New Testament
Lesson
John
20:19-31
19 When it was evening on that
day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples
had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and
said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he
showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw
the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again,
“Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”22 When he had said this, he
breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of
any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin[a]), one of the
twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told
him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of
the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand
in his side, I will not believe.”
26 A week later his disciples
were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were
shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas,
“Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my
side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My
Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have
you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and
yet have come to believe.”
30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his
disciples, which are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so
that you may come to believe[b] that Jesus is the Messiah,[c] the Son of God, and that
through believing you may have life in his name.
Sermon
The Faithful Thomas
Maynard Pittendreigh
I
received a great email the other day about Lee Marvin.
This
actor apparently had a great military career.
According to this email, Lee Marvin was in the
Marines during World War II, was in the battle of Iwo Jima, received the Medal
of Honor, and is now buried at Arlington
Cemetery .
What’s really amazing about this email is that
the actor, Lee Marvin, served under a sargeant named Bob Keeshan – and if you
are part of my generation, you may remember that Bob Keeshan was the man who
played Captain Kangeroo.
The email goes onto talk about Mr. Rogers,
another television celebrity who worked with children’s programming. Apparently he was a Navy Seal, has over 20
confirmed kills of the enemy during the Vietnam War, and the reason he always
wore those sweeters on television is because he had obsene tattoos on his
arm. He was so deeply effected by war
that before going into television he became an ordained Presbyterian minister.
Who would have thought?
This is a great story. Very inspiring.
However, if
you check the record this is 50% true.
Lee Marvin did enlist in the U.S. Marines and
was in combat in the Pacific during World War II. However, he was not in the Battle
for Iwo Jima .
He did receive the Purple Heart but not the Medal of Honor, but he is
buried at Arlington .
As for his sargeant, Captain Kangaroo was also a
Marine, but did not serve with Lee Marvin.
In fact, he never saw combat because by the time he was old enough to
enlist, the war was just weeks away from coming to an end.
And Mr. Rogers?
He is NOT a former Navy Seal, but an ordained Presbyterian minister.
I get
all sorts of interesting email. Madilyn
Murry O’Haire, who by the way is dead, is still trying to get Touched by an
Angel off television – which by the way has been off television for years,
having had a good run until it fell victim of low ratings.
Some
widow in Nigeria
wants to split 200 million dollars with me and all I have to do is give her
access to my bank account.
The
there is an email that says I can lose 20 pounds in 3 days by eating pizza and
chocolate – well, we can only hope that one IS true.
You
can’t be gullible. You have to question
what you see and hear.
Which brings us to Thomas in our New Testament lesson.
Historians and biblical scholars have not been kind to
Thomas. In fact, they have traditionally
been very severe in their treatment of this member of the twelve Disciples of
Christ. Many call him “Doubting Thomas,”
as if that was a spiritual weakness.
Unlike some of the other disciples and followers of Christ,
Thomas was not around on Easter morning to see the empty tomb, or to speak to a
radiant angel, or to recognize the return of his teacher from the dead.
When those who had seen the evidence told Thomas that
Christ was alive again, there is not a hint of saintly wonder and acceptance of
the miracle. Instead there is the human
response of the skeptic: “Unless I see
the scars of the nails in his hands and put my fingers on those scars, and my
hand in his side, I will not believe.”
We can almost see Thomas shifting his eyes and folding his
arms and raising his eyebrows and saying, “Peter, how gullible can you be? Peter, you poor man, you are in denial. Jesus is dead. We saw it ourselves and nothing can change
that!”
Thomas flatly and openly dismissed the story as false,
responding to it in much the same way that we respond to those outlandish
emails we often receive.
The news of the Resurrection was easy news to dismiss. The first reports of the Resurrection took
place in the dark cold early morning hours.
The first witnesses were women who had been emotionally and mentally strained
and overwrought by what they had seen during the confusion of Thursday’s arrest
and trials, and during the horror of Friday’s crucifixion.
With their eyes full of tears, their hearts full of sorrow,
and their minds full of confusion, how could one possibly expect them to see
and to think clearly?
“They
must have found the body stolen and imagined the rest,” thought Thomas. “Or perhaps they had imagined it ALL.”
“Even
the later, alleged appearance to the other ten disciples could be explained
away,” or so Thomas must have thought.
He must have believed it to have been nothing more than a sheer
hallucination born of frayed nerves, or of the intense longing for what could
have been.
And so,
when approached by his friends with this fantastic, unprecedented news that
their dead master is alive again. Thomas
replies with honest doubt: “Unless I see
the scars of the nails in his hands and put my finger on those scars, I will
not believe.”
Because
of this overwhelming doubt, nearly everyone has been rather harsh in his or her
evaluation of old Thomas. We look at him
with the disappointed look that a teacher might give to a bright student who
has failed the test. “Come on Thomas,
surely you could have done better than that.
Surely you could have mustered up enough faith.”
We are
not kind in our treatment of Thomas. We
look at him as a failure in faith.
And
yet, whether we admit it or not, in many of us who are so faithful, there
exists a bit of doubting Thomas.
For
many of us are more like Thomas than we would like to believe, or admit.
We,
too, have our doubts.
So let’s
think about some of those doubts.
Was the
resurrection real?
There are basically two ways you can respond to the
possibility of the resurrection.
It is either true, or it is false.
Why do people find it hard to believe
in the Resurrection?
Many would insist they need evidence.
And yet, the resurrection of Christ
has more historical evidence than any other event of the ancient world.
You have the eyewitness accounts of
disciples who had already gone back to fishing and to their former ways of life.
These disciples had nothing to prove.
They were hurt and grieving, but they were ready to accept the death of
Jesus. In John’s Gospel, Peter begins to
return to his previous life as a fisherman. (John 21).
(1 Cor 15:3-8)
“For what I received I passed on to you as of first
importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he
was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five
hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though
some have fallen asleep. Then he
appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me
also.”
That’s a list of 513 people, and Paul, single man who is a typical first century
male chauvinist, doesn’t list the women who were the very first to see the
risen Lord.
You put 513 eyewitnesses in a courtroom and ask, “What did
you see?” And when they all see the same
thing, your doubts begin to disappear.
In Matthew’s Gospel have the accounts
of the Roman soldiers who were there to guard the tomb, and saw the resurrection.
Matthew records in chapter 28: “As the women were on their way into the
city, some of the men who had been guarding the tomb went to the leading
priests and told them what had happened. A meeting of all the religious leaders
was called, and they decided to bribe the soldiers. They told the soldiers,
“You must say, ‘Jesus’ disciples came during the night while we were sleeping,
and they stole his body.’ If the governor hears about it, we’ll stand up for
you and everything will be all right.” So the guards accepted the bribe and
said what they were told to say.”
SO you have 513 witnesses in favor of
the resurrection, and a couple of soldiers who were bribed saying the
resurrection is a hoax.
Well, we tend to believe military
people and law enforcement people. Their
testimony carries a lot of weight. Maybe
they outbalance the 513?
Take a look at the apostles. Interesting group of people.
Judas betrays Christ and he commits suicide. The rest die horrible deaths – except for
John. He dies of old age. But the others die deaths we can only
imagine. The death of James is recorded
in the Book of Acts, and is the only one recorded in the Bible. The rest come from history and tradition.
Bartholomew is skinned alive and then
put to death slowly.
Peter was crucified on an X-shaped
cross.
Andrew was crucified upside down.
Thomas was killed by a spear.
It would have taken only one to have
said, “It was a lie.” But not one of
them did. Between a lie and a truth, they held
onto the truth and declared their faith in the resurrection – and then they
died for their faith.
And finally you have the testimony of
Paul. When Christ rose from the dead, he did not
believe it. Not for a minute. He was involved in the persecution and
killing of Christians. However, he himself
encountered the risen Christ on the Road to Damascus , and he was never the same after
that.
We all
have doubts -- At one time or another, about one matter or another, and the way
most of us deal with doubt is to suppress it.
We ignore it and refuse to admit it to ourselves and we certainly refuse
to admit our doubts to others.
But we
make a mistake by dealing with doubt by suppressing and ignoring it. But PRETENDING to be faithful and PRETENDING
to have no doubts will not cure the problem.
Sooner or later, the old doubts resurface.
Denial
and suppression is not the way to deal with our doubts.
If we
are hard on Thomas, if we look down on him, maybe it is NOT because he, like
us, felt the pain of doubt.
Maybe
we look down on him because he, UNLIKE so many of us, had the courage to face
his doubts head on.
Thomas
was indeed a man of courage.
When
Jesus announced his intention to go to Jerusalem
and die, the reaction of Thomas was “Let’s ALL go and die with him.”
And it
was with courage that Thomas faced his doubts.
He knew
that ignoring these doubts would not make them go away. If anything would resolve them, it would be
by facing them head on.
“Unless
I see the scars of the nails on his hands, and put my fingers on those scars,
and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
One
week after Thomas expressed that doubt, Jesus appeared to him and told the
disciple, “Put your finger here, and look at my hands, reach out and put your
hand in my side. Stop your doubting and
believe.”
And
Thomas believed. All his doubts were
resolved. And not only that, but he was able to go beyond and make a giant step
of faith beyond what most of the other disciples had made. Others had described the Risen Jesus as
Rabbi, prophet, Messiah, King. But it
took Thomas, who having expressed and faced his doubts was able to say with
great faith, “My Lord, and my God.”
Having
faced his doubts Thomas was able to resolve the questions of faith and come out
with a STRONGER faith that ever before.
It is
good if we are free from doubt. Jesus
himself said, “Happy are those who believe without seeing me!”
But IF
we have those doubts, and many of us do, it is good that we face them and
search for an answer, rather than ignore those doubts and hope they simply
disappear.
For
only then will our faith grow and be nurtured to be a stronger, more realistic
faith.
And now unto
God the Father,
God the Son,
And God the
Holy Spirit be ascribed all might, power, dominion and glory, today and
forever, Amen.
Copyright
2016.
Dr.
W. Maynard Pittendreigh
All
rights reserved
Ministers
may feel free to use some or all of this sermon in their own ministries as long
as they do not publish in print or on the Internet without ascribing credit to
the author.