How would you like to be remembered after you die? Wouldn’t it be really nice to have something named after you, Robert Stephenson managed that, he was one of the early founders of British Rail and Railtrack – maybe we should blame him for the state of our railways – but today, children in our schools remember him for Stephenson’s Rocket, the first passenger train.
Or what about Walt Disney? That name won’t be forgotten for many years as children and adults watch his films and dream of visiting his kingdoms in France at Florida. He will always be remembered as the great Children’s Entertainer.
Or Lord Shaftesbury, he has a charity named after him that helps to remind people many years after his death of the type of person he was. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have our name remembered like one of these people, wouldn’t it be wonderful if fifty years or more after we die, our name is still on people’s lips and they think ‘what a wonderful person they were.’
Thomas did not manage this did he? 2,000 years after he died he is remembered for his doubts. People don’t think of him as a wonderful person, they don’t say ‘I would love to be like the disciple Thomas. This is in spite of the fact that after Pentecost, Thomas became a missionary. He took the gospel to Parthia, and then on to India. Christians in the country of Malibar claim that Thomas founded their church and there is no reason to doubt that claim. He was eventually martyred for his beliefs in the city of Madras in India. Yet all he is remembered for is his difficulty in believing, for his doubts.
Yet there is a lot more to this man than doubt. As we look at him today, I think you will find we have much in common with him. It could well have been one of us who was remembered as doubting ? or doubting ?, or I am sorry to have to admit, even doubting Steve, your preacher this morning if we had been in Thomas’s position.
He is mentioned one time in each of the first three gospels and all of them occur in the list of people called by Christ to follow him at the start of his ministry. Matthew and Mark place him as close to the middle of the list as they can. Matthew has him sixth out of the twelve; Mark has him seventh. Only Luke places him away from the middle. He appears eighth in his list. But Luke, while he was researching, obviously got to know Thomas better. For when he lists the disciples again in Acts 1:13; Thomas appears right in the middle again in sixth place.
Thomas does not appear again in any of these gospels. I am sure he must have been there for if he were not, the gospel writers would have told us why not. But he was never mentioned, could it be that he remained in the middle of that crowd of disciples for the three years between the time Jesus called the disciples, and the time he died on that cross.
Didn’t I say that this man Thomas was like many of us today, for don’t we do the same. We do not like to, or even want to stand out from the crowd. You only have to ask the stewards or deacons in any Church today to find this is so. When they ask for volunteers to do something, there is often a deafening silence. Nobody wants to volunteer because if they did so, they would stand out from the crowd.
And to be brutally honest, isn’t this one of the reasons why we have so many nearly empty Churches. Christians do not want others to notice them, they would rather be hidden in the crowd of their fellow workers, their friends, or whatever, and so few people are attracted to Christ because of this. We are afraid or unwilling to stand out from the crowd and so we fail to be the witnesses that we should be.
But this is not the only way that we are like Thomas today. Fortunately, one of the gospel writers noticed a little bit more about this man who liked to be hidden in the middle. I say fortunately, because it would be extremely difficult for me to preach a sermon from what we know of Thomas in the first three gospels.
In John’s gospel, he appears three more times. The first is in John 11:16. We are told that somebody brings news to Jesus of his friend Lazarus’s illness. As you know, Jesus stayed where he was for two days, and then tells his disciples “Come, let us go to Judea.” The disciples, naturally enough are scared, they know the authorities are looking for Jesus, and they know that they are not planning to hold a party in Jesus’ honour if they find him.
Thomas then says, in a strange mixture of wonderful love and almost supreme pessimism “"Let us also go, that we may die with him." Have you ever seen children’s programmes of Pooh Bear. A couple of years ago there was a film made, I think it was called ‘The wonderful world of Tigger.’ I took my son Thomas to see it and it was fantastic. I even think my son enjoyed it nearly as much as I did. One of AA Milnes characters always reminds me of ‘Doubting Thomas in this passage and that is Eeyore. Throughout the book and the film you always hear him looking on the worst possible side of everything, but going ahead with it anyway. “Oh well, I know it is going to be bad, but I suppose we had better do it anyway.”
This was what Thomas was like here. He knows that the chances of Jesus being arrested or killed was very high, he knows that if that happened, the chances were that the twelve who had been with him for so long would also be arrested or killed. Yet, his love for Jesus was such that for once in his life, he could come out of the middle of that crowd and volunteer to go with Jesus. They say that the difference between an optimist and pessimist is that an optimist’s glass is half full when a pessimist’s is half empty. Well here, we see Thomas looking into his half empty glass and saying, ‘it doesn’t matter, he (Jesus) is worth it, even if the glass never gets filled again.’
Would we have done the same if we were in his shoes? Or would we have stayed quiet and hidden in the middle?
From this show of love, the next time that John speaks of Thomas, we see him show a complete lack of understanding. This disciple, who has been with Jesus for nearly three years now, seeing the miracles he performs, hearing him talk of his Father. He has heard his friend Peter declare ‘You are the Christ’. Yet still, he cannot see what this is all about. Jesus has just told them that he is going back to his Father, and that he will prepare a wonderful home for them, and what does Thomas say “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way.”
In recent years this has become one of my favourite Bible questions. I think I have mentioned before here how my son Thomas has Aspbergers Syndrome. One of the difficult things with this is that you can show something to him, explain how to do something over and over and over again, and each time you do so, it seems as if he has never heard or seen it before. I know all children are like this, but Thomas is a little bit more like it than most. Fortunately, when it seems like he is never going to learn, you suddenly get a day when he is doing this thing perfectly. It is partly this question of the biblical Thomas’s that keeps me going through this time when it seems he will never learn.
When we compare these last two passages, the first where Thomas shows incredible love for Jesus and the second where he shows this complete misunderstanding of who Jesus is; we see how Thomas got his nickname ‘Didymus’. This is the Greek word for twin and it was probably given to Thomas because he was so often in two minds about things. One time full of love, the next, questioning who Jesus was.
Does anybody here recognise what it is to be like this? To be feeling so close to God and Jesus one day that you cannot stop talking to them, and praising them. Yet, another day, it seems as though they are a million miles away. Or you know one day that you really do have enough faith to move mountains; yet within a short time, it seems as though you don’t have enough faith to move a grain of sand.
This is what Thomas was like, exactly the same as many of us. The next time that John writes about Thomas, it seems that it was another bad day for him, John 20:24 reads: “Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came.” We don’t know where he was, maybe he had gone shopping for food. I think it more likely that he had gone off to think through when and how he was going to leave the fellowship. The person he loved was dead, his glass was now thoroughly empty, yet Thomas was still alive, and the disciples had not been arrested and killed as Thomas thought they would have been. Even the most optimistic of the disciples had no hope left; it was amazing and showed the depths of his love that Thomas was still around at all in this situation.
How confusing it must have been for this disciple to come back into that room and finding the other ten disciples laughing, rejoicing and probably crying as well. “We have seen the Lord!” they tell him. What did Thomas think? Could they have been hysterical? Was it possible that after all of the ups and downs of the last few weeks that his colleagues were finally beginning to loose their minds? Whatever it was that he thought, he obviously knew that there was only one way he could allow himself to believe. He had just gone through too much hurt to allow anything apart from physical evidence to change his mind. “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”
Do you remember a certain Bishop of Durham quite a few years ago who stated that it was not necessary to believe in the physical resurrection of Christ for you to be a Christian. What do you think Thomas would have said to him? Maybe that for him, he had to believe in that physical resurrection, a spiritual resurrection was not enough. Maybe that for him, he had to know that Jesus was really alive and not just a figment of his or anybody else’s imagination. Or maybe simply that for him, he had to know that Jesus was completely alive just so that he could no longer be in two minds about things.
Whichever it was, we now see the strength that this man has. Can you imagine what it must have been like for him to be in the same room as these other ten disciples who all knew and believed totally that their Lord was alive. Just think what it would be like if you were not a Christian and you were had to stay in the same room as someone like Billy Graham or Louis Palau for a week. Eating with one of them, nothing to do but talk with them for there was no television or radio to take your attention away from what they were saying, you would even have to sleep in the same room. Can you think of many people who could come out of that situation not believing that Christ was risen and was alive? That he is Lord and God of all.
Thomas could and did do exactly that. For after spending a week in close proximity to these other ten disciples, he was still thinking “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”
It was then that this man who had so much strength at times, and so much lack of understanding at others. This man who had loved Jesus so much that he was willing to die with him, yet had been so badly hurt by that love that he could not trust himself to begin to love, to hope and to believe again unless the evidence was such that he could touch and feel it for himself. He would have known what his nickname was, he would have known about his habit of believing one thing one day, and something else the next. Was he finally looking for something that he could believe in so totally that he would never change his mind again?
Well he found it. Or rather, Jesus found him. For a week after making this statement declaring his doubt or unbelief, all eleven of the disciples were in the house ‘behind locked doors’ John tells us. And Jesus appears to Thomas saying "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe."
Just imagine that scene. Our Lord reaching out with one of his hands to hold Thomas’s finger and placing that finger in the wound on his other hand. Then he takes the whole hand and says ‘look Thomas, feel it, this is real. You don’t have to doubt anymore, you don’t have to be in two minds. You can finally place your strength and your love into someone that you know you can trust forever.”
And then imagine Thomas’s response when Jesus does this, John tells us that:
“Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!””
This is the only response God wants us to make to Him this Sunday and every other day of our lives. And He desires that response to be made in words, and in demonstration as we live out Thomas’s reply in our lives day by day.
