Finger
John 20:19-31

April 23, 2006


Two weeks ago it was fetching the donkey for the Palm Sunday march. On Easter morn it was the unpleasant task of anointing the mutilated corpse of an executed loved one. Today the trilogy of the physical Gospel concludes with a finger wanting to touch the most sacred and sorest wound.

Try as we can in this sanctuary to be spiritual, there is no escaping our bodily participation in worship and faith. Our eternal mistake seems to be to believe that spirituality is somehow non-physical, a holy disentanglement from the constraints and distractions of the body. But even Jesus was adamant that “it ain’t necessarily so.” You’ve got to put your body into your spiritual life.

Once in the early hours of the morning a woman called into one of those radio ministries. The pastor on this program was a wise, grandfatherly gentleman who had that calm reassuring voice that can melt all fear. The lady, who was obviously crying, said, “Pastor, I was born blind, and I’ve been blind all my life. I don’t mind being blind but I have some well meaning friends who tell me that if I had more faith I could be healed.” The pastor asked her, “Tell me, do you carry one of those white canes?”

“Yes I do,” she replied. “Then the next time someone says that,” he said, “hit them over the head with the cane - and then tell them, ‘If you had more faith that wouldn't hurt!’” Poor theology hurts!

We’re still keeping up with the calendar, at least at the end of the story. Luke’s report has Jesus all the way out to Emmaus by Sunday night. John finds Jesus reporting to a locked-in gaggle of terrified disciples, presumably back in Jerusalem the same night. Jesus moves. The sequence concludes back in the same place one week later - tonight - where all the parties find one another in the same place.

Typically, the Sunday after Easter is the low ebb in attendance in most Christian churches, and there are very good human reasons for that being so - emotional exhaustion for one thing, since Easter is the culmination of every Christian story, and it is hard to maintain the high of Easter. Still, the story is not over, our spiritual journey has not arrived at its pilgrim destination. There is something to do on the Sunday after Easter and Wendell Berry’s final poetic line is probably the logical thing to do today, “practice resurrection.”

For us resurrection, Easter, is fun, if not exhausting. But the original recipients were not so impressed. Mary Magdalene has come to the disciples to excitedly report her discovery, “I have seen the Lord,” apparently still in the morning. Now it was evening, which means after 6:00 p.m., and two questions plague us and the disciples. Why didn’t the disciples go looking for Jesus? And why did they have all the doors locked? For fear of the Jews John says, but weren’t they going to lock out wandering Jesus as far as they knew?

Lots of reasons are offered, but it is evidence that having everything you assumed about life change is pretty hard to take. Most of us are terrified by real change, and resurrection is real change.

One of the better suggestions goes back to Jesus’ conversation with Mary Magdalene that she no doubt reported to the disciples. Jesus had said, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Presumably, this was how resurrection worked in these early hours - Jesus had already ascended. The disciples did not bother to look for him, for Jesus was nowhere to be found, physically that is. As for fear of the Jewish leaders, there is no solid evidence that they were being hunted out, but it is not hard to imagine at this chaotic moment in their lives that paranoia strikes deep. Locked doors allow us to think this incredibly new stuff through.

And they saw Jesus standing there, a surprising thing in itself, but Jesus is always surprising. Yet, it occurred so serenely that shock does not correctly describe the emotion. “Peace be with you,” the normal Middle Eastern greeting, is almost surreal in the situation. There was no peace in that room prior to Jesus standing there. What kind of peace would there be with you after a resurrection?

In the early years of Christianity, there were a multitude of skeptics about the resurrection. This was not a society of pre-scientific naive wanna-believers as modern critics try to pass their verdict on the era. No, many thought this was a big hoax, stealing and hiding the body. Others thought it was a rumour in bad taste that unfortunately for civilization got out of control. And many people then, and still now, think of the events as “spiritual” rather than physical. Jesus was not seen to be a real fully flesh and blood human being, for after all, he was God. So the action at the cross and tomb and on Easter was Jesus “seeming” to appear human, but he didn’t suffer. The crucifixion and resurrection was symbolic. Mel Gibson was wrong in advance.

Jesus wanted to show something else. He emphasized that he was human, that this was his body that they had all traveled with for so long, that the ugly wounds and scars he was holding out to them were evidence that he himself had suffered as they had seen him suffering. Resurrection was not an idea; it was real.

There was more, for John squeezed into the next few verses matters where the other evangelists lingered. He commissioned them as apostles, a title that means you are being sent out for a mission. He personally breathed the Holy Spirit upon them, way ahead of Pentecost, and gave them the authority to forgive sins - something only Jesus had dared to do earlier. Thomas was not there to hear all this.

He heard later that week, but Thomas did not doubt, so much as he did not want to commit himself to something neither genuine nor authentic. Neither should we ever settle for anything less than the genuine truth. Thomas is the disciple we should imitate first, rather than Peter or John.

Picking up on the visceral side of their report, the torn flesh in his hands and side, Thomas wanted his finger to feel genuine faith. Tonight, one week later, Thomas saw Jesus standing there, and it was all very physical again, wounds and fingers. Thomas, perhaps the most daring and faithful of Jesus’ disciples, was enveloped and overwhelmed by the physical presence of Jesus so that his finger now was just a figure of speech. He was practicing resurrection.

The punch line at the end is not a throwaway. “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” That’s always been the situation for new Christians, and that’s ours right now.

What we are left to do now that Easter is over is to practice, practice, practice. Practice resurrection, but don’t practice just thinking about it. Resurrection in this locked up room was a physical matter. It was not an issue of breaking outside, but whether you could get the resurrection to break into your mind and life.

Resurrection is not about immortality, of living forever. It is all about the defeat of death and its mob of accomplices. The disciples were locking all the doors because they were still afraid, they were still convinced that death was always stronger at the last. But if you practice resurrection enough, you know there is nothing to fear but fear itself, and then fear has no reality.

Resurrection is not talked about on Easter morning only, or sung and praised in marvelous melodic hymns, or examined in strenuous theological treatises. It is physical, achingly physical and tiring, yet exhilarating beyond language to describe precisely. Fetching donkeys, bathing corpses, touching and healing wounds, raising a family, teaching a class, working on the production line with an odd collection of fellow workers, loading trucks off the shipping dock, and yes, even serving the homeless and the poor a meal at the church or at Soul’s Harbour. You’ve got to put your weight and your body behind your faith, for what else do you have?

Every once in a while I am referred to a person who is described as living fully every moment of his or her life. Usually these are older folk, people who could be excused for slowing down. Yet these are people, and I don’t think there is anyone here who does not know at least one, who want to live their last breath. That is a person who practices resurrection. Let me tell you about one such person I have been privileged to know.

Dr. Miklos Ats was my German professor in undergraduate college. He was Hungarian, no doubt about that, and he told us about his imprisonment in Soviet gulags, and then during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution his escape to the West. Eventually, he came to the United States and started life over again, finally landing in this college where he also taught world history with a very heavy Hungarian accent. His German students could always be recognized abroad by their decidedly Hungarian/German accent!

Miklos was a man no longer afraid of anything, invincible in his soul. Nothing could hurt him, except seeing his family and friends hurt. At the age of 60 he was the best downhill skier in a school of mostly physical education majors. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Warsaw Bloc fell apart and Hungary became free again, he traveled in 1992 to the very field and mountain pass where he had escaped at night into Austria nearly 40 years before. He had a heart attack and died before he hit the ground. This was a man who practiced resurrection every day of his life.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan