Thomas Remembers

Thomas Remembers

Thomas. Most often recalled as “Doubting Thomas.” [John 20:19-31] Thomas bears much disrespect throughout the history of the church, a church that we must finally admit often fails in its most foundational charge: to remember. What is to be remembered is the violence done to a young man from Galilee. What is forgotten is that his death was not unique. The torture Jesus endures was visited upon many. It had been visited upon many before Jesus and continues to this day. Think Black Lives Matter, think Me Too, think of all the unfettered gun violence. Thomas does not doubt. Thomas remembers. He asks to see the wounds. He calls all who would join him in saying of Jesus, “My Lord and my God,” to remember.

Yet, often such violence is masked by words such as “virtuous suffering,” and “self-sacrificing love.” Or, notions that to be faithful followers of Christ we must “join him in his suffering.” This kind of thinking is what the author of the First Epistle of John calls it “atonement” - at-one-ment - quite possibly the most damaging ideas of all Christian theology: “...and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world..” [1 John 2:2].

The idea is simple, and born of repeated attempts to make sense of his torture and death on a Roman cross: Jesus died to save us from our sins. Seems simple enough. It is not. The idea that the torture and death of Jesus on the cross saves us in effect sanctions violence at the very heart of Christianity. Even the most cursory reading of Paul’s letters and the four Gospels contradicts any such conclusion. That is, Jesus is consistently portrayed as one who sets out to bring others, all others, especially those whose lives, like his, bear the marks of similar violation and violence,  closer to the presence of God through acts of healing, exorcism, and building up communities of healing, forgiveness and love. He most often calls us to “follow him” in doing all of this. Thomas remembers. 

We forget. We forget that earlier in John’s gospel it is Thomas, and Thomas alone among all the disciples, who, when Jesus decides to head toward Jerusalem and to visit the home of his friend Lazarus, and all the others warn that it is too dangerous, there are those who wish to “kill you,” it is Thomas alone who says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Thomas does not doubt, he remembers.

 We forget. We forget, or have never been told, that when the fourth evangelist John says, “the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews,” that the word is Judeans. And those disciples hiding from the violence that had just been meted out upon their Lord were themselves Judeans. Most scholars today acknowledge that Judaism as we know it had not been developed in the time of Jesus. Yet, in the church’s forgetfulness, and lack of any careful reading of the texts, much damage has been done in both preaching and sanctioning anti-Semitism right up to The Final Solution. And the church forgets the context of the Risen Jesus as he commissions his disciples saying, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

For in the world of Jesus, Thomas, the disciples and the Jewish people, forgiveness is not as simple as the church continues to misrepresent it. Nor is Jesus inventing some new practice. In the world of Jesus and his disciples Israelites forgive others all the time. Especially on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a day to repair the damage we do to one another, a day to confess sin and forgive sin. If I have sinned against you, damaged our relationship, I can apologize and ask for forgiveness, which you may grant. But if the confession seems insincere, or the damage is still so great and so painful, you are not obligated to forgive. Tradition then says that I may come back a second and even third time to ask for forgiveness. And again, you may forgive, or you may “retain” the sin - and after three times, then I can approach God to ask for forgiveness. That is, it is a process. Some sins cannot be forgiven. There is no cheap grace.

Sadly, the church has not always remembered this. And so women who have been victims of domestic violence have been counseled to forgive and thus “share in the sufferings of Christ.” Victims of sexual harassment have been told to “get over it and move on.” Even in this past few weeks, some American Evangelical pastors have publicly defended serial sexual abusers by saying, “The sinner understands that he or she is forgiven in the eyes of God. We understand Sin and Forgiveness.” Communities that have been ravaged by gun violence, including those charged with keeping the peace repeatedly shooting unarmed Black men, are told, “our thoughts and prayers are with you.” All of which overlooks the context in which Jesus was tortured and violently killed. All of which conveniently overlooks the context of forgiving or retaining sins in which Jesus and his followers lived and died. Thomas remembers this.

Elie Wiesel, when asked about forgiving the perpetrators of the Holocaust replied that he did not have the authority to forgive on behalf of the millions who were tortured and killed. “Who am I to forgive on behalf of so many people?” As the author of Ecclesiastes might sum it up, there is a time for forgiving sins, and there is a time for retaining sins. Which is what Jesus appears to confirm.

Then he breathes on them as God had puffed the first breath into a handful of dust in Genesis 2 to create the first person. Jesus breathes new life into them in their moment of fearfulness and forgetting. “Peace - Shalom- be with you. My shalom be with you.” His shalom means justice and peace for all people. Shalom means healing all that is broken in this world. He puffs on them as one might puff on dying embers to fan them into flames - flames of justice, love, healing, and most of all, the presence of God. Atonement, at-one-ment, does not, at the end of the day, require us to share in his sufferings and violent death, but rather that he, Jesus, he, the Word, he God, is present with us in our suffering and violent deaths. That we are with him in his mission of healing a broken world. The difference in this understanding of at-one-ment is the difference between life and death. Often the church has forgotten this. Thomas asks to see the wounds. He remembers all of this.

Daily we are reminded of just how damaged the world still is. The steady stream of reminders is often overwhelming. Jesus breathes on us. He fans our dying embers into flames once again. “Let us say, that life shows the face of God, only in fleeting glimpses, by the light of night fires, in dancing shadows, in departing ghosts, and in recollections of steady love. Let us say that this is enough, enough for us to run with perseverance the race that is set before us, enough for us to stand against violence, enough for us to hold each other in benediction and love.” [Rita Brock&Rebecca Parker, Proverbs of Ashes: Beacon Press, Boston -  p252]

Thomas does not doubt. Thomas knows and remembers all of this. The question is, do we?