Second Sunday of Easter - 4.27.2025

SERMON, CHURCH OF THE ATONEMENT

2 EASTER (C)

APRIL 27, 2025

The Rev. Anne Wrider

Thomas is one of my heroes.  He is called “Doubting Thomas,” and I think this is really unfair.  I think that what really defines Thomas is not his doubt, but his desire. He asks the question, “How do I know?” but he asks it out of his passion, not out of skepticism. Thomas loves Jesus, and the possibility that Jesus is alive when everything in all reason says that he is dead is too wonderful a possibility to take lightly.  Thomas will not accept any easy answers.  Jesus is so important to him that he cannot accept at face value what others are telling him. To believe that Jesus lives will take Thomas into a world where all the old rules are broken, where life is stronger than death and where God really, demonstrably, walks the earth. And if that is true, then nothing else can ever be taken for granted.  Thomas’ universe will be turned upside down if this is true. But Thomas is ready for that. He is ready for whatever comes next and willing to put his hand into the holes in Jesus’ hands in order to take that next step.

That kind of stance demands a courage that most of us can hardly imagine.  It is a courage that can only be born out of blinding love, love that will risk anything and everything.  That kind of love scares us.  And probably, it should.  It is the kind of love that can, when distorted, lead to fanaticism, to terrorism, to murder.  But it is also the love that sends people running out into the street to heal and preach and teach the love of God. It is the kind of love that will risk everything for the sake of love. And it is that sort of love that transformed those bereaved, desperate people into a force that changed the world.

 We tend to hear the story of the Resurrection through all the filters of reason. We hear that Jesus came through a locked door, and we want to translate it into something our logic can handle; that Jesus appeared in some spiritual sense, that the disciples felt his presence as if he had come through a locked door.  But is that enough?  After all, if Jesus is really risen from the dead, then anything is possible.  And even though it makes no logical sense that Jesus could appear to the disciples in that way, maybe the question is ‘why not’? After all, look at what happened. These were people who had loved Jesus deeply, had left family and home and staked their lives on him. And it was all lost. For any of you who have known real grief, you know that it is completely overwhelming. There is no energy even to do the basic tasks of life. Grief sucks everything out of us. It is debilitating. It takes months or even years to return to any sense of regular life.  But what the Gospels and the book of Acts tell us is that these people were suddenly enlivened. They were suddenly going out into the streets and telling people that Jesus was risen. Something real has to have happened. If what happened was some emotional experience, even if a powerful one, it wouldn’t have been enough to transform these people into a force that would change the world.

And that, I think, is where Thomas stands. He won’t settle for some intellectual understanding.  He will accept nothing less that putting his hands in Jesus’ wounds.

Faith in Jesus is too important to take lightly. And it is too important to accept simply by hearsay. The scriptures say that Jesus has risen from the dead. Our liturgy proclaims it over and over. Many of us here can say that we know Jesus is risen because we have experienced him ourselves.  But not all of us have, and I imagine that there may be some of you sitting here today thinking to yourselves, “What in the world is she talking about?”   And if you are thinking that, or something even less complimentary, I want to applaud you and honor you, because you are in a holy moment.  The moment of doubt is the moment when we are able to reach out to God in a way that certainty never allows us.  Doubt that is born of our desire for God is precious.  It is an invitation for God to come to us in a new way.  It is an invitation for us to touch and feel the Risen Christ for ourselves. 

And when we risk opening ourselves to that encounter, we open ourselves to transformation.  If we touch the hands of Jesus, we will never be the same again.  The change will be for ourselves, but never for ourselves alone.  One of the most striking parts of this story from John is what Jesus says to the disciples.  First he says, “Peace be with you,” and then, before they can even catch their breath, Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”   Our encounter with Jesus always propels us out into the world to share the news. We can’t keep it to ourselves, we can’t hoard it as some sort of private treasure.  The Resurrection is for all of creation.

We live in a world that has trouble believing in resurrection, which too easily believes that death is the last word. We have trouble believing it ourselves. Our vision is limited by what our minds can understand – what we can touch and see and hear. Resurrection demands a leap of faith which says that God loves us infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. And if that is true, God can do more than we can ask or imagine. The evil of this world cannot have the last word. Death cannot have the last word. The last word is God’s, and that word is life.

The Resurrection is not for the timid. It requires passion and courage to actually put our hands into the holes in Jesus hands and to put our hand into his wounded side. And it takes courage to allow God to turn our worlds inside out and upside down, to break open the graves of our own hearts and transform us.  But if we will dare that, God will send us out, transformed, to transform the world.

The Lord is Risen indeed, and let all God’s people say, “Alleluia!”