03.04.05 Colin John 20:19-31 Facing Death
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The terrible news this past week of another earthquake in Indonesia - the same people devastated again 3 months after the Tsunami - reminds us not just of the power of nature, but of the fragility of life. And, as with the Tsunami, it also raises many questions about where God is in the midst of all this suffering and death. Why do we not see God acting to prevent this?
Listen to this poem by Andrew Pratt called 'Another Earthquake'. It's based on Romans 8:22 which says ‘For we know, that up to the present time all of creation groans with pain, like the pain of childbirth’
The quaking ground, the moving earth,
another trial to face;
as people panic, life is lost,
we wonder at God's grace.
We read 'creation groans and moves
in labour pains till now';
and people theorise with skill
what God would disallow;
Yet all the pictures that we paint,
still seem to miss the point,
we analyse with human minds,
our answers disappoint.
So now we trust in simple faith,
like children we're re-born;
and knowing love we trust that God
won't laugh our lives to scorn.
That through that trust, and in that love,
we're held in fear or quake;
and through the aftershock and tears
God's faithful, sure, awake.
Have faith in God, whatever comes,
in life and yet in death;
for love enfolds and grace protects
beyond our final breath.
The imminent death of Pope John Paul and his death last night has also filled television and the newspapers during the past few days. We have watched the thousands gathering in the great square in Rome.
It is never easy to come to terms with death, even when as is often is someone, like the Pope, who is older and has been seriously ill Death is one of the things in life that cannot be seen or understood.
I came across a book called “When Love isn’t Easy”. One of the chapters is called “Goodbye is an Angry Word” - a chapter dealing with death. I want to read and extract from it. It's about a young boy in a primary school who is often teased.
One day our teacher told us that Stewart was not going to live much longer and asked us to stop teasing him so that his remaining days could be happy. The announcement was a shock for us all. I knew someone whose granny had died. But for me death was like the weather in another part of the world. You knew about it, but did not feel it.
My friend Stewart was making me feel death and I was angry with him. I wanted him to stop dying and I could not do anything about it. I stopped talking to Stewart because I was so upset he was going to die and leave me. Then one day in the playground he stepped on my foot. It hurt me so much, I just punched him and my hand hurt.
I started to cry, not because my hand hurt, but because I had hurt Stewart when all I really wanted to do was to love him. But, he was hard to love because I was so angry that he was going to die and leave me. When he was too ill to come to school any longer, I used to watch him from the street, sitting beside the window inside his house. Sometimes his mother asked me in, but I never stayed long. I was afraid, afraid to be where death might be.
The day after Stewart died our teacher announced it to our class in the morning. That day we were brutal. Even the best behaved got into trouble. We fought with each other and sulked. We were not normal again until after the funeral.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Stewart’s death was teaching me something that I would only begin to understand much later: that love and death are never easy companions. So often, I later realized, we get angry with the people in our life instead of angry with God. I began to realize that if anyone can share our fury and anger, if anyone can agree with us that death is an unbearable outrage, it is God.
Later in life, I learned that God never accepted death, and neither should we. Love I began to realize is the very opposite of death, and it is fitting that love and death are mortal enemies.
This story described death “an unbearable outrage” and the death of Jesus is what the disciples had just experienced. Jesus too saw death as an “unbearable outrage” in the human experience e.g. John chapter 11 records the reaction of Jesus to the death of Lazarus and describes how he wept, and was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. Jesus could not accept the death of Lazarus and used his divine power to put death aside by raising him from the dead.
But, the death of Jesus himself was what the disciples had experienced, shortly before they gathered in that upper room. It’s important for our understanding to remember the humanity of the disciples, and the turmoil in their hearts and minds, as they stood in that upper room:
Then suddenly, Jesus stands among them, acknowledging their fear, and saying, “Peace be with you”. They see the Risen Jesus with their eyes. The Gospel reading describes how “the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord”. I find it a bit hard to believe that the disciples took it so calmly!
If you had been there, would you not have been astounded, or even terrified, that your friend Jesus who was dead was now alive again. I wonder if the disciples were angry at what Jesus had put them through They had faced all that grief and sorrow, and now they had Jesus back.
Thomas, like us today, did not see the Risen Jesus that first time in the upper room and found it hard to believe unless he personally saw the mark of the nails and the wound caused by the sword. Thus, Thomas goes down in history as a ‘doubter’, implying he was weak and that he should have believed immediately the word of the other disciples. But, Thomas I suspect was the one who was really showing the pain of his human emotions, and finding it hard to believe Jesus could possibly be alive again.
Thomas, like all of us, found that death is never easy to come to terms with. We struggle with the very difficult and mixed emotions that come into our hearts when someone we love dies. Sometimes there is anger as well grief and sense of loss. Often there are irrational feelings that it cannot be true.
For me, Thomas is the disciple who truly shows his humanity in the struggle he has to come to terms with the death of Jesus, and the fact that he has risen from the dead. Thomas works through his struggle. He sees the evidence, and makes the strongest declaration of faith possible. There is no doubt in his statement. Thomas has absolute conviction when he declares “My Lord and my God”.
Jesus responds to Thomas with the words that have come down the centuries since then to challenge us today “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Thomas may have doubted, but here he is the very first disciple to make an adequate statement of faith when he declares. He confesses Jesus not just as his “Lord” (See Romans 10.9) but also as his “God”, linking the story of Jesus right back to the 1st verse of John’s Gospel which declares that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”.
I find it amazing really, that Thomas who is seen predominantly as a ‘doubter’ is in fact perhaps the first person in the world to make an adequate statement of real faith - a statement of faith, which has become a fundamental tenet of the Christian Church through the 2000 years since then. I’d like to think that perhaps Thomas could be rehabilitated (as they say when historians re-interpret history) from a ‘doubter’ to the first person ever to make the great declaration of faith “My Lord and my God”
As human beings, we are like Thomas. Each of us struggles in the face of our experience to make sense of what our life and death means. There are times when it is a struggle to do this, even when our experience of love has been a good one. And, there are times when our experience as human beings is an “unbearable outrage” such as in the Tsunami, or in the cruelty, violence and hate that some human beings impose on others. As the story of Stewart sought to illustrate, our very humanity means that there will be times when we can make little rational sense of our experience.
Jesus said, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Thomas was able to see the physical body of the Risen Jesus. We cannot, but the purpose of John’s Gospel is to give people the information needed to come to faith.
The challenge that Jesus leaves with us is to weigh the evidence of the Bible, particularly what it says about Jesus, and however hard the experiences of our life are, to respond like Thomas with a firm statement of faith in the unseen but real presence of Christ. May our response, each day, be “My Lord and My God”.