Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed!) Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed!). Alleluia. Our brothers and sisters in many Orthodox churches are better at this than us.. They recognize the centrality of the resurrection. Instead of saying “How ya doin’ Fred?,” for the next 50 days after Easter, they will greet each other with these words, “Christ is risen !”

A quick head’s up for next week: we’ll begin a new series of sermons called “Following Jesus Together.” We live in perhaps the most individualistic culture the world has ever seen…and even in the Christian community, we often hear things like “I love Jesus, but I’m not so sure about the church.” So what is this thing we keep calling the community of faith? What does it look like to follow Jesus together? We’ll look at that beginning next Sunday.

But this morning we want to look one last time at the “hands of Jesus.” During the season of Lent, we have studied Jesus’ hands in five different ways: forgiving hands, healing hands, serving hands, washing hands, bleeding hands. Today we want to look this time at the “scarred” hands of Jesus.

First, a little context: after Jesus was raised from the dead, the gospel writer John tells us he appeared first to Mary outside the tomb. Then on the first day of the week he suddenly appeared in a locked room that the disciples had gathered in, and greeted them with the words “Peace be with you,” and spoke to them. Then follows our passage this morning from John 20:24-29.

Jesus had a problem. He had just risen from the dead, had overcome the grave, broken the power and finality of death. But now…could he convince his followers it happened? That He was alive and with them?! It might be the biggest challenge he had, if this guy Thomas is any indicator.

Thomas missed the resurrection appearance of Jesus the first time around. It seems as though all the other apostles managed to make it. What happened to him? Did he miss the message? Where was he? As I read this, I wondered if Thomas was grieving.

When we were just about ready to move from Minneapolis to Seattle in 1999, my grandfather Charles died in Idaho and I was asked to do the services. Our family gathered at a little country cemetery on top of a hill to bury him. Then there was a big memorial service in a nearby town.

Afterwards there was a reception, almost like a family reunion with cousins and relatives I hadn’t seen in years. I made it through all the speaking, prayers, stories, visiting…but finally I’d had my fill. I had to just get away by myself for awhile. I snuck off and drove back up to the cemetery alone, alone with my thoughts and prayers and memories. I think that’s when I actually started to grieve.

I needed to be alone. I wonder if that’s what had been going on with Thomas.

Parts of history have been a little hard on Thomas. “Doubting” Thomas is a common term for someone who falls on the skeptical side of the spectrum. People use the term who don’t even know who Thomas was. “Don’t be a doubting Thomas.”

What a way to be remembered! It’s like calling someone a Benedict Arnold when you think they are a traitor. Or saying “I hope you don’t pull a “ Steve Lympus!” (no comment on what that might be). If you’re a Thomas, the glass is always half empty. And those are the nice comments. John Calvin once said Thomas wasn’t just a doubter, but that he was “downright obstinate!”

The truth is, we don’t know very much about Thomas. He was one of the twelve apostles, appearing simply as a name in the lists of Matthew, Mark and Luke. His name comes up two other times in John besides this one. First, in John 11:16 in the story of the death of Lazarus, Thomas says rather pessimistically, “well, let’s go join him in dying.”

And then once more in John 14, as Jesus speaks his famous words about “going to heaven to prepare a place for you,” it is Thomas who can’t help blurting out “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, how can we know the way?” And Jesus of course answers with “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.”

Doubting Thomas. And why not? His world was spinning. Jesus was, after all, what he had given his life to for the better part of three years, Jesus was the one who had instilled hope for God’s future he had never felt before and now he was gone. Whatever the reason, Thomas had missed the meeting. And he was clearly not going to take the testimony of the others as making the resurrection a fact. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in [them] and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Let me see the scarred hands…then I’ll believe.

I like Thomas, I’ll be honest. Thomas may have needed a little time, but he came back. And if we aren’t wrestling, with ourselves, with God…at various points along the journey of faith, I wonder how authentic it really is. Doubt is a part of faith. Paul Tillich once said “Serious doubt is confirmation of faith.” We, after all, believe in a God who by and large, is not visible in the world, at least not in the normal ways. We believe in the reality and presence of a good, compassionate and powerful God in the midst of a world often filled with heartache, violence and evil. Do you ever doubt? Do you ever say “I wonder if God can really do this,” or “I wonder if God is even out there, or even hears my prayers?” I bet you do. I certainly do.

What did Thomas need to move away from unbelief? To move from doubt to faith? What do think you need? Some people say

“I’ll believe as soon as I can reconcile the condition of the world to the existence of God.”

Others say

“I’ll believe when God answers my prayers by giving me what I ask for.”

Some say

“I need something supernatural, healing or speaking in tongues or something amazing.”

Some people seem bound and determined to be unbelievers unless everything in their lives lines up perfectly. What will it take for you to believe?

Thomas thought he knew what he needed. He thought that he just had to see with his eyes and touch with his hands. The funny thing is, this story never quite gets around to saying that those things actually happened. The resurrected Jesus comes to the disciples (including Thomas this time), again through locked doors, again greets them with “Peace be with you,” and immediately looks at Thomas and says “Okay, doubting Thomas. Look, touch. Do not doubt, but believe.”

But it never says Thomas touches Him! Thomas just answers him and says “My Lord and my God!,” one of the clearest and strongest affirmations of Christ in all of the New Testament. Thomas thought what he needed was sensory proof. But something happened. He received what he really needed. My personal feeling is, I think what Thomas really needed was just to know that Christ could and would be with him. That would be enough.

Think about the Old Testament story of Job. Job had every horrible thing in the world happen to him, the death of his family, financial bankruptcy, health problems, he was living under a black cloud. For a long, long time Job pleads his case, argues with his friends, insists he had done nothing wrong, nothing to cause these things, yet God is silent and he is persecuted, Job doubts God’s tactics and his justice.

After 37 chapters finally God speaks, but he doesn’t really answer Job. In fact, God sort of blasts Job. None of the bad circumstances are overturned. But when Job speaks again to God, he is contrite and repentant. He has received enough. It seems that what Job really needed was not to have everything fixed, but to know that he was not alone. That God was with him. That would be enough.

Dr. Paul Brand was a remarkable man, a Christian physician who spent much of his life working with leprosy patients in India. As you might imagine, the people that he treated had been ostracized and quarantined away from family and friends. One day he slipped in late to a gathering of patients in the courtyard at the treatment facility. The patients asked Dr. Brand to speak. He wasn’t prepared, and wondered what to say, and then he looked at the people gathered and said “I am a hand surgeon. I can’t help looking at hands, and I’ve always wished I could have studied Jesus’ hands.”

As he talked, Dr. Brand looked at the deformed hands characteristic of Hansen’s disease, or leprosy. Some were missing fingers, many were pulled into a sort of claw position. Dr. Brand talked about the kinds of things that Jesus’ hands did…the same kinds of things we have been talking about in these weeks. Healing, touching, compassion.

Then he imagined Jesus’ bleeding hands, describing as only a hand surgeon could, what it would do to drive a nail into the palm of someone’s hand. The thought of those healing hands being crippled convinced him that Jesus identified with all of the human beings of the world… “Jesus enduring poverty with the poor, weariness with the tired…and clawed hands with the cripples.”

You can imagine the effect on this crowd of social outcasts, as they listened, identifying with Jesus. It was electrifying. Finally Dr. Brand talked about Jesus’ resurrection hands, even using the story of Thomas we read today. He wondered why Jesus still had the scars after his resurrection…and decided that Jesus wanted to continue to understand the needs of the suffering, “to be forever one of us.” And when Dr. Brand was done speaking, all across the courtyard, dozens of people raised their hands in a sign of respect, but in a way different than they ever had before. What broke upon those people…was not that their problems were solved. But that in this significant way, the resurrected Christ was with them.

When Jesus, the resurrected Jesus appeared, he came as evidence that there is nothing on earth, in heaven, in life or in death, that can separate us from God’s love. Nothing. If death can’t do it, nothing can. The scarred and living hands that Jesus showed to Thomas and the disciples (and us) told both of his death on a cross and his resurrection to life. And it means everything for our lives.

But we are people prone to doubt. So how do we move from doubt, unbelief to belief. What can we do?

a) In one sense, there is nothing. We don’t just will ourselves to change from unbelief to belief. Even faith itself is a gift. Perhaps the most honest words in the New Testament are the father of a sick boy, who hears Jesus say “all things can be done for the one who believes,” and immediately cries out: “I believe, help my unbelief!” Doubting Thomas doesn’t “do” anything, but just receives what Jesus brings him. On the one hand, faith is a gift. We receive it.

But there are things that are helpful at those times when doubts creep in and assail you, whether that means doubting God’s very existence, questioning God’s heart, or wondering about God’s ability to do something.

b) We can rehearse our story with God. What happened? What does it mean? God’s people have always practiced this. The people Israel kept alive the story of what God had done by repeating it. “Remember when God brought us out of Egypt, when he saved us by his mighty hand!” Over and over in the Old Testament, it’s a litany of where God has shown up.

The whole New Testament is a repeating of the story: the gospels, Peter and Paul, especially in the book of Acts, telling the story of what they have seen and heard and experienced.

Almost always, when someone comes to faith in Jesus Christ for the first time, I tell them right away: Go tell someone! Tell your parents, your spouse, your friends. Tell them the story. Hear yourself say it. And later, when God meets you in some particular way, when a prayer is answered or you receive a flash of insight…tell someone. Say the words. And when you are in a difficult place, remember. Where has God met you in the past? If he’s been faithful 49 times in a row…he just might be faithful in the 50th time!

c) Part of telling the story also implies: get yourself around other believers, be with people who watch for Christ in their lives and will talk about it. Friends, prayer partners, home groups- be around other believers. Sometimes, when our own faith seems dry or we have trouble believing, we are carried by the faith of people around us.

Doubt is a part of faith. We never have all the answers. But, as Philip Yancey once wrote about GK Chesterton, “The riddles of God proved more satisfying than the answers proposed without God.”

When I stand up here if front of you this morning, I don’t have any miracles to show you or impenetrable arguments for the existence of God. I have the good news of the gospel, that Jesus died on the cross for us, and was raised from the dead. That news was told to me many years ago, I have read and thought about and experienced for myself. For 2000 years, the Holy Spirit has been moving people from doubt to faith. People like us, who have never seen the bodily Jesus.

When the resurrected Christ had come to meet Thomas, and had received Thomas’ worship (“my Lord and my God!”)…Jesus said “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” It’s almost as though Jesus looks through Thomas, and down through many centuries, into other lives, many other lives, and into your life and my life too…people who have not seen but come to believe.

The Thomas story has a great ending. He may not have known exactly what he needed. But he received it when Christ became present in a lifechanging way. The strong tradition of the church is that this same Thomas eventually made his way from Palestine all the way to India, around the year 52 AD. And that he told people the Jesus story, and started 7 churches there, and was eventually martyred in 72 AD. Now, consider that today in India, there are some 25-50 million Christians. It’s amazing to think that all of that started with just one person…and he was a person who doubted. Let us pray.

Prayer:

Lord, give us such doubt. Honest doubt. Real Questions. Be patient with us.

Lord, give us such faith. Help us to believe. Help us to encourage one another.

Help us to testify to your presence.

Lord, give us what we need. Give us Yourself. Help us be attentive to your presence in our lives.