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He was a twin, but we don't know anything about his brother; he was cautious, yet ready to walk into danger if that's where his master was going; he was the one who was prepared to admit his ignorance if he didn't understand something; he was a cynic, or a realist, depending on how you look at it, but when confronted by the impossible was able to draw the only conclusion that fitted, that God had done a miracle beyond all miracles. Finally he was one of the first to leave his homeland and travel to the far ends of the earth to tell people about that miracle of the resurrection, or so the traditions tell us. |
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Yes, of course I'm talking about Thomas, the twin, 'doubting Thomas'. |
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I have to say that we don't know a huge amount about Thomas. Most of the information we have is found in John's gospel, and nothing's mentioned of him after the resurrection appearances of Jesus. But, still, there are legends about him taking the gospel to Asia. The church in Southern India calls itself the Mar Thoma Church because of the tradition that Thomas went to Kerala to preach the gospel in the first century. It's not actually clear how much truth there is to that story, but it seems likely that he at least got as far as Persia or Afghanistan and if not to India then his converts would most likely have taken the gospel there. |
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But today I want us to think, first of all, how Thomas came to the point of taking the gospel to foreign lands and then I want us to think about what the implications of this gospel are for us. What is it about the gospel that Thomas was building on in his missionary endeavour? |
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Our knowledge of Thomas begins in John 11. Jesus has just received a message from Mary & Martha that Lazarus is sick. So what does he do? He tells his disciples, "don't worry about it. This illness has come on him to glorify God." And then he waits around for two more days. After the two days have passed he tells his disciples to pack up, it's time to go back to Judea. |
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Now it's not that long since the crowd in Judea tried to stone him and the Jewish leaders have been plotting his death for some time so the disciples have a bit of a problem with this idea. They don't want Jesus walking into a death trap - nor do they want to walk into one themselves. But Jesus is going because he needs to raise Lazarus from the dead. And that's Thomas' opportunity to star. He stands up and says, in truly cynical fashion: "Let us also go, that we may die with him." |
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He's not happy with the decision, but if Jesus is going, he's not going to let him go alone. And of course we know what happens: Jesus gets there four days after Lazarus has died and performs the final and greatest of what John refers to as signs. He raises Lazarus from the dead. |
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Well, the next time we see Thomas in action is during the last supper when Jesus tells his disciples that he's only going to be with them for a little longer. He assures them that although he's going to leave them, he will return to take them to be with the Father in heaven. And then he says: "And you know the way to the place where I am going." Well they're totally mystified. What is he talking about? But again, it's Thomas who speaks up. He says: "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" He wants answers. He's a simple plain speaking type who just wants to know the details. And so Jesus says one of the most well-known statements of the gospel: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." |
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Finally, when Jesus appears to his disciples on the evening of the resurrection, Thomas is absent. And again we see his cynical nature come to the fore. Or is it simply that he's a realist. He's seen what happened to Jesus on the cross. He's seen his dead body hanging there and he knows that no-one survives that sort of thing. Not unless there's someone like Jesus around to raise them from the dead and when it's Jesus who's died what hope is there? So he says 'show me some proof. Let me "see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side." Only then will I believe.' |
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Thomas would have fitted well into our modern world wouldn't he? Richard Dawkins might have got on well with him - for a while at least. People like Dawkins want to hear the scientific evidence. They dismiss the stories of miracles because that sort of thing doesn't happen in our world. Or they explain them away with psychological explanations. Even those new age people who are open to spiritual forces in the world dismiss the gospel stories as being too remote from their personal spiritual experience, or perhaps because they're too down to earth. |
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But Thomas was about to get a reality check. The laws of the physical world as he understood them were an insufficient description of the world as God has made it. What seemed impossible had actually happened. God had intervened in the natural order of the world. The cycle of life and death that arose from human sin had been broken by one who was without sin, on whom death had no hold. And so Jesus appears for a second time in the room where the disciples are hiding - and this time Thomas is there. |
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Well, Jesus doesn't beat around the bush does he? He comes straight to the point and there's a hint of rebuke in his words: "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe." |
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How many times did Jesus say that sort of thing to his disciples? "Have I been with you all this time, ... and you still do not know me?" (Jn 14:9) "You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you?" (Mt 17:17) "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things" (Mt 16:23). The disciples were just like us, weren't they? Slow learners; occasionally confused; well meaning but sometimes a bit off the track; needing constant reassurance. |
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Thomas gets some bad press as the one who doubted, but he was no worse than anyone else. The first thing Jesus did when he first appeared to the disciples was to show them his hands and his side. God knows we all need reassurance from time to time and he's very gracious in the way he gives it to us. It might be in the form of someone saying something that echoes what we've just been thinking. It might be an answered prayer. Or it might be like what happened to someone I was talking to the other day who had a total stranger come up to them and say something quite significant, completely out of the blue. |
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Well Thomas may have been a doubter, or maybe he was just a realist, but it didn't take him long to revise his view of reality. He doesn't need to put his finger into the holes in Jesus hands or into the hole in his side. He responds instantly with "My Lord and my God!" Thomas is totally convinced. Only God could come back from the dead as Jesus had. And if he was God then he deserved to be obeyed as Lord. |
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And that's all we know for certain about Thomas other than what we know about the disciples in general. |
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He would have been present on Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was given and he would have gone out like the rest of the apostles to preach the gospel. And there does appear to be good evidence that he headed east towards Asia. |
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But let's think for a moment about the heritage on which Thomas was building as he went out to preach the gospel. |
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I want to look briefly at what Jesus said to the disciples at his first appearance to them, then we'll think about the words we read in Ephesians about what Jesus achieved through his death and resurrection. |
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Jesus says two things to the disciples at his first appearance. First he says: "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." Jesus is passing on the baton. His work has finished and now he passes on the work of the gospel to these 11 men. But then he adds something else. He says: "Receive the Holy Spirit. 23If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." Jesus doesn't just send them out with the impossible mission of converting the world by themselves. He empowers them by giving them his Holy Spirit to guide and strengthen them, to go before them and change the hearts of those they'll speak to. And he sends them out with the task of bringing forgiveness of sins to those they come across. Their task is to tell people about Jesus' saving work on the cross. To the extent to which they succeed people's sins will be forgiven. If they fail, their sins will remain with them. |
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This is important for us as much as it was for them, because we follow in the line of the apostles. The apostles in turn passed the baton on to their converts who passed it on to theirs and so forth down through history until today, when we hold the baton of the gospel. Jesus' charge to his disciples has become a charge to us. Go into all the world and preach the gospel. Tell people about the forgiveness of sins. Do your best to make people believe the gospel so their sins can be forgiven. Remember that God's Holy Spirit dwells within you. The fact that this charge is passed on to us is confirmed by Jesus' final words to Thomas: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." That blessing continues to flow out through the preaching of the gospel as people come to belief through the work of the Holy Spirit. That blessing continues to bring people from all the ends of the earth to unity in Jesus Christ. |
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Which brings us to Ephesians 2. Here Paul's writing about the miracle of the gospel that's brought Gentile and Jew together into a unified body with Christ as its head. Two groups who were totally opposed, hostile to one another, are now at peace, joined together in Christ. |
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And again, the gospel continues to bring people of different cultures, different languages, different world views together. That's one of the great things about this congregation here. We may have a whole range of backgrounds, different languages, different expectations, different ways of looking at the world, but we have something that's far stronger than all of that. All of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. We're now "citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, 20built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone." We're being built into a "holy temple in the Lord; 22[being] built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God." |
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You know the building committee is putting a lot of effort at the moment into building a new parish centre, making sure we have the right facilities, thinking about the needs of the parish for the next 25 years or so, working out whether we can afford to build the facilities that will be needed and so on. But there's a far more important building project that we should all be working on. That's the project to build a living temple for the Lord, a place where God can dwell in our midst. The older Cantonese Fellowship group calls themselves the Living Stone Fellowship. Now I assume that's a reference to 1 Pet 2:5: "Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ." That's what we should all be doing: allowing ourselves to be built into a spiritual house. |
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What will that look like? How can we do it? Well if you're to be built into a spiritual house you probably need to be connected with the other bricks in the building. That means we need to be meeting with others and probably more than just on Sundays. This is why we have small groups operating during the week, so people can connect with one another. We might need to be offering hospitality to one another, inviting people over for a meal, sharing our lives with them. We might need to spend time praying with one another. We might need to be reading our Bibles together so our minds are being renewed at the same rate so the transformation that comes through the word of God working within us affects us all at the same time, so the building grows straight and strong. And we might need to be crossing the congregational divides somehow. |
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We have a great opportunity here at St Thomas' to demonstrate the power of the gospel to bring diverse cultures together into unity. We have a great opportunity to bring God's great offer of forgiveness to a perishing world. We can do great things together if we all take the attitude of Thomas and acknowledge Jesus Christ as our Lord and our God. We can do great things together if we obey Jesus' command to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, which these days probably means across the road, to those people who have no concept of a living God who sent his son to die and rise again so we could be forgiven. |
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Let's pray that we might be a church that brings honour to the name of Christ and that follows in the footsteps of Thomas and the other apostles in preaching that name to all we come across. |
