Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter April 16, 2023
(Acts 2:14a, 22-23)+Psalm 16+1 Peter 1:3-9+John 20:19-31
These words were written in a letter many years ago:
Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.
There is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake?[1]
It may come as a surprise that none other than Mother Teresa wrote this. The publication of letters and other writings by the Saint of Calcutta after her death shocked many people, because this woman who seemed a paragon of unshakable faith actually spent most of her life wondering where God was. She felt God’s absence more than God’s presence.
I imagine Mother Teresa might have had an affinity for the Apostle Thomas, the one who needed to see and touch to believe. Thomas, who has come down to us as “The Doubter,” was really less a doubter than he was a realist. Everyone knows that a dead person can’t come back to life, right?
Even though he had witnessed that very thing when Lazarus was called forth from the tomb.
But in this case, this time, the Romans had done their worst to his friend. He didn’t just die a peaceful death like Lazarus. No, he was tortured and brutalized before he died. Jesus was dead, and you expect me to believe he alive again?
Just to set the scene:
In John’s telling of Easter Day, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb. When she discovered the body missing, she went to tell the disciples, and Peter and John came to the tomb with her, confirmed that it was empty, and went back to the Upper Room (presumably). Jesus then appeared to Mary who mistook him for the gardener, but when she realized it was Jesus, he told her to go tell the disciples, and she did.
Later that day, in the evening, Jesus appeared to those gathered in that Upper Room, still bearing the marks of crucifixion on his body, but Thomas wasn’t there. I have often wondered if he simply didn’t care if he was the next to be arrested and refused to cower behind locked doors or if, more likely, in his pragmatic way he had determined to just get on with it, that adventure was over, and there’s no sense moaning over what was or might have been.
A week later, Thomas is there, and he is disbelieving, no matter what Magdalene or the disciples told him. So, Jesus shows up again and invites Thomas to touch his wounds. You want proof? Here it is! Thomas’s exclamation of, “My Lord and my God” (20:28) seems less a pious profession of faith than an astonished and bewildered O.M.G. moment. And then Jesus says, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (20:29). The those to whom he is referring isn’t just all those whose lives Jesus touched and who had come into contact with him or heard about it. No, the those to whom he is referring is us.
Mother Teresa may have felt God’s absence, but she believed even if she couldn’t feel, even if she had doubts or wondered. Acknowledging the absence of that warmth and closeness she had once experienced is an acknowledgement of belief, even in the face of absence. She lived her life in a state of what Ignatius of Loyola called desolation. Her early experience of closeness, of consolation, was gone. But she carried on, even in that state of desolation, as if it were all true, and she continued to be the hands and feet of Christ to the most despised and rejected amongst us.
In a few minutes, the parents and godparents of the two being baptized this morning will stand here and make affirmations of belief, statements of faith, and renunciations of evil for themselves and on behalf of these babies. I would not be surprised if, as they make their responses, they don’t wonder if they really believe what they are saying.
Well, don’t worry. There are times when I wonder if I believe everything I am asking.
But when that happens, I remember Thomas, who just wasn’t sure and who, on our behalf, refused to believe without seeing. He saw and he touched and he bore witness so that we can believe this great Good News.
Christ is risen from the dead. The slate has been wiped clean. Nothing we can do will ever separate us from God’s love. It is into this love that we welcome these two children into God’s household and recommit ourselves to living our lives – even when we aren’t always sure – as if it is true, at least until that day when we see and touch and hear with our own eyes and hands and ears.
Alleluia. Amen.
[1] Mother Teresa and Brian Kolodiejchuk, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta (New York: Image Books, 2009)