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Thought
for the Week Sunday 5 July – Saint Thomas
It’s
not just in the Church, but also in the world, that we tend to call things by
the wrong name. “Friendly fire” is not
at all friendly if you are on the receiving end of it. The parable of the
prodigal son is not about the son; heaven knows there are plenty of prodigal
sons; it is actually about a loving, forgiving father. So it is with “Doubting Thomas”, who should
more accurately be called “believing Thomas”.
Of
course, Saint Peter was the first to say that Jesus was the Messiah, for
which the Greek word is “the Christ”.
According to Mark, that is all that Peter said. In Saint Luke’s Gospel, Peter expands it,
saying “You are the Christ of God”, although there wasn’t anybody else for
the Messiah to be of anyway. In
Matthew’s Gospel, Peter expresses it even more fully, saying, “You are the
Christ, the Son of the living God”, but even this is not new; the King of
Israel was regarded as the son of God, and all the Children of Israel were,
in a sense, children of God. Peter may
have been the first to say it, but no doubt, all the disciples knew that
Jesus was the Messiah, and perhaps many others believed Him to be the Messiah
too, but they were still expecting the Messiah to be a military leader, in
the style of King David. Don’t forget
that it was Peter who was carrying a sword in the garden of Gethsemane on the
night that Jesus was arrested. Saint
Thomas goes much, much further. They
all knew that Jesus was the boss. They
called Him “Rabbi”, the title usually given to a teacher of the Law of Moses,
and in some places in the New Testament, “Rabbi” is translated “Teacher”,
though Rabbi literally means “Great one”.
They called Him “Master”, and they called Him “Lord”; we call Him Lord
too, for example when we say the “Kyries” at the Eucharist – Kyrie is Greek
for Lord. These were all titles
commonly given to great leaders, prophets and teachers by their
followers. But Thomas calls Him, “My
Lord and my God”. It
took the church some three hundred years to catch up with what Saint Thomas
had said. Even then the matter was not
entirely settled. The Council of Nicea
in 325, which was summoned by the Roman Emperor Constantine, was the first
gathering of all the Bishops of Christendom since the Council of Jerusalem,
in about 50 AD, when the Apostles had met to decide the conditions under
which non-Jews could become Christians.
The Council of Nicea lasted 66 days (and you thought our Chaplaincy
Council meetings went on a bit …), and it described the Trinity – God is one,
but within that one-ness are three Persons co-equal and consubstantial,
outside of time and space. Most
Christians had long believed that Jesus was both God and man, but not all
did. Some thought He was a created
being, that is, not God. Others
thought He was only Spirit, and not human.
But Thomas had got there nearly three hundred years earlier, and, by
the end of the Council of Nicea, all but two of the Bishops signed up to our
understanding of the Trinity, and of Jesus as both God and Man. Even
then, it was not entirely settled. For
example, the Cathars in this area could not accept that God could ever be so
involved in this sinful world that He would choose to be born as a human
being and live out a human life, even going through death. The Cathars were brutally wiped out, but
there are some sects, still in existence today, that deny the Trinity, like
the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who maintain that Jesus is not God, but a created
being. How they cope with the
confession of Saint Thomas, I do not know. Most
scholars agree that John’s Gospel originally ended at the end of our reading
today, and while your chaplain hesitates to call himself a scholar, that is
certainly his position. Chapter 21 is
set in Galilee, while the other post-resurrection appearances are in the
Jerusalem area, and it talks of the sons of Zebedee, who are not otherwise
mentioned in the fourth Gospel. Most
important, the final verses of this chapter are both clearly written as an
ending, and bring us neatly back to its beginning; the purpose of the whole
Gospel is that “… by believing, you
may have life in his name”. This
is actually the third time in which Thomas says something a little bit
awkward in John’s Gospel. The
first time follows an incident in chapter 10, when the Jews try to stone
Jesus in the Temple, but he evades their grasp. With the Disciples, He crosses over the
river Jordan, out of the province of Judea, governed by Pontius Pilate, to
the rather wilder country of the province of Perea, ruled by Herod Antipas,
Son of Herod the Great. They are still
in the Holy Land, but away from the Temple, and from the court. There, John tells us, many people believed
in Jesus. However,
Lazarus dies in Bethany, just two miles from Jerusalem, and Mary and Martha
send word to Jesus, who decides to go back into Judea. Putting a rather negative note on
proceedings, Thomas says, “Let us also go, that we may die with Him.” In the event, after raising Lazarus from
the dead, Jesus and the Disciples returned to Perea, but Thomas was right
that going to Bethany would be fatal, for it was from Bethany, a few weeks or
months later, that Jesus would make his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, five
days before his arrest. He was also
right that we do indeed share in the death of Christ when we are baptised
into the church, but there is more to it than that, because we also share in
the new, risen, ascended, glorified life of Jesus too. The
second time occurred on the night of the last supper. Jesus had washed the disciples’ feet, and
told them that he would be betrayed, and that even Peter would deny Him three
times before the cock crowed. He
explained that He was going to the Father, and that they knew the way to the
place where He was going. Of course
they did, He was going to Heaven, and they had been with Him throughout his
teaching and healing ministry. Nobody
knew better than they how to follow Jesus, and enter the Kingdom of
Heaven. But Thomas said, “Lord, we do
not where you are going, so how can we know the way?” Jesus’ reply is one of the most beautiful
and significant sentences in the whole bible,
“I am the way, the truth and the life.” All
three of the things that Thomas says in the fourth Gospel may look a bit on
the stupid, obstinate, awkward side at first bit all three help us to enter
more deeply into our faith. Perhaps
the last is the most important of all, “My Lord and my God”. Perhaps that is a prayer that each of us should
make a frequent part of our prayers and of our daily lives. Let us pray that Jesus will indeed be “My
Lord and my God” to each and everyone of us, this day and for ever. Amen. Father Charles Howard: Anglican Chaplaincy
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