(Whose tale is told in John 20:19-31)We read a book to get to the end of the story. Most of us, anyway, unless you are like me and have a half-dozen books scattered about the house in various stages of incompletion. A spouse’s or roommate’s surest form of torture would be to sneak in unawares and rearrange the bookmarks, greeting the absent reader with a frustrating sense of bewilderment upon returning to the discombobulated text.
Some books, of course, propel us forward with abandonment of time and distraction. We can’t put them down, can’t wait to get to the climax, to the resolution, to the solving of the mystery.
That’s why I feel so frustrated getting to the end of the Gospel of John. For 19 chapters we have been tugged and prodded, teased and cajoled, humbled and inspired by this most amazing “Good News,” and then we get to the final act, the death and resurrection of Jesus – and we have this truncated epilogue that almost apologizes for its incompleteness.
Nineteen chapters of the greatest story ever told, and we get one chapter, the 20th, that sums it up, tells us what it all means, and more importantly, tells us what we do now. The early church may have recognized this inadequacy by adding what most scholars conclude is an editorial afterward, the 21st chapter of John in most Bible translations.
But we are left here at the end of the 20th, hearing that there were many other signs of Jesus appearing amidst the disciples, but that they are not written in
this book.
We are like the disciples, gripped in the drama all along, ever since Jesus called us as one of the 12, who have been left in agony at Jesus’ death and bewildered beyond all belief at his resurrection. That is the next-to-last chapter in the story.
But then, as this last chapter is being written, Thomas has gone missing. Thomas was not with them with Jesus came. Perhaps too distraught or overcome to continue, he left the book sitting on the table. Where did Thomas go? Out for air? Was he mourning in the woods? Was he out drowning his sorrows? Was he stuffing his real feelings down inside by getting back to work and losing himself in his old routine?
There
are those of us who need our space. When the world gets loud, we need the quiet to process, to take stock, to reground ourselves. It’s a way of staying sane for some of us. Paradoxically, sometimes in solitude we are able to reconnect with the divine.
But it is always at some risk. Thomas was at some risk, for the Gospel writer tells us that the disciples were huddled together behind a locked door for fear of their detractors. Thomas was out roaming free, unprotected from enemies, without the consolation of his comrades.
And then, sure enough, when the resurrected Jesus appeared to those who had cleaved to one another, Thomas is not there. Is it any wonder then when he returns – and again, we no more know why he returned than why he left – he rejoins his brothers (and we presume sisters) with a case of shellshock. They tell him they have seen the risen Lord. He says, show me, don’t tell me. Is it that Thomas is the proverbial doubter, as he is so often known, or is it that absent the care of the Christ-following community his heart has been hardened to miracle? He has come back to pick up the book that he has been reading and the bookmark has been moved, and nothing seems to make sense.
Jesus certainly had to notice Thomas’ absence that day, for when he returns to the disciples’ enclave a week later, he speaks directly to Thomas. “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”
Thomas and we are one with the pleading man in Mark’s gospel who cries out, “I believe! Help my unbelief!”
Belief and unbelief are not an either/or proposition.
True, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” But this is not a rebuke; it is what it says it is: a blessing. Jesus understood that there would be many Thomases to come – Thomases like us – who would yearn to touch the flesh of the divine but would come to learn that it is a thing of the heart, ultimately, this business of belief.
We also learn that getting to the end of this story in the Gospel is really just the beginning of the story. Rather than crumpling in dissatisfaction that all the loose ends aren’t tied up, Jesus invites us to keep living into the story, in our going out and coming in, to grow to believe that he is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing we may have life in his name.
"The eating begins. Clams steam, corn steams, salad wilts, butter runs, hot dogs turn, torn chicken shines in the savage light. Iced tea, brewed in forty-quart milk cans, chuckles when sloshed. Paper plates buckle on broad laps. Plastic butter knives, asked to cut cold ham, refuse. Children underfoot in the pleased frenzy eat only potato chips. Somehow, as the first wave of appetite subsides, the long tables turn musical, and a murmur rises to the blank sky, a cackle rendered harmonious by a remote singleness of ancestor; a kind of fabric is woven and hung, a tapestry of the family fortunes, the threads of which include milkmen, ministers, mailmen, bankruptcy, death by war, death by automobile, insanity . . . The family has hovered in honorable obscurity, between poverty and wealth, between jail and high office. Real-estate dealers, schoolteachers, veterinarians are its noblemen; butchers, electricians, door-to-door salesmen its yeomen. Protestant and teetotalling, ironically virtous and mildly proud, it has added to America's statistics without altering their meaning. Whence, then, this strange joy?"
