19 On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.21 Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” 22 And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” 24 Now Thomas (also known as Didymus[a]), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” 26 A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” 28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” 30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. 31 But these are written that you may believe[b] that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
How many resurrections can you count in today’s gospel story? In addition to the most obvious one, the resurrection of Jesus? Well, that depends on how many things or people have died and need resurrecting. And secondly, it depends on the answer to the second question: What is a resurrection? And how does a true resurrection differ from a mere reanimation, or a resuscitation?
As for things that died and needed resurrecting, we can count at least three things: First) the disciples’ shattered hopes and dreams. Almost every movement of our bodies is driven by some hope. We wake up hoping to have a good, meaningful day; we get in the car hoping to get somewhere on time and in one piece. Whatever we do, we hope to accomplish something, get through the day and get home, again in one piece. We rarely stop to think about these hopes, let alone name them until, suddenly, some rude surprise stops them in their tracks.
“We had hoped that Jesus would be the one to deliver Israel,” said one of the disciples on the Road to Emmaus. But gone on that first Good Friday were the disciples’ hopes for Jesus and what he would accomplish for Israel. When our cherished dreams, hopes and aspirations die, it’s not only disappointing; it’s disorienting and devastating. It can feel almost as bad as the death of a loved one. People whose businesses have collapsed, for example, commonly experience physical symptoms of shock, depression, and a blow to the gut of grief and shame, even when it happens for no fault of their own. The same when the pink slip comes because the plant is closing down, or the company has been bought and we’re a victim of “restructuring,” or “downsizing.” Dreams die hard, and that hurts.
For the disciples, the dream that died was that following Jesus would be an uninterrupted climb from power ever, onward and upward into greater heights of power, until they stood next to Jesus atop the world’s pinnacle of power, by next Tuesday, perhaps. But come that first Easter Sunday, those hopes and dreams were dead in the water, with nothing to take their place but grief, guilt and shame.
The guilt and shame relate to the second thing that died for those disciples: their sense of themselves. Their self-esteem, the value of their personhoods in their own eyes. Let me assure us all: we are not alone should we suffer any niggling, nagging insecurities about ourselves, though these self-doubts make us feel very much alone. Thank God, we usually manage to manage those self-doubts and anxieties and chug along with some sense of ourselves as adequate, capable, trustworthy and dependable for most purposes. As they say in AA and other Twelve Step groups, “We fake it till we make it,” only to find, Hey! we weren’t faking it, after all; God gave us what we needed for this task or that challenge. Generally, that works.
Until suddenly it doesn’t, and we’re left wishing we could take back something we just said, or undo something we just did, or get a do-over on something we neglected to do, and we wonder, How could I have…? Where did that come from? What got into me? Or who?
Stress and frustration may bring out the unwanted stranger within. Like whenever I’m on the phone with a “customer service department” and I’ve pressed the fifteenth number for this possibility or that and I end up back at the original menu, which includes, “If you are calling from a rotary dial telephone, please press the number six.” I sure hope nobody recorded that call for “training purposes.”
But that’s small potatoes compared to what the disciples saw in themselves come Good Friday. They had promised to serve and to stand by Jesus, even until death. Yet all of them had fled on the night of Christ’s arrest, one had betrayed him, another had denied him, and three of them slept when Jesus asked them to pray with him. All that was left to them was, “How could I….?” and “Why did I?” and “What’s to become of me?” The despair over their faults and failures, their lost sense of self, led one of them even to suicide.
Take away someone’s hopes, dreams and their sense of self, and a third thing dies: our sense of reason, logic or meaning to life. That was a third death for these disciples: the sense that life made some sense. Up till Jesus’ arrest, everything about him, his mission, the prophecies of their Bible, God’s purposes for Israel and themselves had seemed so logical, coherent and reasonable, until, suddenly they didn’t. In place of confidence there reigned confusion, in place of fulfillment, emptiness, instead of structure and purpose, chaos, instead of meaning, meaninglessness, instead of justice, only evil triumphant. The vacuum left by the sudden absence of sense or logic to life does not stay empty for long. Fear and anger will soon fill the empty space. Anger turned outward, can lead to estrangement, even to violence and vengeance. Turned inward, anger can lead to depression and addiction.
We typically look at Thomas’ doubts about Jesus’ resurrection as a personal failure of faith. But I wonder if Thomas is not exhibiting something else due to the deaths of hope, the death of his sense for himself, and the death of his sense of some sense in life. When Thomas says, “I won’t believe unless….” I wonder if Thomas is not showing symptoms of trauma. Not that he had personally suffered the physical trauma of a violent car crash or a terrorist attack. He had not, of course. But just witnessing terrible violence and injustice to someone else, and being powerless to stop it, and knowing that there are similar threats to oneself, can be traumatizing. Having the rug pulled out from beneath our sense of reason, meaning and order to the world, our hopes and dreams for the future dashed, our sense of self undercut by our own failures and the betrayals of others, all these traumas combined might be so great for Thomas that he can’t take the risk of ever trusting anyone or anything again. If we too have suffered a breakdown in close relationships, betrayal, infidelity, divorce, criminal actions and assault, or a terrible diagnosis, we know how long and difficult can be the journey from trauma back to trust.
But with the resurrection of Jesus come three resurrections of the very things that had died for the disciples: again, 1) their hopes and dreams, 2) their sense of themselves, and 3) their sense of purpose, order and meaning in life. But that leaves begging the next question in the outline: What is a resurrection? A true one, as opposed to a mere reanimation of someone, or a resuscitation.
In the Bible we read multiple stories of people coming back from the dead, but only one of those would I call a “resurrection:” the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Lazarus walking out of his tomb, that might better be called a resuscitation, or a reanimation, not resurrections. Not in the way that Jesus was resurrected. In that and other cases of people coming alive again, people came out of death pretty much the way they went in. They went from being mortal and aging, to being mortal and aging again. They would age some more, and die again.
The difference between a mere resuscitation and Jesus’ resurrection comes down to two other elements: transformation and reconciliation. As for the first one, transformation: Jesus did not come out of the tomb the same as when he went in. Yes, Jesus came out of the tomb a physical, visible, tangible, recognizable flesh and blood person, as we see when he invites Thomas to see the nail prints on his hands and touch the spear wound at his side. Eye-witnesses to the Risen Jesus also ate bread and fish with him. But in today’s account, Jesus also shows up twice inside a room whose doors were locked, the first time just after he had walked to Emmaus some miles away and broke bread with people there. The Resurrected Jesus is free of the constraints of time and space. And death has no more power over Jesus. like it would have again over Lazarus. No longer localized in First Century Galilee, Jesus is now the universal Lord of the church and the cosmos, everywhere present by his Spirit, yet still bearing his scars, soon to eat and drink with his disciples in the fullness of His Fathers kingdom.
Paul says in I Corinthians 15 that Christ’s resurrection is the first fruit and guarantee of our coming resurrection, and that we too shall have “spiritual bodies.” Will our resurrection future be like that of Jesus’ current resurrection state? I don’t know. I just passed the point of understanding all this several sentences ago and I had better stop before I’m in over my head any deeper.
Because of the resurrection of Jesus, the disciples also underwent a resurrection transformation of their own: their dashed and broken hopes and dreams, their sense of self and their sense of God and the world were resurrected on Easter Sunday. But not in the same forms in which they had been before they died on Good Friday. Before the resurrection, they had seen Jesus triumph over a few cases of evil and sickness. His tomb now empty, they know him as the undisputed conqueror over all evil, even over death. Before the resurrection, they knew Jesus as the promised son of David, the long-awaited king of Israel; now he is to them Lord over the nations and King of the Cosmos. Before the resurrection, they had seen Jesus stop a storm in its tracks; now they know that Jesus is himself the firstfruits and the guarantee of a new creation free of evil, chaos, death and decay. Before the resurrection, their hopes and dreams were based on themselves, their ethnicity, their own faithfulness, wisdom, merits and gifts to obey and follow Jesus. After the resurrection, they could say, “Not I, but Christ, who lives in me.” Christ’s resurrection transformed their understanding of all these things. Their post-resurrection vision and mission were so much greater and more durable than the vision and the mission they had lost on Good Friday.
The disciples also experienced reconciliation when reconciliation came seeking them with the very first words of the Resurrected Jesus: “Shalom,” or “Peace with with you.” They did not achieve this reconciliation: they had to choose to receive it. They were not reconciled to the evils that nailed Christ to the cross. May we never be reconciled to such evil or violence, either. But they were reconciled to the new reality that God brought out of these terrible events. They were also reconciled to the people who had committed the evils. They forgave, and bore no grudges against anyone. Nor were they reconciled to their own faults and failures in the matter of Jesus’ death. They didn’t excuse or justify their actions. But they were reconciled to themselves, as the eternal objects of God’s love and mercy.
Which brings us to the third question in the outline: What guidance does this resurrection/transformation/reconciliation account in today’s gospel reading give us? First of all, understand that resurrection transformation and reconciliation flow from the resurrecting, transforming and reconciling nature of God. The transformation of death, loss and sacrifice into resurrection is the pattern of God’s work that is woven both into the Bible and Creation.
For example, in nature, a seed has to die and decay in the earth, for there to be something greater than a seed: a plant, fruit, and many more seeds. In the Bible, Abraham and Sarah had to age beyond the reasonable hope of ever having a child of their own, for God to make them the parents of a mighty nation, which includes us. In nature, caterpillars have to be wrapped and to sleep, like Lazarus in his grave cloths, in the tissue of a chrysalis, to be reborn as butterflies. Similarly, Israel as a nation had to die in Babylonian Captivity to come back as a prophetic faith that was durable and even portable, all around the world.
But something about human nature prefers the reanimation and the resuscitation of the familiar past over a resurrection into a new future. We would often prefer to go back to some golden days of yore, because they are familiar, and we came to manage them, more or less. We may want to recapture our lost youth, our lost innocence, our lost energy, to replay that high school basketball game in which we almost made the winning shot, and get it right this time. How much more would we want to turn back the clock to a time before the pink slip, or the terrible diagnosis?
God cares about those hurts and losses. God works to help and to heal us. But God also has purposes for us bigger than just turning back the clock to something familiar but gone, and restoring what time and life have taken. The Resurrected Jesus is the goal and the pattern toward which God is leading us, shaping us, remaking us until the day when “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” God can use any struggles, changes and losses of our lives as stages, dry runs and dress rehearsals of resurrection in advance of the ultimate resurrection. So, secondly, don’t just hope for a return to a lost past, however much we cherished it. Don’t settle for mere reanimations or resuscitations of things we have lost: expect transforming and reconciling resurrections to better things. Receive them and live them.
Like what happened to a friend of mine in ministry in South Minneapolis, a few years back. We’ll call him Ed, not his real name. Ed was developing a wonderful ministry with men in transition from prison or drug and alcohol treatment, in halfway houses and men’s shelters. Ed had an angle on faith and ministry that combined the best of addiction treatment and theory, family of origin stuff, human life stage development, in a solid framework of basic Christian faith and discipleship. He wanted to help them break the cycles that kept sending them back to prison, or to treatment. The men were eating it up; it was making a real difference in their lives.
Ed’s ministry was just about to get recognized and funded by our regional district conference when his wife walked out on him. Was it for another man? She wouldn’t say. It was a swift and total cut-off. Ed admitted that, as he was getting this ministry off the ground, he could often be a cranky, obsessive, miserable pill to live with. He confessed and asked for her forgiveness, and to work it out with her, and get counseling together. She simply refused. The last communication he got after that from her were the divorce papers. With the death of his marriage died his ministry as well. He was just too devastated.
Ed’s faith was on life support during this crisis. At one point he told me, “If this is the way God treats me after all my efforts to serve him, if, after I’ve done so much I still get dumped on the curb and left for dead like this, God can go take a hike, for all I care,” he said. “And the next time anyone says to me, ‘God never closes one door without opening a window, I swear, I’m jumping through it.”
That was not the time to argue fine points of theology. That was not the time to quote Romans 8:28, “All things work for the good to those who love God…” although I believe that. So I said to Ed, “Ed, if you’re finding it very hard to carry any trust in God right now, can I carry it for you? Then, when you’re ready to have it back, you’ll know where to come get it. I’ll have it ready and waiting for you.”
Though Ed and I regularly check in as buddies, he never did say, “Okay, I’ll have my faith back now.” He didn’t have to. Like the Risen, Resurrected Jesus coming of his own gracious initiative into that room for his disciples in hiding, Ed’s faith came back in force for him, and in a deeper, stronger way. After the death of his first ministry plans, ministry came back for him in a powerful new form too: he went back to seminary and got a degree in family and marriage counseling. He is now doing powerful, wonderful ministry to other people, their marriages and families, many of them poor and underserved clients, many of them with addiction issues and trauma.
Such transformations, reconciliations and resurrections into greater things than before are happening all around and among us, as a result of Jesus’ resurrection. Because the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells in us. The resurrections which God would work in our lives require some cooperation on our part, that we hang in there with God, the church and ourselves through some tough times and disorienting changes with whatever meager trust or patience we can scrape together. But really, finally, such resurrection transformations are gifts of God, and not human achievements.
Because of the human condition, we can expect trials, troubles, changes, deaths and losses in this life. Because of God’s nature, we can trust that there will always, eventually be transforming, reconciling resurrections, on the way to the final, greatest resurrection of all.
Don’t settle for anything less.
Thank you for this contrast. I wonder how many times I and the rest of us just want resuscitation for resurrection and not transformation and reconciliation? Resurrection is the transformed life in full exhibit.