15th April 20072nd Sunday of Easter

Fr David Cherry

Acts 5 : 27 – 32 ; Revelation 1 : 4 – 8 ;  John 20 : 19 – 31

“Peace be unto you; as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.”

Thomas must see and feel for himself what has been communicated by others to him.

A man comes round from a heart attack in a Catholic hospital. 
A nun is looking down on him. 
Where am I?
St Joseph’s says the nun.  Now do you have medical insurance?
No medical insurance
Do you have any money in the bank.
No money in the bank
Do you have any relatives?
A spinster sister.  She’s a nun.
Nuns aren’t spinsters they’re married to God!
Send the bill to my brother-in-law!

When you pray, what kind of God is it who comes to you?  
How do you imagine your God?  
And how does this God make you feel?

The way we see God or imagine what God is like is very much tied up with the way we see ourselves and what has been communicated to us over the years, and particularly in our early years.

Fowler wrote about the seven stages of spiritual development which coincide with general age groups. He noted a movement from fixed certainties towards a more relational understanding as we mature through life.  There is this movement from believing ‘THAT’ or ‘ABOUT’God to believing IN a Person.

The journey of conversion is a process through life, seeing in a new light and leaving what one thought was good enough or important behind.  This process of coming to see in a new light is peculiarly unique to each of us.  

Doubt has got a bad name and we can be too hard on ‘doubting Thomas’.  How do we imagine what is going on in today’s gospel?  The new revelation of Easter is communicated to Thomas by the other disciples.   Thomas is disbelieving.  He must see and feel for himself what has been communicated by others to him.  He doubts because he doesn’t yet know it for himself.

Notice : something is communicated to him which he can’t quite get – and then something is experienced by him personally, he undergoes something:  a new revelation or discovery.  He is undergoing a ‘change of mind’ – metanoia in Greek.  In the words of St Paul, he is undergoing a transformation by the renewing of his mind (Romans 12 : 2)

Christine Rees writes of this process : If only we could accept down to our marrow that God loves us, then people like me would not feel they had to try so hard to win God’s love.  (The Divine Embrace)

Depending on the tone with which you read the gospel, you can see the Lord either coming into the upper room to reprimand Thomas for doubting, saying sternly, “be not faithless, but believing!” Or you can see the Lord of love appearing.  Peace be unto you.  An extraordinary greeting from someone who was abandoned by his friends, denied by some and deserted by all, left to die in shame.  Peace be unto you.  

St Ignatius says: “consider the office of consoler that Christ our Lord exercises.”  (Spiritual Exx.  #224) -  he comes to console his beloved disciples in their fear and confusion.

You and I, in our personal, spiritual journeys are also involved in this sort of process.  We get stuck at times. God communicates to us through others – hopefully through the community of the Church, its liturgy, preaching and the care of others.  We can stubbornly stick to our guns, defend where we’ve got to, say it is enough OR we can allow new insights to change our minds and hearts.  

Thomas is being converted – he is growing, developing.  This is what it looks like and it is natural.  Doubt, a certain kind of disbelieving can be that turning point where what one thought was true is overtaken by a new revelation, a fresh discovery of God.

The Dean of St Alban’s, Jeffrey John, is coming in for some stick since his Lenten Talk in which he spoke about such personal development and the theory of Penal Substitution which you can read about for yourself.  Before hearing the talk or reading a transcript, three evangelical bishops denounced him and are looking pretty silly now.  He raises important issues which are all to do with what sort of a God we imagine God to be.  

The whole Bible is a record for us of how God’s people are receiving new insights and being brought into a fresh and living relationship with the true God over time - centuries.  It begins with their perception of a god who wants to be appeased by human sacrifice to a God who becomes that human sacrifice. Or in the words of Jeffrey John: the price for sin isn’t paid to God, but by God.  

This is what seems to have upset a lot of people!

And doubt takes many forms.  There are many reasons for being stubborn, sticking to your guns, defending your image of God.  Hurt from the past; shame; fearing that you might be wrong… and then what?  What is wrong with being wrong…?. (How I hate being wrong!)  I wonder if this isn’t why some people resist the real God of love.  

Sister Wendy Beckett, the hermit of the Carmelite community at Quidenham, Norfolk, talks about a doubt which is wilful, a dishonest kind of doubting because it isn’t really seeking to believe in Jesus at all.  The will is not engaged because the desire just isn’t there.  The desire is caught up elsewhere and the will is to retaliate.  

I reckon that people like Richard Dawkins who hammer on against Christianity are that sort – they beat on about a cruel school-boy God, knowing full well that most Christians couldn’t love such a God either. But I wonder whether at the bottom of all this argument there isn’t a deep hurt, a childhood anger and need to rebel.

What have we received and taken into ourselves; what has formed or shaped our sense of who God is and what he is like.  Who is this God you and I are coming to believe IN?  In the Creed we will sing : “ I believe IN…”, in other words “this is who God is for me.”  This is very important stuff because we are invited by the Risen Lord to communicate that to others: “… as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you”

What has been communicated and what is it we will communicate to others?

Rowan Williams writes: “There is no hope of understanding the Resurrection outside the process of renewing humanity in forgiveness.  We are all agreed that the empty tomb proves nothing.  We need to add that no amount of apparitions, however well authenticated, would mean anything either, apart from the testimony of forgiven lives communicating forgiveness.”

What is being communicated is forgiveness for sins.  Peter is very clear about this in the first reading.  In effect he is saying to the authorities: “you killed him and he has forgiven you; now believe in him.”  St John in the second lesson writes of ‘everyone who pierced him, all the tribes of the earth wailing on account of him’ – they wail in recognition at what they have done to God and in gratitude for his love.

Forgiveness – that letting free of what we hold onto by recognising where we are culpable…. All because in our midst stands Jesus, ‘my Lord and my God, with no word of recrimination or condemnation: only love, here to commune with us and share his very life with us in the Sacrament of Holy Communion:

“Peace be unto you; as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.”