I Doubt It’s About Thomas

I Doubt It’s About Thomas April 25, 2017

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This morning I am So Honored and Thrilled to be able to have the Rev. Tim Fountain post here. I’m not good about knowing which months are for celebrating or remembering or working on which issues, but I did somehow figure out that April, which is almost over, is Autism Awareness Month. Tim’s blog, Sometimes Care Giving Stinks, has been a true help to me over the years when I’ve wanted to complain more but needed a smart knock on the head. Wherever you are in life, whatever your responsibilities and trials with other people, whatever your level of exhaustion, Tim is a continual encouraging needed breath of oxygen. Check out his blog and buy his book (linked down below in the post). And now, here he is talking about Thomas.

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Ah, the “Low Sunday” Gospel about Doubting Thomas.
So many sermons make it all about Thomas, and thus about us.
It can be a moral sermon about trying harder. Wag finger over the greatly-diminished-from-last-week congregation and proclaim, Don’t doubt like that guy. Have faith stronger than all those people who showed up for Easter and won’t be back in church until Christmas. If you have faith you’ll do X, Y and Z. It’s all about us and how we can do better.

Or you can go the opposite direction with an antinomian liberal reflection. Wag finger over the greatly-diminished-from-last-week congregation and suggest, Hey, our doubts are a good thing. Thomas’ intellectual skepticism was so compelling that Jesus realized he had to stop being so divine and meet Thomas where he was. So we affirm all those seekers who came for Easter and are now taking a quiet Sunday to reflect on the missional context they experienced here. It’s all about us and how we’re just dandy.

But the Gospel of John is emphatic in making it all about Jesus. Yes, the whole Scripture points to Jesus. But John, for all of his lofty thought, is an ueber-blunt narrator. The Word was God… without HIM was not anything made that was made… John the Baptizer pointed at HIM… Mary said “Do whatever HE tells you”… his disciples believed in HIM…

Not to mention John’s collection of Jesus’ I AM statements. Or just compare John’s report of the feeding of 5,000 with the other Gospels’. The others talk about the disciples helping to distribute the food; John leaves that out to focus on the divine Jesus doing HIS work.

Low Sunday’s traditional Gospel is not about Thomas as our role model (negative or positive) and not about us as the ones who will do this, that or the other thing in response to his example. It is, as John tells us at the end, one more report written down so that you may believe that JESUS is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in HIS name.

It’s about the dead, buried but now gloriously alive One who passed through barred doors.

It’s about the One whose own breath imparted the Holy Spirit to ten other disciples and whose word gave them scandalous, divine authority to forgive or retain other people’s sins.

It’s about the One so above our snitty categories of good and bad and so full of patient love that he made a special appearance just to be known to the hard headed, broken hearted guy who skipped church the week before.

It’s about the One who pronounces blessing in advance on all those across time and place who will believe in HIM.

When I was bobbling and fumbling the inspiration to write my first book, Raising a Child With Autism, I told another Christian writer that I should probably wait until the kid moved out and I could speak from completed experience. Her wise reply was something like, No no no, you’re not writing as the expert. You’re writing testimony to the Lord who is helping you in the middle of this.

For so much of my life, I could read John’s blunt testimony to the supremacy and sufficiency of Jesus and then go on as if things all depended on me. Caring for my son forced me to confront grace as more than a pious concept. I had to trip over my own limitations and failures and sin again and again and again over decades to realize that I was stumbling over the cornerstone I’d rejected – the unmerited and undeserved favor of God.

That’s where the story of Thomas and all of the other words in the Bible point, to the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. May the blessing of belief be with us all ever more. Amen.


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