Today is the Feast of St Thomas and without doing so very obviously, both our readings tonight, from the very end of the book of Job and the start of Peter’s first letter illuminate the ways in which we can come to know the nature of God and our salvation, just as Doubting Thomas came to know it as famously recounted at the end of John’s Gospel
Thomas has been slightly unfairly treated. The most famous, almost the only, story about him is somewhat misinterpreted and certainly usually misrepresented in art which for, I suspect, sensational reasons usually shows him poking his fingers into Jesus’ wounded side. In fact his realisation of who the risen Jesus really is, comes before he needs to rely on touch; merely seeing Jesus is enough. It’s also unfair to Thomas to concentrate on this story alone, because he makes two other appearances in John’s Gospel which reveal his more complex character.
Before proceeding to Bethany to raise Lazarus from the dead, there is a debate about the prudence of Jesus entering Judea. He is warned that in doing so he risks being stoned by “the Jews”. It was a prescient warning but it’s Thomas who says to his fellow disciples “Let us go also that we may die with him” Was it bravery or bravado or a true understanding of what was going on? It certainly complicates any notion that Thomas was simply a doubter.
He is next mentioned asking one of those apparently naïve, but logical questions that John put in the mouths of those talking to Jesus. Thomas asks how they can know the way when they don’t even know where they are going. The impetuosity of charging off to Jerusalem and all its dangers, has been tempered with some realism and touch of scepticism.
When it comes to the doubting, we can assume that the shock of the crucifixion and the apparent abject failure of the Jesus movement, throw Thomas into a crisis of disbelief. But as with so many others in the Gospels, simply the encounter with Jesus in a tense and intimate moment, is enough to bring Thomas to full knowledge and belief. It real point, however, is revealed in Jesus’ somewhat implausible (in reporting terms) coda; “Blessed are those that believe without seeing”. This is, of course, the major point of writing the Gospel- for the benefit of those who did not encounter Jesus in the flesh.
The brief passage we heard from the book of Job, follows the famously powerful descriptions of the strength of the Leviathan and Behemoth- probably Crocodile and Hippopotamus. Job is silenced in awe of the creator of these terrifying beasts. He has come through appalling suffering and resisted the advice of his friends to challenge God and now his response is a literally awe filled humility. This is perhaps something like the experience we might have (without the previous suffering) before some natural wonder, a great mountain or the lush green of an oasis; or some divinely proportioned building or heavenly harmony, but most perhaps in an event such as the birth of a child, falling in love or witnessing an incredible act of kindness and self-sacrifice. These may leave us, like Job, or Thomas, speechless.
Thomas may be wordless after his out bursting declaration but like others who witness the Godhead in Jesus, responds in action. We witness the work of God and are inspired to attempt to respond with our own works. For Thomas it meant evangelising India. For Job it
was restoration of his fortune, and another 140 years of life. A warning, I suggest, that one should be very careful in what one wishes for.
If Job’s experience takes us away from the intimate immediacy of Thomas ‘experience, Peter’s exhortation brings us back to the Gospel as both the medium and the message of Christian faith. As Jesus remarks, we will not all see God, but yet we can believe. Peter is conscious that his readers have not seen Jesus. They know about him through teaching and perhaps writing too; certainly they know something about him through the predictions of the prophets (and we must suppose that his readers are in the Jewish). They probably knew their Old Testament rather better than most of us do, but they are essentially in the same place that we are. We too are conscious, or should be, that we are “inheritors of a new birth into a living hope by the resurrection”. And yet the revelation is not complete; there is much work to do and trials to undergo before we see (as I think we would put it) God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven. The trust that enables us “to reap the harvest of [our] faith, that is, the salvation of our souls”- that “joy too great for words” is based essentially on second hand experience and analysis; that is reading the Gospels and the Christian writers who have followed and are still writing and interpreting the 2000 year old story into present and equally vital relevance. What, in my feeble way, I’m trying to do now.
Job and Peter would seem to be entirely different indeed opposite approaches, the one based in subjective experience, and the other the response to others’ record and thoughts. They are certainly different but not mutually exclusive. All our experiences are formed in part by our background knowledge, conscious and unconscious; if we have the luck to have a divine experience it will have been shaped by our reading and what we have been told, but more importantly it will in turn inform our reflection and intellectual understanding. We need both, and to both our response will be to try to live the Gospel in our lives. And as it was with Thomas, we should expect that response to be a process, perhaps a lifelong one, but certainly a fulfilling one. Amen.