The Lessons Appointed for Use on the Second Sunday of Easter, Year C

In the name of God: Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Amen.

It’s good to see you all here this morning. In some churches, the Sunday after Easter is often known as Low Sunday, as in low attendance. A friend also informed me that this Sunday is also known as Seminarian’s Sunday because the seminarian is always asked to preach after the craziness of Holy Week and Easter. So by the time a person leaves seminary, she or he will most likely have preached on Doubting Thomas.

Poor Doubting Thomas. He can’t catch a break. Everyone always uses him as the bad example, the one didn’t believe that Jesus appeared to the disciples, passing through locked doors, and showing off his wounds. Can you really blame him? He probably thought the rest of the disciples were playing some kind of crazy joke on him. First Mary Magdalene sees Jesus and then the rest of the apostles. It just didn’t make sense. Who wouldn’t want some proof? People just don’t rise from the dead every day, and even though Jesus was a pretty special guy, cheating death takes it to a whole other level. I have to admit that I’m kind of in the Thomas camp on this one. Particularly for a post-Enlightenment person who relies on reason and facts for evidence, needing proof is not a foreign concept. Besides, Thomas had some other good reasons to doubt. Look at what happened. He gives everything up to follow Jesus. He does what God calls him to do, and then BAM, it all comes screeching to a halt on Good Friday. All this, and for what? Nothing? And likely to get him killed too. Thomas is not about to get his hopes up that this resurrection thing is the real deal. He is so pessimistic that he doesn’t say something like, “Well, I’ll believe it when I see it for myself.” No. He won’t believe it until he can touch Christ’s wounds.

Thomas is a Good Friday guy in an Easter world. He is so consumed by the bad stuff that has happened that his belief in the power of God is diminished. Just think about our Christian brothers and sisters in the Southern hemisphere who celebrate Easter in the fall. It’s easy to say, “Alleluia! He is Risen!” on a beautiful sunny, spring day when the flowers are in full bloom and the leaves are budding on the trees. But how difficult is it to say the same thing in fall when the days are growing shorter and everything around us is dying? The truth is that we are Easter people in our hearts all year round. Even on Good Friday, our knowledge of the resurrection is what gets us through those dark days during and after the crucifixion.

This is true of our lives as well. Being an Easter person is not about being endlessly optimistic or a Pollyanna-type who says that everything is fine when it isn’t. We all have our ups and downs. People close to us die. We lose our jobs. Money is tight, and stress levels are high. Life happens. It would also be foolish to suggest that these things happen because our faith isn’t strong. If we just believed a little bit more, we would have everything we wanted, and life would be smooth-sailing. Being Easter people means knowing that God is all-powerful, and God works through all situations for good. Being Easter people is about hope. As Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “But we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”[1] For Paul, hope is a spiritual grace, not an antidote to pessimism about one’s situation. Easter is about hope, and hope does not disappoint us, not after Easter.

Hope is sometimes the only thing that keeps us going. I’m sure that you all are familiar with the story of Pandora’s box. When Pandora opens her box and all of the terrible things come flying out of it – ills and sicknesses and human toils – the very last thing that weakly limps out of the box is hope. In some interpretations of this story, hope is the worst of the evils. Instead of letting us resign ourselves to the way the world is, we are foolish enough to hope that it will get better, hope that we can change it, and imagine something different. I prefer the explanation that, although hope is the puny thing at the bottom of the box, it ultimately conquers all of the other human ills that we experience. As Christians whose hope is in Christ, this is our reality. We know that God loves us. We believe that God has good things in store for all of creation and that God is bringing that into fulfillment through Christ.

But like our good friend Thomas the Twin, there are times when we despair, when we think that God has abandoned us, ceases to exist, or is even out to get us. There are times when the resurrection seems like a cruel joke that someone is playing and a pervasive sense of gloom settles around us. How could we hope when everything is only getting worse? But Easter breaks through the pessimism and despair. We, along with Thomas, place our hands in Christ’s wounds – the wounds that say, “You are forgiven, and I love you.” The wounds that say that the power of God is stronger than death and ask, “Where, O Death, is your sting? O Grave, where is your victory?” We hope in a love that surpasses all that we can even imagine. What else, besides the bodily resurrection of Christ, could have transformed the disciples’ despair into hope after seeing all that they had seen, after being afraid for their very lives? Just as the disciples believed and had life in Christ’s name, so the good news is written so that we may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God and to have life, not a life where we simply exist, but a joyful, abundant life. One full of hope and trust in God’s love for us and for all creation.

Easter is despair transfigured into hope by the all-powerful love of God. Jesus tells Thomas and us, “Do not doubt but believe.” Believe that love conquers death. Believe in the resurrection of the dead and in life everlasting. Believe that God abides with us as God was with the disciples. And through believing, may you have life in his name. Amen.

[1] Romans 5:3-5

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