John 20 19-20: When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
John 20:24-25: But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 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."
Preface
It is an honour to speak with you this morning. Ellen and I have found a spiritual home here at All Saints and while we are not Anglicans, by heritage, we are becoming part of this sustaining circle and we are so grateful for your grace and hospitality. We have rejoiced with you in the progress of the past year and received many grace filled gestures of support—especially when I broke my ribs falling off the roof last Christmas. We have been blessed and by your kindness and friendship ... so we thank you.
Since the advent of the recent tension between the United States and Canada, out of sense of nostalgia or perhaps patriotic determination, I have returned regularly to the recent five nations hockey tournament final game between the best men’s teams from Canada the United States. Who can forget it? Connor McDavid’s’ overtime goal came at just the right moment. When we felt besieged and alone, his winning goal was a triumph and affirmation of the Canadian spirit. So when the tariff road got rough last week and markets went crazy or Donald’s threats of annexation became too frequent and real, I would return and watch Connor McDavid score again and again.
“Elbows up!”
Now You-Tube algorithms being what they are, once I had watched that winning goal more than twice, my You Tube feed sent me more of Conor McDavid material: “Conor McDavid’s 15 best Goals,” “Conor McDavid’s Overtime Success,” Conor McDavid’s 10 best shoot outs.” Guess it was a sign of my need for something beautiful and Canadian that I watched every one of those short videos.
In my younger years I was a goalie. Nothing spectacular, but I played with a defenseman, Ken Hancock, who was drafted by the Chicago Blackhawks back when there were only 6 professional teams in the NHL and Ken gave me good advice. “Keep Your Eye on the Puck.” Don’t worry about what a player does, how he or she moves. Don’t watch their head shake or their stick handling. Keep your eye on the puck,
And as I watched Conor McDavid’s 15 best goals, I saw a pattern. He is not only impressively fast, he is a master of disguising where the puck is going. His stick handling is like a magician’s card trick. Sleight of hand, faints and turns. The goalies he faced are mesmerized by all the bluster and show and inevitably lose sight of the puck. There was a common pattern. He would get the goalie looking way over to his glove side using a flurry of stick handling to draw his attention, and then he’d slip the puck back through his legs or past his blocker on the opposite side of the net. A classic move in hockey games and magic shows. Keep your audience focused over here, while the real play is happening unnoticed over there.
Now in the reading of John’s gospel this morning, we have the same dynamic operating. For millennia we have joined the disciples in the upper room after the Crucifixion / Easter revelations. And with them we are caught by the wonder that Jesus is not dead, but alive. How could that be! The women in our community saw him crucified, They helped put him in an stone tomb and they then waited for the sabbath to end before they returned to prepare his body for burial only to find that very tomb was empty. They returned to the disciples with the most extraordinary news: Jesus is not in the tomb, he has risen from the dead. Dare we say it “He is Resurrected.” Now that is not just a statement that Jesus is alive again, it is a declaration that the whole world order is about to change. We’ll leave the implications of their declaration for another sermon.
Let’s stay with the upper room, unbelievable news that Jesus is alive again. Incredible! Then ... and here’s the drama ... Jesus appears to us ... doesn’t walk through the door, we know this because it’s locked. And here he is standing among us. We see him and are amazed and overjoyed.
Thomas, our fellow disciple is not with us and when we tell him later that we have seem Jesus, he doesn’t believe. He doubts. Like so many believers who have travelled the journey of faith ... he doesn’t believe until he has proof. In John’s gospel, indeed throughout the entire Christian canon, Thomas embodies the dynamic relationship between faith and doubt. He is the prototype for followers of every age. How can we believe if we don’t see Jesus, touch his side and put our fingers in his wounds?
And that’s the story that captures our attention ... and has done so for centuries. We all wonder about “doubting Thomas,” as we call him, and measure our faith against his doubt.
But what if this is not the real show? What if the more significant, world changing event is happening where we are not looking.
That’s where we begin our sermon today, but first let’s prepare our hearts with prayer: “God help me never to use my reason against the truth.”
Introduction
There is a momentum in fiction that all writers recognize. Having set up a dramatic event or unique scene we add enough details to make it sound real and plausible. So if our main character is holding a chef’s knife, as he approaches the front door where (drum roll please) the serial killer is waiting ... we have to explain why anyone would do that. So we say: “he’s just been chopping potatoes at the kitchen counter preparing dinner.” Or “he’s frantic to find a weapon but grabs the knife as he passes through the kitchen to the front hall.” Or “his partner had a habit of leaving kitchen utensils around the house and he picks it up from the front hall credenza as he reaches for the dead bolt.” I call this dramatic momentum. The scene unfolds requiring more details. We try to give a logical reason for why the drama is progressing as it does. It’s an embellishment to be sure, but it is also an essential part of storytelling: making your drama seem credible.
In John’s gospel, some of the post resurrection appearances happen in the upper room ... as is the case also in Luke and Matthew. But it is only in John’s gospel that we have a bit of what I just described as dramatic momentum. A detail gets added to make things believable and convincing.
A bit of biblical background. John’s gospel was written last of the four we have in the Christian scriptures. Somewhere around the turn of the first century. The questions facing the author of the fourth gospel are different from those to which Mark, Matthew and Luke responded. In John we have a gospel that is preaching to the gentile community, to a generation of people who were living 75 to 80 years after the original events. Eye witnesses are long gone and the question of believing in Jesus, even though he is not present, becomes a central struggle. Thomas is going to act as our bridge to that, now ancient story, of the risen Christ. How can you believe if you cannot see him with your own eyes. John uses Thomas as a way for Jesus to reply to all new converts: (John 20:29b )“blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
But keep your eyes on the puck. There is an historically and theologically much more significant issue in this story that we often miss because Thomas is so interesting.
What does the gospel writer do to make the scene credible? He locks the doors. Of course, the doors are locked otherwise doubting listeners could and probably did claim that Jesus just walked in like any ordinary human being would. No miracle here! The doors have to be locked so that Jesus’ appearance has the arura of the divine, This is no ordinary man. In John’s gospel Jesus is God incarnate ... able to defy the laws of nature ... indeed he is in charge of all creation. Locked doors are no hindrance, to the Son of God.
Then John’s dramatic momentum takes over. The doors are not just locked. John feels he needs to give a credible reason for the locked doors. So they are locked “for fear of the Jews.” Whether that is a conscious choice or a unconscious addition, the phrase poses many problems. First, technically, the people inside the room are also devout Jews, so how does it make sense that they are afraid of the Jews outside the room. Second, why would the first disciples be afraid ... It’s not like there are gangs of marauding vigilantes looked for Christians to violate. The upper room gathering is still nothing more than a leaderless, hopeless clutch of Jesus followers—largely invisible.
But when we take account of the shifts to the passion narrative introduced by John we can see a pattern. The people who gather to manipulate Pilate to crucify Jesus are not just chief priests as in Mark, or Chief priests and a mob of on-lookers as in Matthew. In John, it’s the chief priests, the temple guards and finally the people as a whole who cry out for his death. It is an ethnic group that sets itself opposed to Jesus of Nazareth. Of course it is not just in John, that the seeds of anti-Judaism are sewn. Matthew has the crowd gathered in front of Pilate embrace the execution of Jesus as their specific responsibility: “His death be upon us and upon our children (Matthew 27:25).”
Alas, John points his finger at the “Jews” and essentially says they are to blame for our fear. They are out to get us. They are the enemy.
There is no way to soften or pretend away the fact that in John, we find the justification for the persecution of Jews as an ethnic group: anti-semitism. And that’s my point for this sermon: Doubting Thomas is an interesting, even instructive tale, but the real game-changer, the bit of scripture that had, alas, the most lasting influence on human history, is that brief, but deadly reference to the Jews as ones we can blame for our fear.
KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE PUCK
In the school yard, what did we chant when someone was verbally abusing us. Do you recall? “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” We shouted that in defiance, didn’t we.
But it’s not true. Pointing the finger at someone and calling them a name, using a derogatory slur, can do great damage. It reduces the other to an aberration, a non-being. If John, the gospel writer, were to join us here this morning, he might well counter what I have just said about anti-semitism by arguing that all he did was mention them as outsiders. “The Jews” are not us. It's only a statement of fact. But when we claim they are after us and that they are making us afraid, now we have crossed over the line into name calling. Out of our own inner turmoil and fear, we wag a finger at someone else and name them as the ones who are wrong, who are after us. “They are the ones to blame.”
Names can hurt. They turn our world into a binary and simplistic equation. There are two kinds of people: us and them. “They” are wrong, “we” are right. “They” are blind and pernicious, “we” are righteous and open. “They” want to hurt us and “we” need to protect ourselves from them. Not just locking our doors against their interference and malevolence, we need to round them up, control them.
Of course what happens when we separate “us from “them” is that we cease knowing who they really are. We start to imagine their devious nature and we tell ourselves stories about how they want to hurt us. We start adding adjectives to those people out there. They are greedy, blood thirsty, ignorant, pernicious or scheming.
In the 1930s the National Socialist Workers Party otherwise known as the Nazi’s, were able to instill in the wider populace a distrust of the Jews in their midst by a propaganda technique known as: “Feindbilder.” Literally translated as “enemy pictures,” the Nazis produced hundreds of images of the Jews and their evil ways: Christ killers, world dominators, greedy and mean-spirited. And while the images seem ridiculous...looking at them now, they appear grotesquely melodramatic, these “enemy pictures” blunted the moral sensitivities of the German soul ... It is indeed remarkable that the culture which nurtured such great Christian thinkers as Luther, Schleiermacher, Hagel and Nietzsche could be subdued and seduced into such a base prejudice.
It was the name calling. It was enemy pictures. That’s where it begins. When the president claims that those people over there are wrong, that they eating our pets, coming from other countries where they were criminals or rapists. When we say they are not just illegally among us, but they have come to do us harm and treat us badly ... that’s where injustice finds a foothold.
If there is evil in the world to our south, it is in the rise of divisive name-calling and blaming. Let’s not be distracted by the chaos. Keep our eyes on the puck. When we are invited by our leaders to blame “those people” for our problems, then we are in trouble. “They get rounded up and detained without due process. They get shipped out on planes before laws can intervene and we all go along with it, because we know they are bad people. Even when it is proven they are innocent, we tell ourselves they are not worthy of our regard.
I am not pointing out something you have not seen or felt. Our dismay over Donald is not merely the way he has created economic chaos or his callous disregard for people’s ability to work, offer service and prosper. It’s not even that he has lead his country back behind a wall of isolation and indifference. Our real fear is the extent to which he corrodes the common good with lies and slanders that make it easier and easier to break laws that have protected minority groups, the defenseless and dispossessed.
Let’s keep our eyes on the puck. The God we encounter in scripture is not interested in turning humankind into an “us” and “them” equation. Rather, the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God of Jesus and Mary, is inviting us to collaborate in creating a world community where all enjoy the fruits of creation, where all live without fear and where all are protected from aggression and violence. In scripture, it precisely those who are weak and vulnerable who need our care and empathy.
Tomorrow is election day. And I know we are motivated to vote because of the threats over our sovereignty, and what others say about us. And I know that elections tend to divide us into camps and we spend too much energy elaborating the faults of others. But I recall the conclusion of the election in 2015, when Justin Trudeau won and his first words were to invite Canadians, to be united. He said, “Conservatives are not our enemies, they're our neighbours." So we shall be on Tuesday morning: neighbours.
Alas, as a Christian I know too much about how name calling leads to law breaking and injustice. If we keep our eyes on the puck, then we realize that our real work is to build neighbourliness. We offer love and justice to our all—even our enemies, so that in the end we all become neighbours.