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Sermon for Easter 2A

April 7, 2002

Our Gospel lesson this morning tells the story of the disciple Thomas—Doubting Thomas, we often call him today—the story of how he demanded to see the marks of the nails in Jesus’ hands, how he demanded to have his own experience of the Risen Christ before he would believe, and, ultimately, how he went from being the one who said “I will never believe” to being the first one of all the disciples to say to Jesus, “My Lord and my God.” And even though the point of the story is when Jesus says, “How blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed”—still, I think a lot of us today feel a certain connection with Thomas and his desire to see for himself—a lot of us today resonate with Thomas’s feeling that he can’t just take the disciples’ report of the resurrection at face value, but that he needs something more concrete to go on. I think a lot of us today are rather like Thomas—and that’s not necessarily a bad way to be.

Thomas isn’t sure he can accept what the other disciples tell him about seeing the Risen Jesus, because that sort of resurrection doesn’t fit into the way Thomas understands his world. Now Thomas, of course, was a good believing Jew, and most of the Jews of Jesus’ day did believe there would be a general resurrection of the just at the end of the world—but this Sunday evening after the Passover was hardly the end of the world, and Jesus risen into this world just didn’t fit the picture at all. Thomas, along with all the other disciples, had seen Lazarus brought back to life by Jesus—but that had been Jesus giving life to someone else; how could Jesus give life to himself when he was dead? No, this idea of resurrection just didn’t fit the limits of what Thomas knew about reality, what Thomas knew about the way the world works, there was no place in Thomas’s mindset to fit the disciples’ report that “We have seen the Lord!”

And that is the part of the Thomas story that I think most of us modern and post-modern people connect with. For a lot of us, too, resurrection does not fit easily into what we know about reality, what we know about the way the world works. Modern biology and modern medical science have taught us a great deal about the way the human body works—and nothing in that knowledge suggests that a human body that died on a cross on a Friday could spontaneously re-animate and walk out of its tomb on Sunday. The author and former bishop of Newark, John Shelby Spong, has come right out and said that modern science has made the idea of a bodily resurrection of Jesus incredible, quite literally un-believable, to anyone who wants to be an intellectual citizen of the modern world. And Spong, of course, isn’t the only person to have said this; other authors, and other people in the pews, have also had these thoughts—sometimes not daring to express them or explore them with the same daring the Thomas shows in the story.

And yet, believing in the resurrection of Jesus is at the very heart of Christian faith. If we do not believe that Jesus brings new life, and that that new life was revealed after Jesus was killed on the cross, then this whole show is for nothing. As Paul put it to the Corinthians, “If Christ has not been raised, your hope is futile and you are still in your sins.... If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” And if we do believe in new life in Jesus, then that new life must have some kind of bodily dimension to it. We humans are embodied beings; life as a disembodied ghost or mere thought wouldn’t seem very lively to us; therefore if Jesus has brought us new life, that new life must be for our bodies as well. So if believing in the resuscitation of a corpse is incredible, but believing in the resurrection of the body is central to Christian faith—then what do we do?

In this kind of situation, it’s tempting to say, “Well, the resurrection is a mystery; it’s beyond our grasp and we’ll never understand it; so we should simply stop questioning and believe.” And there is some truth to that: the resurrection is more than we can understand, it doesn’t yield itself to scientific analysis, in the end we either accept the Good News or we don’t. But Jesus did not tell Thomas to “be quiet and believe”; Jesus accepted Thomas’s questions. And if we believe that God wants us to love with heart and soul and strength and mind, then it is part of our faith to try to understand what we believe as well. So while we can never fully analyze the resurrection, there is room in faith for us to think about how we believe the resurrection happened.

So I would like to share with you my understanding of how the resurrection happened, as just one part of our sharing the journey of faith together. Now, I’m gonna get technical on you, and pull out some heavy-duty metaphysics—and I’ve never tried to preach this to a congregation before, although I’ve been speculating about it to myself for years. But because the bodily resurrection of Jesus is so important to our faith, and because the resurrection is hard to understand in the scientific picture of the world, I am made bold to try this with you today. And because modern science is what has made belief in resurrection so difficult, it is precisely with post-modern science that I will begin.

Science today tells us that reality is made out of relationships and patterns of relationships. Protons and neutrons and electrons come together in patterns of relationships to form atoms; atoms come together in patterns of relationships to form molecules; molecules come together in patterns of relationships to form crystals and compounds and materials and proteins and enzymes; compounds and proteins and enzymes (some of them) come together in patterns of relationships to form living cells and tissues;  cells and tissues come together in patterns of relationships to form living bodies; in some living bodies, brains and nerve cells come together to form minds and personalities and selves; people come together in patterns of relationships to form families and tribes and towns and churches and societies. Reality is made out of patterns of relationships; and with each pattern of relating, something new comes into the world that wasn’t there before. Cells are more than just collections of molecules; bodies are more than just bunches of cells; people are more than just fancy bodies. The way of relating brings something new to reality that is more than would be there if the things had simply remained apart.

And that is true for us, too. Our selves, our souls and bodies, are made of patterns of relationships. What makes me who I am, what makes you who you are—what makes Jesus who he is—is not just that we are made out of a certain kind of stuff or that we have a certain kind of appearance; what makes us who we are is the complex pattern of relationships between DNA molecules and cell structures and brain formations and memory traces and life experiences and a whole host of other things that come together to make us, us. And that pattern that makes us remains through all kinds of changes. Cells die and are replaced with new cells; molecules of oxygen come into the pattern when we breathe in and molecules of carbon dioxide go out of the pattern when we breathe out; our appearance changes as we grow and age, yet the basic pattern of features remains. The pattern of relationships is what makes me who I am, and you who you are, and Jesus who he is—and the pattern remains through many material changes.

And that pattern doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it is part of a world, and it is grounded in God. That’s the part where theology adds something to science. Science tells us that everything is made of relationships, and theology tells us that all relationships begin with God and are sustained in God. The patterns of relationships that make us exist because God holds them in being.

And I believe that what happened to Jesus in his resurrection was that God sustained the pattern of relationships that make Jesus who he is, God held that pattern in being even after its physical expression was dissolved in Jesus’ death on the cross, and God allowed that pattern that is Jesus to be expressed in new ways in the presence and the experience and the lives of his disciples. The particularities of Jesus’ resurrection body may have been different—his forms of matter and energy and time and space may have been different—but the pattern of relationships that is Jesus was just as real and true and living and present as the disciples had ever known it before. Even more real and true and living and present, because the Risen Jesus could be with them in ways that the earthly Jesus could not: he was present with them when the doors were locked, he came to be with them suddenly when they were journeying to Emmaus or fishing in Galilee, he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, he gave them Peace which the world could not give, he breathed on them and shared with thim his own living Holy Spirit. The relationships were transformed, but the pattern remained the same.

And that whole notion of relations that are transformed while the patterns remain is not really that alien to us. We experience it all the time, in smaller and simpler ways. Right now I am speaking to you, which means that sound waves are coming out of my mouth in certain patterns, and those sound waves are striking your eardrums and making patterns of vibrations in your ears and your auditory nerves that you recognize as words. Air and eardrums are very different things; but the patterns of vibrations are recognizably the same. Not only that, but I’m speaking into a sound system, which means that I’m wearning a microphone that picks up the pattern of sound waves from my mouth and translates them into a pattern of electrical impulses; those electrical impulses run down a wire to a transmitter pack on my belt, which translates the impulses into a pattern of radio signals; those radio signals travel through space to a receiver in the sound system case back by the organ, which translates the signals into a pattern of electrical impulses; those impulses run down a wire to the speaker up above the font, which translates the impulses into a pattern of sound waves; and those sound waves travel through the air until they strike your eardrums and produce a pattern of vibrations you recognize as words. The pattern of my words has been through several transformations on its journey, and has been embodied in several different ways, air and electricity and radio—but the pattern has been the continuing reality through the whole process.

Now I think something like that—something vastly more complex and vastly more important, but still, something like that—happened in the resurrection of Jesus.