Those of a certain age will remember going to Saturday matinees as children. I was such a crazed movie-goer that I would show up for the kiddie double feature and then stay for the adult double feature. I always emerged from 6 to 8 hours in the dark shielding my eyes from the blinding glare of early evening.
My favorite kiddie matinee movies were those historical epic pictures made in Italy with the American actor speaking English and everyone else sloppily dubbed from Italian. These movies regularly made a hash of history, mixing epics, scriptures, heroes, and eras with abandon. They had titles like “Goliath versus Hercules”. You get the idea.
But as bad as these movies were, they genuinely sparked my interest in stories both classical and biblical.
You may remember one of the great scenes in classical literature: Homer’s depiction of the moment toward the end of The Odyssey where the returning Odysseus is recognized by the aged woman Eurycleia who had nursed him as a child. Odysseus has been gone for many years, first at the Trojan War and then on his travels homeward, and he has returned to Ithaca in disguise. As a boy, Odysseus had been wounded in a hunting accident. And when he returns home Eurycleia washes his feet as a gesture of hospitality, much as we did together on Maundy Thursday. She recognizes Odysseus by his scar. In Emily Wilson’s translation:
The old slave woman,
holding his leg and rubbing with flat palms,
came to that place, and recognized the scar.
She touched his beard and said . . .
“You are Odysseus! My darling child!
My master! I did not know it was you
until I touched you all around your leg.”
—The Odyssey, Book 19 [Emily Wilson]
Just as Odysseus’s recognition hinges on his identity being verified by a wound, so in today’s Gospel does the credibility of Jesus’s wounds validate his identity, at least to the apostle Thomas.
One church I served had (and perhaps still has) a weekly men’s group called the “Doubting Thomases”. The Episcopal Church has always been a congenial home for educated skeptics—people who can’t quite buy the virgin birth, the empty tomb, or walking on water. And for many the doubts expressed by Thomas— "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."—these doubts have turned him into the poster child for people who have questions.
Now I’ve never been a so-called “doubting Thomas”, but the men in this group were very good friends of mine and some of the most faithful members of the church, so I do not intend here to make light of them. But I do want to suggest that, for all their emphasis on thinking before believing, they actually misunderstood what Thomas is doing here.
The Jews of first century Palestine who both opposed and followed Jesus were all Pharisees, and the Pharisees (unlike the Saducees) believed in the resurrection. So when Thomas says "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” he is not expressing doubt in the possibility of bodily resurrection. He wants to make sure that the risen person they saw was actually Jesus of Nazareth.
For all the spiritualized nature of John’s crucifixion account—it is much less brutal than the other three gospels—it is only John’s gospel that mentions the nailing of Jesus to the cross and the piercing of his side with the spear. Thomas is asking to see the signs of the event they all have witnessed together. But the credibility of the whole thing rests, for Thomas, on Jesus’s wounds, on the tangible marks of his suffering.
Why this emphasis on physical wounds and scars? I think there are a couple of answers.
First, Thomas clearly remembers who Jesus was in life and what he taught and stood for. The power systems in Jesus’s world killed him because Jesus knew their power was false. Thomas’s refusal to believe until he sees the wounds expresses his affirmation, not his doubt, about the very nature of the resurrection. He followed one who died rather than submit to false power. If this is really the resurrection of Jesus, then these wounds tell the story of just what it means to be true to God’s values. Thomas will not believe nor follow just any risen person. He will only believe and follow this risen person, Jesus of Nazareth, whose wounds attest both to his identity and his faithfulness.
Second, much earlier in John’s Gospel, Jesus had predicted his crucifixion in these words: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” [John 12.32]. If Thomas has ideas about the nature of the resurrection, he also has ideas about its purpose. For Thomas and for Jesus, the whole point of going to the cross was to save the world.
For John, the crucifixion is also a “lifting up”, an exaltation. It was both the final manifestation of God’s glory in Jesus and the first act in God’s drawing in of all people into the divine embrace. Seeing and touching Jesus’s wounds validated the identity of the risen One standing before Thomas. And it also reaffirmed God’s commitment that this act of love extend to the far reaches of the human community. At his first Easter appearance, Jesus had given the Holy Spirit to the disciples, telling them they now have the power to liberate people from their sins. At this second appearance, Jesus gives them the gift of peace and expresses compassion for everyone who is not preset, including you and me. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Thomas now has his hopes for the risen Jesus confirmed: his mission, and our task, is to draw all people to him so that all might know how deeply and irrevocably they are loved.
As much as I admire Homer’s Odyssey, there is a great difference between Odysseus’s scar and those of Jesus. Homer’s epic is about the saving and redemption of one fictional man. John’s Gospel is about the saving and redemption of the real world. You and I might identify with Odysseus in his travels, but his suffering does nothing for us. Jesus is a different story: in Easter season we begin to realize how much the empty tomb and upper room events mean for our lives and those of the world. Jesus has gone to the cross so that his lifting up would reconcile God and the world. You and I have been caught up into that wonderful moment. Like Thomas, we may have our questions. But also like him, when we take in all that has happened over these weeks, we are left with nothing to say except, “My Lord and my God!”
They don’t much have those kiddie matinees anymore, and movie technology is much more sophisticated today than it was in the late 1950s. But sitting in the dark, gorging on Junior Mints and Sno Caps, I always found myself taken up into even crummy old world epics. The story you and I now tell—one of cross, wounds, and empty tomb—is even less technological, but so much better. First of all, it’s true. Second of all, it’s for you. The one who was pierced is now lifted up and calls you to himself. That’s a lot to take in and understand, but for now the best response is simply to say, along with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!” Amen.
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