Courageous Thomas

 John 20:19-31

A sermon for Decorah Lutheran Church

I want to talk with you this morning about Thomas and courage. I realize courageous is not the usual adjective given to Thomas. He is the “doubter,” they say, because he asked for proof—the same proof the other disciples received a week before. But just because he is no more a doubter than the rest of them certainly does not make him courageous, so what I am I talking about?

            Let’s step back for a moment. “The doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews,” the scripture says. I remember in church growing up how our pastor was very careful to remind us that everybody is a Jew here—the chief priests and the Pharisees who wanted Jesus killed, the disciples; the women who discovered the tomb empty; and Jesus himself. All Jews. Everybody of import in the story except Pilate is a Jew. My pastor made this point so that we were careful not to drift into some form of anti-Semitism, claiming that the Jews killed Jesus, as many Christians throughout the centuries have done. Nonetheless, this week it struck me that the reason the disciples are hiding is because of fear of their own people. They had every reason to be afraid, because their own people had done this to Jesus and now Jesus was gone. They had every reason to believe they were next

            So, given all that in the background, have you ever stopped to wonder why Thomas wasn’t there?

The moment you wonder, something about this whole story flips, doesn’t it?

I mean, there’s only one likely reason Thomas was not in the house and that had to be because he was the one braving the streets full of people who might be looking for them, getting the rest of them food and water, and maybe sniffing out whether anybody was going to drag them off before Pilate next. Not only that, Thomas was alone—or at least none of the other male disciples were with him.

Which brings us to a strange part of the story. This is one of the few times—maybe the only time I can think of—where Jesus appears not to the outsider but to the insiders. In every other instance in Jesus’ ministry that I can think of, he seeks out the least and the lost—a woman at a well, a Samaritan, the unclean, the poor, even a Roman centurion. Jesus even called the disciples from among the rejects—young men who were not good enough to continue the study of the Torah, who left to become fishermen and tax collectors and carpenters. Jesus always picked the outsiders! Yet, here, he appears to the disciples hunkering in the house and not to Thomas.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus’ first appearance was on the road to Galilee (again, how quickly we exclude the women at the tomb is kind of breathtaking, but I digress). In the Emmaus story, Jesus appears to those who are out in the world, as he did throughout his ministry—folks who were curious and attentive to God’s presence. But again, in John, it is to the disciples cowering in the upper room.

So, why doesn’t Jesus go to Thomas first? That would have fit with the kind of people he met in his ministry—as Robert Farrar Capon called them, “the least, the last, the lost, the lowly, the little, and the dead.” It seems like Jesus should have gone to Thomas first.

I have a guess—only a guess—why Jesus appeared this way. After the resurrection, the rules changed. Suddenly, the disciples have become the least and the lowly—the disciples in the room are the ones stranded by their own fears, and after the resurrection, Jesus comes first to those who are afraid. The disciples back home need Jesus more than Thomas, and Jesus comes first and foremost to abolish fear. After all, the very first words from the angel in the empty tomb to Mary Magdalene and the other women were “Do not be afraid!”

Where once our faith was founded on fear of hell and damnation, now we have a God in Jesus Christ who has already gone there and come back so that we may know that there is no longer anything to fear. Jesus comes to the poor, sad, lowly disciples first—not Thomas—because Thomas has the courage to be outside in a dangerous world, doing what needed to be done. But—here’s where it gets really interesting—Thomas’ courage is also not enough. If I were to hazard a guess why the Gospel of John lingers over Thomas’ doubt, it is to remind all of us that brave though we may be, we are not saved by our courage. It is not the strength of our willpower that redeems us but the grace of God through Jesus, who showed us the saving power of true humility, humbling himself to death. Jesus returned to Thomas as a cautionary tale of putting things in the right order.  

Grace first, faith second; and courage, last of all.

The change in the disciples after Jesus’ ultimate ascension is worth pondering for a moment here. Jesus came to them and revealed all their doubts; none of the disciples come out of this scene looking particularly good. But by the time we come to Acts and the accounts of the apostles in the early church, every one of these guys becomes a superhero. Having received grace, they are set free with courage. And—you know what?—every single one of them suffered for their faith, and according to tradition, every one of them but John was killed for their faith. Courage followed faith; faith followed grace. It didn’t lead them to comfort, yet they followed nonetheless.

It is the same at camp—courage follows faith; faith follows grace. We don’t start with courage—quite often campers begin with fear. There are plenty of things to be afraid of at camp. If you come from a loving, safe family, then being away from that family can be scary. That is a healthy fear. If you are used to being indoors, then being outdoors can be scary. If you are accustomed to twelve hours a day of screen time, then sixteen hours a day of face-to-face interaction can be really scary. If you are uncertain about your faith, or feel you don’t fit in, or have been told that, for whatever reason, something about you is wrong or broken, then coming to a place that deals with real questions and real faith can be terrifying. You don’t know if it’s a safe space! How would you? If you feel you are not enough, you may well fear that camp is just another place that will tell that you need to fix something about yourself. We start with fear because we are all lost in our own ways—like the disciples—but Jesus comes for exactly this reason. Jesus meets us when we are afraid, and comes saying the words he always uses, “Fear not!”

Never once in Jesus’ time on earth does Jesus say to fear God—not once! Instead, he says, “Do not be afraid!” I can only assume this is because he knows who he is dealing with—little campers like you and me, who just cannot believe that grace could possibly be for us. But when we come together, whether as a camp or as a church, something amazing happens. We look in the face of one another and see we are all these lowly, fearful creatures, all in need of grace, but also, we bear in us the image of the very God who saves us! So, we come together and what began with fear turns to courage once we know we are saved by grace, once we experience faith, and once we see it alive in one another. Then, we crave that assurance, again and again, so we come back to the waters of baptism—or the waters of the Maquoketa River—each of us, looking in the mirror and bringing with us new fears—every year—because the truth is there is much to be afraid of. But something changes when we meet Jesus Christ and that fear defines us no longer. Instead, we have courage—courage better than Thomas’s courage—courage built on the foundation of the resurrection.

Blessed are these campers whose faith comes alive under the open skies, for where there was not enough, they will find grace; where there was doubt, they will find faith; where there was fear, they will find courage. And that courage will continue to propel this and every ministry into a future that only God can see. A future that will not be easy, but why did we ever think that was where God was leading us?

The disciples were killed, remember? They suffered, absolutely. You could easily look at the lives of the disciples and say that the courage granted by Jesus’ appearance to them was foolish, but in this Easter season of all seasons, we need to stop living as if death has the last word!

We see this courage playing out at Ewalu every year. This summer we will be having a cross walk for our mid-week worship at camp, which is part of our three-year rotation of Wednesday night services. I have seen these types of services at many camps now, and I confess I am often leery of this kind of thing, because I have seen camps where the goal was to make kids cry, or to have some kind of altar call that suggests these kids are capable of saving themselves by their own choosing. However, when done well, a cross walk can be particularly powerful because it achieves that very movement—first, to grace, in the sweeping awareness of the need for a Savior to do what we cannot; second, to faith, as a gift we cannot earn from a Holy Spirit who meets us in water, and bread, and wine; and finally, to courage, revealed when all the fears we carry are released at the foot of the cross—all our doubts about our own standing in the world, about whether we are good enough, whether we are popular enough, whether we are smart enough, whether we are brave enough—all of those feelings die at the cross and we rise to what comes next. When you rise from death, you are sure as hell going to be courageous.

So, I hope all of you can go forward today in courage. After all, what is there to be afraid of? You are saved by grace, apart from all the things you have and haven’t done. You have the gift of faith, which exists even through doubt as it did for Thomas, because we have a God who meets us even when we do not believe. And, so you too can be courageous. You will be.