Thomas does not believe the other disciples.
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| Thomas and the Disciples. Ravenna. Basilica di Sant'Apollinare Nuovo |
He has been with them for 3 years. At times life will have been intense, and they will have had to completely rely on each other.
But when the other disciples tell Thomas that they have seen Jesus, that he is risen from the dead; when they tell him that they have seen his hands and side, Thomas refuses to believe them.
We are told a little about Thomas in John’s gospel.
When Jesus says that he is going to Jerusalem, Thomas says to the other disciples, “Let’s go with him so that we may die with him”.
And later, when Jesus says that his disciples know the way to the place where he is going – Thomas asks, ‘How can we know the way?’. And Jesus answers him by saying, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”
I think it tells us quite a bit about Thomas
It tells us that he imagined in his mind the worst possible outcome: death for Jesus and death for Jesus’ followers.
And it tells us that even though he had not really understood Jesus, he was utterly loyal to him. He was going to go where Jesus went, wherever that was, and he was going to die with him.
I’ve recently been reading Navalny, Patriot. At the end Navalny suggests two techniques for surviving in prison. The first is this. He writes: “Get into your prison bunk and wait to hear “Lights out”. The lights are switched off. You invite yourself to imagine, as realistically as possible, the worst thing that could happen. And then, as I said, accept it. … You need to think about this seriously, and your cruel imagination will whisk you through your fears … The important things Is not to torment yourself with anger, hatred, fantasies of revenge, but to move instantly to acceptance. That can be hard.”
I wonder, when Thomas says, let us go to Jerusalem and die with him, whether he was doing something like that: thinking the worst and living it.
But now Jesus was dead – and Thomas had not died with him.
And I just wonder whether Thomas is completely crushed. A bit like Peter who had told Jesus that he would never deny him, that he would die for him, and who then did deny him.
Maybe that was why Thomas was not with the disciples on that first Sunday evening. He was disappointed with them, no, with himself.
Maybe that is why he refuses to believe his mates when they tell him that they have seen the risen Jesus. He could not cope with the idea of being let down or of letting Jesus down.
And that may also explain why, when Thomas is convinced when he sees the risen Jesus, his reaction is greater than those of the other disciples. It says of them in verse 20, ‘then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord’. But Thomas looks at Jesus and declares, ‘My Lord and my God’.
That statement is the climax of John’s gospel.
We were introduced in chapter 1 to Jesus the Word made flesh, who was with God and who was God. That is the theology. But as we read through John, as we travel through the story, we find people discovering that for themselves. They grow in their understanding of who Jesus is. A man who God was with, a prophet, the Messiah, the Son of God and finally we have this declaration: ‘My Lord and my God!’
And for Thomas this was not just a head statement. According to tradition, and it is a strong tradition, Thomas travelled to what we know as India, where he preached the Gospel and established Christian communities. And Thomas did in the end die for Jesus. He was believed to have been martyred in India in AD72.
But he did not die for a dead Jesus but for a living Jesus, who he had seen risen from the dead.
But what about us?
Because we are the people who are blessed because we have not seen and yet have come to believe (John 20:29).
We are blessed not because we have seen the risen Jesus but because we have been given grace from God to hear what the disciples are saying: that they have seen the risen Jesus – and we have been given grace to trust them.
J John, who is a well-known Christian speaker, tells of the time he went to do an assembly at a large high school. He said it did not start well when the head teacher said to the assembled school, ‘This man has come to talk to you about God’.
There was year 7 all keen sitting on the floor at the front, all the way up to some of the year 11 cool kids not sitting but standing at the back.
At the end the headteacher said, ‘Have you got any questions?’. Nobody dared ask a question. And then one of the cool kids at the back put his hand up. ‘Have you' – he said pointing to J John – 'ever seen God?’ And J John answered back, ‘No’. And the other cool kids sniggered because they thought that their mate had skewered the preacher.
But then J John said, he went on. ‘Have you ever seen Queen Victoria?’ ‘No.’ ‘That does not mean that Queen Victoria did not exist. You did not see Queen Victoria because you were not alive when Queen Victoria was alive. I have not seen God because I was not alive when Jesus was alive. But if I had been, I would have seen God. But other people did see God – and they wrote it down so that I could read it, make my mind up about it, and choose to believe them, to trust them that they did see God risen from the dead, and come to trust in Him.’
That is what John the apostle writes at the end of his gospel, his good news, about Jesus.
“Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you many come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name”. (John 20:30-31)
We, I suspect, have not seen the risen Jesus. I know of two people – both of whom I completely trusted – who said that they have seen the risen Jesus. But we have the records here of people who did see the risen Jesus. And we are not asked to put our faith in some idea that there might be a god out there – but in what they wrote and what they claimed.
Faith begins with something that people could and did see. But faith does not need us to see. Faith begins when we listen or read and hear what they are saying. And they are saying that they saw the risen Lord Jesus; they saw his hands and his side.
And the interesting thing is that if we do listen to them, and if we put our faith, our trust, in Jesus of Nazareth, that he was the one sent from God, that he is our Lord and our God; if we receive him and invite him to be our Lord, then we will know – maybe not immediately, although for some that assurance does come immediately – the life that he offers. We will begin to know that peace that he offers. Twice he says, ‘Peace be with you’. We will know the reason, the purpose that God has given us, ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’; we will begin to know the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit in our experience; we will know what it means to have had our sins forgiven and to be right with God; and we will know life – that life which is bigger than death.
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