The Rev. Canon Marianne W. Borg
Trinity Episcopal Church, Bend Oregon
April 7, 2024
John 20, 19-31
I was “converted” reading this story. I was 26 years old. I want to share a little about what this text meant to me then. And what it means to me now.
I want to preface by saying a little about stories. The story about Thomas is just that. A story. Stories are something we make them up because there is no better way to describe what it is we are trying to get at. They are imaginative. But that doesn’t mean they are not true. Like today’s Gospel, they are not to be read as journalistic stories. It’s not like you could capture Jesus walking through those locked doors on your iPhone. You couldn’t. But the image is one that is intended to stick with you.
And what an image it is. Suggesting perhaps that even when we lock ourselves under our tightly fit ceilings of seasoned tongue and groove something new, unexpected, can break through and come to us. Even bodily. Or let’s recall the story of Jesus walking on water. It didn’t happen. But the image is unforgettable. Suggesting perhaps that the undertow of life didn’t get him. That he kept his equanimity amidst the turbulence of existence that tosses us to and fro and can even take us out. And we can be like Jesus. Most the Biblical stories are not records of what happened per se but suggest in their telling what might have happened. And even what can happen to you. These stories create a space. Hold space open. For you to participate in. Stories can make us see and hear what eye has not seen nor ear heard. And make the impossible seem possible.
Today’s Gospel story, like all good Gospel stories, invites us in. To a scene, a happening, that catches our attention, makes us curious. They can amaze and we can be lost in wonder. Gospel stories have a way of asking how is this true? And stretch our sense of what is true. And importantly, puts us in touch with something beyond ourselves. Gospel stories have the power to transform. I suggest this is what makes them sacred.
I started reading the Gospels at the behest of a friend. I didn’t understand Scripture. It was unintelligible to me. I didn’t know what kind of book it was. I didn’t know what I was reading. I didn’t understand the story. The Bible was new to me. And I hadn’t been brought up in the church.
But strangely enough I did have a strong sense of the presence of Jesus. From the time I can remember. From childhood. I experienced Jesus as my guardian angel. You couldn’t have argued with me about that. That said I knew nothing about his dying for my sins or being the Son of God, or being my ticket to heaven. And frankly I have never believed any of that. But Jesus as my guardian angel is another story.
So I began reading the Gospels. I pressed on. God knows why. And arrived at the story we heard today. And it got to me. This story got to me.
I felt deeply addressed. It’s like it read me.
Jesus appeared to his friends. After his death. But Thomas was not with them. He couldn’t take their word that they had seen him. I understood that. Like Thomas I was the kind of person who wasn’t going to take on someone else’s truth, especially when it came to matters of “ultimate concern,” or matters of the heart, like matters about God and Jesus. I needed a first hand authentic encounter. I had to know for myself. It had to be “real.” So I identified with Thomas in this story.
And somehow rather than just reading the story I started to experience it. I was in it. It was happening to me in a strange whirl and morph of time and space and place. It was almost like I had a change in consciousness.
And when Jesus said to Thomas “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” I was shaken. He was saying it to me.
I had never been addressed that way before.
My family avoided emotional intimacy. They did not acknowledge wounds or sadness or being hurt or injured or the searing cost of grief, or admitting you weren’t sure who you were. It wasn’t mature to show such “weakness.” We were better than that. There was nothing “wrong” with us. Nothing to tell here. We are all fine. But we weren’t.
For Jesus to say to me put your finger here and see my hands… hands are so intimate… and reach out your hand and put it in my side was something I had never imagined could be said. Or heard. Or seen. This was disorienting for me. I felt this story wrap around me in three dimensions, or four. Maybe eleven. Something intimate and powerful had just opened up. Something personal and relational of an order I knew not of. This was the same Jesus of my childhood speaking to me. Only entirely different. I can’t capture what happened. But paradoxically it was as though Jesus entered my wounds, which were unspoken, and took my hand and touched me. I was sitting in my overstuffed green chair with arms so wide they could hold my cup of tea and I cried and cried.
And then Thomas in the story says “My Lord and My God!” I didn’t know what those words meant. I still puzzle about them. But something had shifted in me. About Jesus and God. And my sense of self. And those words My Lord and My God were mine. And I cried some more.
The end of the story says “These (signs) are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” Well, I had no idea what any of that meant either. I have since spent my entire lifetime grappling with those words: Jesus, Jesus as Messiah, Jesus as Son of God, having life in his name.
If this was the kind of experience that constituted a conversion experience I was not a happy born again Christian. After all, I was hanging out with Buddhists and Sufis at the time. Those traditions are still dear to my heart. But I had not been addressed as deeply or personally by their stories as I was by this one. I struggled and puzzled and pondered what had happened. What had happened to me. It changed my life.
A year later I joined a church. Started out as Presbyterian. That’s another story.
For a little shy of 50 years now the Thomas story has continued to get my attention. Its effects and possible meanings, its images, undergo revision and enlargement. And deepen. The Thomas story continues to read me as I read it. The story changes. So have I.
Jesus’ wounds haunt me. When I learned about Jesus’ execution and why he was killed I thought more about what it might mean to enter them. To enter his wounds. For us to enter them. And for all our proclamations about Jesus’ divinity I began to wonder if it isn’t Jesus’ humanity that has most to say to us. If our hope isn’t in his humanity. And our own. And what about the wounds? The resurrection stories show Jesus’ wounds, an inevitable part of the human condition. Wounds and suffering. We do not live without them. And the “resurrected one” has wounds. There’s a reason the story is told this way. The Thomas story causes me to think again and again about the tactile, tangible, vulnerable body. And how important is the specificity of human and historical suffering. And what is our call to restore our debt to the dead. And what does this have to do with our future? And a future that will be ours.
The Thomas story didn’t make me a Christian. It did pierce me though. And in such a way that I began a different searching, a different relationship with Jesus and with Christianity. Which claimed me.
Shortly thereafter another story “took hold” of me. The story of Mary in the Garden. It actually precedes the Thomas story. It too takes place after the events of Jesus’ death. Mary is in the garden near the tomb where Jesus was laid and she sees someone she assumes is the gardener. But when he calls her name, Mary, she recognizes it is Jesus. In two syllables her life was changed. It might as well have been a three syllable name in my reading. My own name.
Mary goes to embrace him. And he says to her “Do not cling to me.”
This story has also had a powerful effect on me. The one I want to cling to most, my Jesus, says do not cling to me. Do not cling to me. Wiser words have never been said. I didn’t recognize them as such at the time.
These two stories, sacred stories, like parables, are not about historical facts but imaginative realities. They don’t prove themselves. They point beyond themselves. They don’t declare. They invite. They are not so much stories about what happened as what happens in their telling. They are about truths. But not the kind you can capture on an iPhone or in a journalistic report.
“Truth is far too important to be literalistic with.” “Truth is far too important to be literalistic with.” Isn’t that a great sentence? It’s from priest and author Mark Oakley, chancellor at St. Paul’s Cathedral London. “Truth is far too important to be literalistic with. We know this when we fall in love and try to express how we feel. Literalism won’t do.” Indeed, literalism won’t do. There are some things that can’t be said exactly yet our heart stammers to express. Oakley goes on to say: “The curse of literalism is that it often misses meaning and turns resonant truth into stone.” Turns resonate truth into stone.
It didn’t occur to me to literalize the story of Thomas and Mary. To fix them to a date and time and place. These stories were too important for that.
Reach out to me. Do not cling to me. Reach out. And do not cling. Descriptive of my journey. Reaching out and learning how to be near, so near and also knowing I am far, and yet not far. And keep open space for Jesus and myself, and Christianity for that matter, to grow and change, transform and be transformed. Perpetual transformation. That I may have life. That Jesus and the tradition may have life.
Scripture stories, stories that become sacred, are an event. An event we didn’t see coming. We are touched by something, moved, transformed by more than words can convey. If we literalize these stories we cage the very Spirit in them that seeks to take us forth on wing. If we dissect these stories with prosaic fact-finding or rationalistic, logical explanations they will inevitably become carrion and eventually ossify like dry brittle bones in a desert.
Let the story tell the story. It might tell you who you are. Or make you wonder.
Sacred story opens a space. And we all recognize the sacred. We are made to. We don’t cognate the sacred. We recognize it. The sacred makes real an open space. Where something new can be born and rise up and change a life and change the world. This I suggest is what is meant by resurrection.
