Second Sunday of Easter
John 20:19-31
April 11, 2010

Those Glorious Scars

We don’t even know this guy’s real name. "Thomas" means "twin" in Aramaic, so when the Gospel writer John identifies him as "Thomas who was called the twin," he’s simply telling us what his nickname means. The Greek for "Twin" is Didymus, which sounds like "ditto" to me. Alas, the English and Greek are not related, but you’ve got to admit, "Ditto" is a pretty good nickname for a twin. An old tradition holds that Thomas’ given name was "Judas," same as Judas Iscariot, which would be a good reason for sticking with the nickname.

So, call him "Thomas" or call him "Ditto" if you’d rather. It’s not his name that lives in infamy so much as it is the adjective that usually precedes it: doubting. "Doubting Thomas," he’s often called, or even better, "Doubting Ditto."

John Calvin came down hard on this fellow. He wrote, "the stupidity of Thomas was astonishing and monstrous . . . he was not only obstinate, but also proud and contemptuous in his treatment of Christ."

I think Calvin must have written that during one of those long gray winters in Geneva, when the Town Council was trying to run him out of town and his tolerance for dissent was at its lowest.

I don’t see anything in John’s story to indicate that poor old Ditto was stupid, proud or contemptuous. It seems to me he was merely being honest.

No doubt he’d heard Mary’s report of her encounter with the risen Jesus. "He called me by my name," she kept saying. And surely the other disciples could speak of little else than the visit they received.

The doors were locked. All of a sudden he was standing there, saying to us, "Peace be with you." Then he told us he was sending us, just as the Father had sent him, and he breathed on us and told us, "Receive the Holy Spirit." You should have been there, Ditto.

But Ditto wasn’t there. Nobody knows why. Perhaps he was looking for Judas, who was nowhere to be found. Perhaps he went for a walk to clear his head. Perhaps, as Frederick Buechner suggests, he was out looking for a job, seeing as how the disciple business had turned out so badly.

Whatever the reason, when he got back to what the disciples were hoping was their "safe house," his colleagues bombarded him with their report and, I assume, expected him to swallow the whole thing hook, line, and sinker.

"I’m not buying it," Ditto says in effect. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. For all I know, the whole lot of you are suffering from some form of mass hallucination What you describe is a ghost, not the flesh and blood man we all know died on the cross. 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."

Father Calvin calls that proud and contemptuous. To me it makes good sense. To me it sounds like Ditto is holding out for what my seventh grade science teacher called "empirical verification."

But that’s not quite it, either. Ditto lived in the first century, long before people were taught that the only truth worth knowing is the kind that comes out of a laboratory. The word for "believe" in this passage is pisteuo, which doesn’t just mean, "believe" in the sense of "assent to doctrine." Pisteuo means "I put my trust in," "I rely on."

It’s the kind of thing that happens when a parent hands over the car keys and says to the teenager, "No curfew tonight. Use your best judgment. I believe in you."

Ditto has already put his life on the line by trusting Jesus, and all he got for his trouble was the sight of his Master hanging on a cross. Now Ditto is jumping at shadows and afraid he’ll be arrested at any moment. I don’t think this is pride or contemptuousness that’s talking here. I think it’s hurt – hurt and fear.

Ditto is not some first-century advocate of the scientific method, forerunner of Sir Isaac Newton. He’s a man whose heart has been broken because he put his trust in someone and that someone let him down.

Yet for all his hurt and fear – and doubt if you want to call it that – Thomas gets one thing absolutely right. The one sign – the only sign – that could change his mind would be those scars.

The mark of the nails in Jesus’ hands. The ugly spear mark in his side. If anything could rekindle Thomas’ trust, it would be those. He would know it was Jesus not because he could pass through closed doors, or because he spoke words of peace and commissioning. For Thomas, it would be the scars that would do it. The scars and nothing else.

When Michael and I were choosing hymns to go with the scripture readings today, we both thought of the hymn we just sang as the gradual. "Lo he comes with clouds descending." It’s the perfect link between the Epistle lesson from Revelation and the gospel lesson from John, and the link is, of course, the scars.

Lo! He comes with clouds descending,
Once for favored sinners slain;
Thousand thousand saints attending,
Swell the triumph of His train:
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
God appears on earth to reign.

Every eye shall now behold Him
Robed in dreadful majesty
Those who set at naught and sold Him,
Pierced and nailed Him to the tree,
Deeply wailing, deeply wailing,
Shall the true Messiah see.

Those dear tokens of His passion
Still His dazzling body bears;
Cause of endless exultation
To His ransomed worshippers;
With what rapture, with what rapture
Gaze we on those glorious scars!

            Truth be told, we had go to the Episcopal Hymnal to find Charles Wesley’s actual words. The Presbyterian version of this most biblical of hymns has been Bowdlerized almost beyond recognition. Instead of "deeply wailing," those who nailed Jesus to the cross are "shamed and grieving," which is not the same thing. And as for "those dear tokens of his passion," those scars that Thomas was holding out for, they have dropped out altogether. If our hymnal editors had had their way this morning, we would not have sung,

            It’s a bit surprising that those "glorious scars" should be so important for the gospel writer John. Of the four accounts, John’s Jesus is the most cool, calm, and collected. He remains in control during his arrest and trial. When Pontius Pilate interrogates him, it’s Pilate who ends up on the defensive. Even from the cross, John’s Jesus remains in charge. He assigns his mother into the care of the disciple whom he loved. He says, "I am thirsty," but only in order to fulfill the scripture. There is no cry of dereliction in John. When the moment arrives, Jesus simply says, "It is finished," and dies.

            There are times when John’s Jesus seems like Superman, "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound." He comes over as a "strange visitor from another planet" merely disguised as one of us.

            But even in John’s gospel, Jesus bleeds. The flesh he takes on is our flesh – the kind that tears and bleeds and scars. Even in John, we know who he is by his scars. The nail-scarred Jesus is the only Messiah offered by any of the gospels. He is still the only Christ who can save.

            A superhuman Christ is no help to us when we descend into the valley of the shadow of death. He has no affinity, no connection, with us. He will not be there when "the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done." He will not descend into hell with us and for us. He will not, as we are fond of saying, "be there for us." He won’t be there because he’s never been there. Without the scars, he’s just another plaster saint.

        When he came and stood among the disciples a week later, Jesus offered to take Ditto up on his dare. "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe."

        At that point, Judas required no further convincing. "My Lord and my God," he says. Who among us, given the same situation, would not have said the same?

        We cannot touch his scars, but we can touch our own. We can touch the wounded places in our own lives, which are the very places where Christ has been and will be. Speaking as one who travels to such places – the beside, the graveside, the valley of the shadow – I can tell you, Jesus Christ is there. He always gets there ahead of me, and there is no doubt who he is. He has the scars to prove it.

                With what rapture, with what rapture,
                Gaze we on those glorious scars!

        I can see why a sheepish editor would want to leave out those words. They can be hard to hear and even harder to sing. Most people don’t want a scarred up Christ. They want one who is neat and tidy and unblemished. They want a spiritual Christ, not a scarred one.

        But Ask Thomas. He will tell you. Without the scars, Jesus is not the genuine article. With the scars comes the good news.

 

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