 |
 |
 |
 |
As the Father Sent me, So I Send You
by Martin Smith
March 30, 2008
[John 20:19-29]
Nicknames are catchy—they are meant to be—so listening to today’s gospel triggers that ‘Doubting Thomas’ cliché. But if we are in too much of a hurry to focus on Thomas we might skip over the first part, the encounter in the upper room on that first day of the week on which the tomb had been found empty, the meeting with the Risen Christ that Thomas missed. In this encounter, doubt is never mentioned overtly, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t present. Sometimes art is most effective when its methods are indirect and subtle, when it only hints at the truth that is, in reality, the most poignant emotional core of the scene. Art is most powerful when it draws us in, so that we supply through our own imagination from our own experience the feeling that the artist is leaving unspoken.
Now doubt is certainly present in the upper room, but because the disciples had found the empty tomb and heard Mary’s story of meeting Jesus, the doubt I am referring to is not doubt about whether Jesus was alive. I am talking about self-doubt. Some of us have doubts about the resurrection. Far more of us have doubts about ourselves. Which is why this key moment in the gospel of John can be so enormously powerful.
Self-doubt can hit bottom when we have violated our most cherished ideals. A soldier on a battlefield encounters a comrade lying wounded on the ground in agony, but he turns away and keeps on running to save his own skin. A mother abandons her children to go and live with her lover. A public official known for the strictness with which he holds others accountable makes an exemption for himself and bends the rules for his own gain. A promising, brilliant student doing well at college starts to go into a self-destructive spiral for no apparent reason. It is as if she needs to sabotage her own progress out of some hidden dread of success. She starts to flunk courses. She drops out and sinks down into apathy. After these kinds of violations lies the prospect not only of shame, but of self-doubt. How can we trust ourselves after these kinds of betrayals? And even if we have not been guilty of overt acts of cowardice, abandonment and breach of trust, our more everyday forms of self-doubt can give us inklings of what it is like to be unable to trust ourselves, to lose faith in ourselves. Think of the ways in which you and I rationalize our reluctance to take risks, to take up new challenges. We doubt ourselves, we second-guess ourselves, we anticipate failure then avert it by playing safe, repressing our self-mistrust and giving phony pretexts. “I haven’t time. I can’t afford it. They won’t approve….”
The disciples have abandoned Jesus. Only the unnamed disciple he loved didn’t desert him. They can never trust themselves again. They had huddled in the upper room for fear of the Judaean crowd, who were hunting Galilean pilgrims tainted by association with that insurgent Jesus. But their main fear was for their own characters, now their untrustworthiness had been so cruelly exposed by Jesus’ arrest. They must have felt so worthless. Their unreliability had been proved. The best they could hope for was to slip out of the city with the returning crowds, take up their old jobs again and come to terms with disillusionment.
It is into this pit of self-doubt that Jesus appears, the very one that they all had deserted and left to die. We can hardly imagine their bafflement of seeing Jesus, who had in fact been killed and buried. We must try and imagine the surge of shame and confusion at being face to face with the one they had abandoned.
And how does Jesus meet them? With the greeting “Peace be with you”—and never had the everyday word shalom had such depth of meaning. No accusation, no shaming, no rebuking. The gift of friendship restored. Peace. But notice what happens next. This isn’t one of those fake reconciliations, where the breach of trust is glossed over. It isn’t based on denial, pretending that they hadn’t abandoned him. Jesus doesn’t hide the hands that had been pierced with the nails behind his back. No. If he is going to reach out to embrace them he has to show them the wounds of his torture and execution on his hands. “Peace be with you. After he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side.”
It is at this point, that the disciples realize that they are encountering the real Jesus they knew, the prophet who had never been afraid to confront truth and had always challenged them to take the hard path and the narrow gate of reality instead of the broad path of fake and cover up. The reconciliation he was offering them was based on the hard expectation that they would face their own fear that had led them to take flight. And that is what opened up the floodgates for real joy. Jesus was reuniting himself with them, and in that reunion taking up again the challenge of healing them of fear and turning them towards the possibilities that faith and trust open up. “Peace be with you. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”
I wonder who was the first of them to have the thought, now where do we go from here? What does Jesus expect of them now? I wonder how many of them began to wonder what kind of rehabilitation plan Jesus had in mind for them. Clearly, they had not really grasped his message very well during the days they followed him. They had all proved that they couldn’t be trusted when the final crisis came. So surely what lay ahead was a long period of spiritual rehabilitation. They needed therapy, they needed re-training, they needed a program that would restore trust in themselves. Surely, on condition that the period of probation was long enough, they could gradually prove themselves in stages to be worthy of his trust. Just give us time and we will earn your trust back.
But none of them has time to express these thoughts. Because the risen Lord cuts through all this tangled web based on self-doubt and shame. “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I send you.” God had sent Jesus in complete trust. God had utter confidence in Jesus to follow through, even through apparent defeat and shameful death. God totally believed in Jesus to express who he was to the world. Like father, like Son. And this was the same trust that Jesus was now placing in them. Without delay. Without conditions. No question of rehabilitation. No program of probation and re-training. Now. Straight away. Jesus puts faith in them. Jesus believes in them. “With exactly the same confidence that God had in me, I now trust you and send you to represent God and me to the world and to set people free with the truth of our love.”
As long as we feel we must repair ourselves, and prove ourselves worthy, we are sunk. God doesn’t wait for our trustworthiness. God creates our trustworthiness by actually trusting us. God gives us faith, by giving us the gift of his faith in us. We think Christian faith is believing in Christ. No! Christian faith is coming to terms with the astonishing truth that God in Christ believes in us! Our own faithfulness and trustworthiness is nothing we can fix or generate. But we can receive it as a gift. And this gift is none other than the gift of the Holy Spirit.
“When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any they are retained.” Reconciled to Jesus, given the gift to trust in themselves because God trusts them anew from his heart, they are now entrusted with the same mission that Jesus had. It is a prophetic mission. Forgiving those who want reunion with God. Confronting and challenging those who push back at God’s peace and want to sabotage the Creator’s will to weave humanity and all the creatures of the earth into a community based on costly honest and mutual care.
So here is the secret of this amazing Easter scene. How will Jesus appear to you and to me? Not in a vision. Not in a special visitation. Those were strange and mysterious occurrences meant for his first companions. You and I will encounter Jesus through equally mysterious moments when we sense something wonderful breaking through our self-doubt, our self-mistrust, our self-disqualification. In moments when our shame and avoidance are confronted and set aside, and we sense the presence of Christ seeking reunion with us. In moments when we realize that God believes in us and trusts in us. In moments when we are moved to accept our own calling to be God’s agents and representatives. When we accept that we have gifts that God intends to use to weave his community of peace and restoration. Only in these experiences do we break through to Easter joy. The only way to have faith in Christ is by accepting Christ’s faith in us.