When we need to be a Thomas and not an Earnest
Gospel Reading John 20:19-31
Origin of the word 'earnest': “resulting from or showing sincere and intense conviction”
Algernon says: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
Gwendolyn: My ideal has always to love someone of the Earnest. There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence.
I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude.
Algernon: The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It’s simply washing one’s clean linen in public. --- The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
Australia! I’d sooner die!
Lady Bracknell: I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
I think it is high time that Mr Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids.
1. Of course today there’s no rhyme or reason to be frivolous, even in the face of good news such as we enjoy today – Christ is risen – He is risen indeed.
2. But I do feel it’s important for us to reflect on why sincere and intense convictions in themselves are not enough. We need to test the assumptions upon which they are based. For if the assumptions are wrong then no end of sincerity and intense conviction will change REALITY.
3. Arising from our Thomas story are three facts about him:
A. His honesty
B. His integrity
C. His authenticity
4. Each of these traits may seem to merge into one another, but they are quite distinct from one another.
5. First his honesty – he won’t say he believes in something unless he sees it with his own eyes, touches it with his own hands and hears it with his own ears. Just because the disciples say they have seen the Lord doesn’t mean they have because how does Thomas know it’s not their wishful thinking borne out of feverish fear behind closed doors? He will not prop himself up on make-believe.
6. ‘Unless I 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, I will not believe.’ Lest we think this is said from a position of weakness, a fact which often alludes us is that Thomas wasn’t there in fear with the disciples. He was walking free not confined by fear.
7. The second thing about him is his integrity. A person who has it together: a person who knows himself, is in touch with reality, knows his friends – knows their weaknesses, and his own – knows his own and their cowardice, for example and probably if we knew the full story would have named it to himself and to them. Admits to it faces it. Comes to the room to face his demons = the possibility that all this is made-up to make life bearable, liveable. Thomas won’t have any of that. Neither will I, neither should you! You might say integrity is a maturing/developing outgrowth of honesty.
8. The third thing about Thomas is his authenticity = not false or copied; genuine; real. And this of all the traits is probably the most important for reasons not immediately apparent. In classical Greek it meant principal/original, i.e. foundational/fundamental. How fitting then that it should be Thomas, the one who would follow the way of Nietzsche and his theology of suspicion, the one who refuses to wear the mask of pretence, unmasks it in himself and in others - who declares what everyone is thinking but too afraid to say: ‘My Lord and my God!’
9. Jesus’ ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’ should not be taken as a reproach, but rather an encouragement to go beyond pure reason. That for my reading is the more reasonable approach to take to dear Thomas. ‘Doubting Thomas’ is such a cruel and unnecessary put-down.
10. The most difficult part of our reading this morning is the art of forgiveness. I wonder if the disciples felt the sting of their own guilt as they were sitting there reflecting on their cowardice and their failure:
Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘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.’
11. I finish with a parable of my own and some reflections from Thomas Merton.
Nikolai Blaskow
The yellow sun embossed on a deep blue stares at the boy. He never did know what it meant. In this alien country the light, pulsating colour, hurts his eyes. Like The Red Shoes. And that other film The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T which the nuns at St John’s Boarding School trotted out on a Friday Night Flicks and the Bell and Howell. Nightmares they were with their scary magician and the monstrous Piano for boys who hate practising. Such a lark, hey, when the flick got dull, to shove a sharpened pastie into the kid’s neck in front of you, the projector grounding to a halt, waiting for Sister’s screech, Who was that? shrugging it off with – I don’t know… it wasn’t me Sista!
It worked most times maybe one time too many when Sista’s cane came down on ya! Like when something went wrong and no one owned up in the Refectory, and EVERYONE got it. He could still remember the exact moment as they filed out, when Sister de Pazzi’s crucifix flashed gold in the sun going up… as the yellow cane came down.
Memories like these were ok except those which reminded you of Dad on his bad days and his step-uncles. They were always hard to shake off – like a shadow cast by a very high wall. But the Sisters knew how: What happens in the home stays in the home. What happens in the school stays in the school, they said. The boy said it aloud with a hundred others so it would stick.
Then there was that remembered morning when music delighted him with his adopted aunts egging him on… My! how he could dance, one pirouette after another to Bill Hayley and the Comets “rockin’ round the clock tonight” before his admiring public. Maybe one more little turn, he thought – and then that slip of the tongue as he caught the corner of the carpet and headed like a meteor streaking across the night sky for the round glass coffee table in a shower of splinters of light.
Silence. He’s alright! The aunties said. But Dad coming home from work didn’t think so. Took that boy by the scruff of the neck and behind locked door wielded the belt… and when that didn’t work, took to the hand, a bit of blood never hurt anyone, aunties’ cries and banging on the door to no avail.
The forgiveness Dad asked for next day in the cool summer afternoon stuck in his throat. But he did know it was his own fault – Dad must have had some reason for being so mad. But you grow up. You learn. His Dad had remarried (his mother died when he was born) a Latvian girl whose family thought she was marrying beneath her academic standing. She was a newly graduated dentist, and his Dad and she both headed for England like all dentists do seeking their fortune. Dad wanted to be a Journo or a screenwriter, leaving the boy with a step-family seething with resentment.
So there he was the boy (if he was Jewish, he’d be preparing for bar-mitzvah) on Christmas Eve, lights flashing on the tree close to midnight when the step-uncles come crashing in – fighting. One took the canary cage and threw it against the wall. The other brought him to ground. Step-grandmother stepped in with a hypodermic needle (she was a doctor but couldn’t practise in Australia). But the boy observed it took the cop next door to subdue the man. Turns out it was about the inheritance. Whatever.
The boy determined then and there he’d have to find out the hard way what life was all about. Couldn’t trust the adults – they had no idea!
When the boy grew up and became a man, a much older man, he discovered he had cousins on his mother’s side in an email with photos of them with his mother. They’d been looking for him for 59 years. And finally tracked him down. He discovered Dad had been keeping the truth from him. They told how and why his mother really died. He barely managed to get his head around it. The boy wouldn’t have coped.
Dad called them liars, spiteful. Only he knew what had happened because he was there. Dad and the boy didn’t talk for months – seemed like a year.
The moment of truth came when Dad came to vote for the Bulgarian elections. The boy now a man didn’t recognise him – he had shrunk so much he thought there was a boy under that cap of his.
Is it true? he asked before re-boarding the plane. That question wasn’t about his mother’s death. It was about her father and her brother. Yes was the answer.
The father shrunk to boyhood covered his head with his hands in dismay at a truth which could not be named. No more than the other unmentionable truth.
The boy in the son had met the boy in the father. And in that moment a truce of sorts was brokered.
I glance at the mirror in passing – and see myself…
I stare at the mirror, remember the past;
the mirror stares at me. I stare at the mirror.
I see my father;
and in the reflection, I see mother crying
and learn all over again…
what it means to forgive and to try to forget.
“Except you become as a little child, you cannot see.”
Thomas Merton's poem says it all – we are all one we just don’t know it.
When in the soul of the serene disciple
With no more Fathers to imitate
Poverty is a success,
It is a small thing to say the roof is gone:
He has not even a house.
Stars, as well as friends,
Are angry with the noble ruin.
Saints depart in several directions.
Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
Here you will find
Neither a proverb nor a memorandum.
There are no ways,
No methods to admire
Where poverty is no achievement.
His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction.
What choice remains?
Well, to be ordinary is not a choice:
It is the usual freedom
Of men without vision.
Rev Dr Nikolai Blaskow 07 April 2024