“Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe.” It seems that the Easter
season is a time in which we can always count on someone to stir up controversy about our beliefs.
As you may recall, last year’s controversy was the “Jesus Tomb” TV documentary that was quickly
exposed by scholars around the world as a sensationalistic and thoroughly unsupportable notion
that Jesus’ tomb had been found.
Last week as we were celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, a few in the church were
proclaiming other messages that I, for one, have a little difficulty finding much joy or truth in. The
Dean of one Anglican cathedral in an unnamed land far, far away decided that he needed to correct
our naïve misconceptions by saying this in his Easter sermon: “The Resurrection of Jesus ought not
to be seen in physical terms, but as a new spiritual reality.” And then he went on to say that the
Gospel accounts “are symbolic images of the breaking through of the resurrection spirit into human
lives.” Whatever that means.
I’d like to spend a few minutes this morning talking about our response to the Resurrection
accounts, and what the scriptures say about these. I want to begin by saying overtly that really,
what this Dean’s words come down to is unbelief. Even within the church there are people so
confined within the box of scientific rationalism that they apparently can’t even bring themselves to
allow for the possibility of a miracle.
The information available to us makes two things pretty clear. First, there’s a pretty fair amount of
reliable historical evidence for the Resurrection. And second, being almost 2000 years later we don’t
have empirical, scientific proof for it. Therefore, we’re required to apply some degree of faith.
Please let me first say just a few words about the evidence. According to St. Paul, Jesus’ post-
resurrection presence was witnessed by several hundred real people, and we know that these
people quickly spread the word of what they’d seen. Shock waves began issuing from a real place
called Calvary, outside the walls of the real city of Jerusalem. And they’ve jostled and shaken the
world ever since. This really is a matter of simple historical record. Around 1975 years ago, in
every direction from Jerusalem, word went out that a great man, a prophet who claimed to be the
long-awaited Messiah of Judaism, and even claimed to be the Son of the Most High God, died on a
Roman cross and two days later rose from the dead. The spreading of that word was started by a
group of folks who’d been crushed into despair by the sudden death of their Master. But then they
saw, heard, and felt something that completely and permanently changed their despair into
delerious, contagious enthusiasm that spread like wildfire. I can’t draw any other sensible
conclusion than acknowledging that that something was the physical resurrection of Jesus.
And then there’s the case of Paul’s conversion. This persecutor of Christians was literally knocked
on his tush (to use a good Yiddish word) by an appearance of the risen Christ. His entire world was
disoriented and then reoriented around the rock-solid conviction that Jesus not only was exactly who
he said he was, but that he’d been raised from the dead. St. Paul affirms this passionately in 1
Corinthians 15.
I don’t have time this morning to get into all of the many other convincing arguments for the
Resurrection. But if you want to invest yourself in a few weeks of exhaustive analysis concluding
that the biblical accounts of the Resurrection are reliable, I commend to you N. T. Wright’s book,
The Resurrection of the Son of God.
Yet this is evidence only, and not irrefutable proof. For this reason I’ve often thought, what a
blessing for those who were there when Jesus physically walked this earth. How blessed we’d be if
we’d been there after the resurrection! How much easier it would be to believe unwaveringly with all
of our heart! But, as we’ll see, Jesus didn’t think that those who saw his resurrected body were
necessarily as blessed as those of us who weren’t there can be.
This is where faith comes in. As I mentioned, the disciples were stunned and transformed by Jesus’
appearance to them in the upper room. But there was one disciple who wasn’t initially there for this
dramatic moment in their lives. I want to say first that I can really relate to Thomas. Having been fed
a steady diet of 20th century scientific rationalism throughout my public education, I sometimes find
it a struggle believing in something that can’t be directly perceived with the senses or measured by
the instruments our senses rely on.
In Thomas, I find someone who shares that struggle. When Jesus appeared to the disciples, their
despairing minds had already been contemplating a life without Him. And now their world was
overturned. Their despair turned to elation. But Thomas hadn’t been there among them. He’d
been away. When he returns from his trip,Thomas’s first impulse is not to believe this new
information. Maybe the others has seen a ghost or made some huge, collective mistake. He says,
“Unless I see the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I won’t believe.” He refuses to invest his
trust so soon after such crushing heartbreak. So he goes for a week hearing the others’ accounts
of the risen Christ, and then, the following Sunday, again in the same house, Jesus appears to all of
them. He says, “Peace be with you!” Then he turns to Thomas and says, “If you doubt, go ahead
and touch my wounds!” OK? Not ‘feel my spirit’, or ‘sense my presence’, but ‘touch my wounds.’
“Do not doubt, but believe.”
Then Thomas, in an electric moment, smitten to the marrow with the undeniable truth standing in
front of him, says, “My Lord, and my God!”
The penny drops for him at that moment. Perhaps he sees a split-second memory collage of Jesus’
teachings and predictions, and with the illumination made possible by the pure light of the Holy
Spirit, he sees Jesus for who he really is: the Messiah, the Lord, and the Son of God.
I picture him dropping to his knees in humility and amazement as reality hits. Then Jesus says,
“Have you believed because you have seen me?
Then, with his penetrating eyes envisioning the future hearers of the gospel, Jesus speaks words
intended for you and for me. He says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to
believe.” OK? ‘Thomas, it’s wonderful that now you see the truth, but that’s nothing compared to
the blessing awaiting those who’ll walk by faith, and not by sight.’ That, my friends, is us! The point
is this: For Thomas, seeing was believing. For us, believing is seeing. Believing is seeing. We’ll
never really understand Christian life and doctrine without first having faith. In the words of St.
Augustine, “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may
believe, but believe that you may understand.”
You see, in order to be convinced, Thomas wanted an effective dose of physical evidence. And our
Lord kindly provided him with it. But He encourages us not only to receive as our own the evidence
He gave to Thomas, but also to take the risk of investing faith in those areas that may not be fully lit
up with evidence. You and I may not have the advantage of the resurrected Jesus standing in front
of us, but this same Jesus says that, if we step out in faith, and respond to what evidence and
spiritual promptings we do have, we’ll be especially blessed. In my own experience, since my first
tottering steps as a Christian; since my first doubt-infested moments as a baby believer, I can
confirm that it’s been faith that has more than anything brought me into a deep understanding and
love of our Lord.
My friends, if we insist on waiting for the absolute slam-dunk, smoking gun piece of irrefutable proof
before we decide to invest our faith in the resurrected Jesus, we may be in for a long wait. Because,
it appears from our Gospel passage that it was never Jesus’ intent to give us that. Instead, he
craves relationship with us, and we open ourselves to that relationship by stepping out and daring to
trust God through the apostolic witness carried to us by His word and by his church. This is what
basic faith is In the words of St. Peter: “Though you have not seen him, you love him and even
though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious
joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”
I’d like to conclude by reading a poem about the Resurrection written by John Updike nearly 50
years ago. This is called the Seven Stanzas of Easter. If you’d like to follow along it’s on the back of
your sermon outline.
Seven Stanzas at Easter, © 1961, John Updike
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. Not as some fluffy metaphor, but as a solid, flesh and blood
body that presages our own resurrection when He comes again to judge the living and the dead. I
pray that we all cling faithfully and joyfully to this truth. “Blessed are those who have not seen, yet
have come to believe.”
Amen.
season is a time in which we can always count on someone to stir up controversy about our beliefs.
As you may recall, last year’s controversy was the “Jesus Tomb” TV documentary that was quickly
exposed by scholars around the world as a sensationalistic and thoroughly unsupportable notion
that Jesus’ tomb had been found.
Last week as we were celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, a few in the church were
proclaiming other messages that I, for one, have a little difficulty finding much joy or truth in. The
Dean of one Anglican cathedral in an unnamed land far, far away decided that he needed to correct
our naïve misconceptions by saying this in his Easter sermon: “The Resurrection of Jesus ought not
to be seen in physical terms, but as a new spiritual reality.” And then he went on to say that the
Gospel accounts “are symbolic images of the breaking through of the resurrection spirit into human
lives.” Whatever that means.
I’d like to spend a few minutes this morning talking about our response to the Resurrection
accounts, and what the scriptures say about these. I want to begin by saying overtly that really,
what this Dean’s words come down to is unbelief. Even within the church there are people so
confined within the box of scientific rationalism that they apparently can’t even bring themselves to
allow for the possibility of a miracle.
The information available to us makes two things pretty clear. First, there’s a pretty fair amount of
reliable historical evidence for the Resurrection. And second, being almost 2000 years later we don’t
have empirical, scientific proof for it. Therefore, we’re required to apply some degree of faith.
Please let me first say just a few words about the evidence. According to St. Paul, Jesus’ post-
resurrection presence was witnessed by several hundred real people, and we know that these
people quickly spread the word of what they’d seen. Shock waves began issuing from a real place
called Calvary, outside the walls of the real city of Jerusalem. And they’ve jostled and shaken the
world ever since. This really is a matter of simple historical record. Around 1975 years ago, in
every direction from Jerusalem, word went out that a great man, a prophet who claimed to be the
long-awaited Messiah of Judaism, and even claimed to be the Son of the Most High God, died on a
Roman cross and two days later rose from the dead. The spreading of that word was started by a
group of folks who’d been crushed into despair by the sudden death of their Master. But then they
saw, heard, and felt something that completely and permanently changed their despair into
delerious, contagious enthusiasm that spread like wildfire. I can’t draw any other sensible
conclusion than acknowledging that that something was the physical resurrection of Jesus.
And then there’s the case of Paul’s conversion. This persecutor of Christians was literally knocked
on his tush (to use a good Yiddish word) by an appearance of the risen Christ. His entire world was
disoriented and then reoriented around the rock-solid conviction that Jesus not only was exactly who
he said he was, but that he’d been raised from the dead. St. Paul affirms this passionately in 1
Corinthians 15.
I don’t have time this morning to get into all of the many other convincing arguments for the
Resurrection. But if you want to invest yourself in a few weeks of exhaustive analysis concluding
that the biblical accounts of the Resurrection are reliable, I commend to you N. T. Wright’s book,
The Resurrection of the Son of God.
Yet this is evidence only, and not irrefutable proof. For this reason I’ve often thought, what a
blessing for those who were there when Jesus physically walked this earth. How blessed we’d be if
we’d been there after the resurrection! How much easier it would be to believe unwaveringly with all
of our heart! But, as we’ll see, Jesus didn’t think that those who saw his resurrected body were
necessarily as blessed as those of us who weren’t there can be.
This is where faith comes in. As I mentioned, the disciples were stunned and transformed by Jesus’
appearance to them in the upper room. But there was one disciple who wasn’t initially there for this
dramatic moment in their lives. I want to say first that I can really relate to Thomas. Having been fed
a steady diet of 20th century scientific rationalism throughout my public education, I sometimes find
it a struggle believing in something that can’t be directly perceived with the senses or measured by
the instruments our senses rely on.
In Thomas, I find someone who shares that struggle. When Jesus appeared to the disciples, their
despairing minds had already been contemplating a life without Him. And now their world was
overturned. Their despair turned to elation. But Thomas hadn’t been there among them. He’d
been away. When he returns from his trip,Thomas’s first impulse is not to believe this new
information. Maybe the others has seen a ghost or made some huge, collective mistake. He says,
“Unless I see the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I won’t believe.” He refuses to invest his
trust so soon after such crushing heartbreak. So he goes for a week hearing the others’ accounts
of the risen Christ, and then, the following Sunday, again in the same house, Jesus appears to all of
them. He says, “Peace be with you!” Then he turns to Thomas and says, “If you doubt, go ahead
and touch my wounds!” OK? Not ‘feel my spirit’, or ‘sense my presence’, but ‘touch my wounds.’
“Do not doubt, but believe.”
Then Thomas, in an electric moment, smitten to the marrow with the undeniable truth standing in
front of him, says, “My Lord, and my God!”
The penny drops for him at that moment. Perhaps he sees a split-second memory collage of Jesus’
teachings and predictions, and with the illumination made possible by the pure light of the Holy
Spirit, he sees Jesus for who he really is: the Messiah, the Lord, and the Son of God.
I picture him dropping to his knees in humility and amazement as reality hits. Then Jesus says,
“Have you believed because you have seen me?
Then, with his penetrating eyes envisioning the future hearers of the gospel, Jesus speaks words
intended for you and for me. He says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to
believe.” OK? ‘Thomas, it’s wonderful that now you see the truth, but that’s nothing compared to
the blessing awaiting those who’ll walk by faith, and not by sight.’ That, my friends, is us! The point
is this: For Thomas, seeing was believing. For us, believing is seeing. Believing is seeing. We’ll
never really understand Christian life and doctrine without first having faith. In the words of St.
Augustine, “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that you may
believe, but believe that you may understand.”
You see, in order to be convinced, Thomas wanted an effective dose of physical evidence. And our
Lord kindly provided him with it. But He encourages us not only to receive as our own the evidence
He gave to Thomas, but also to take the risk of investing faith in those areas that may not be fully lit
up with evidence. You and I may not have the advantage of the resurrected Jesus standing in front
of us, but this same Jesus says that, if we step out in faith, and respond to what evidence and
spiritual promptings we do have, we’ll be especially blessed. In my own experience, since my first
tottering steps as a Christian; since my first doubt-infested moments as a baby believer, I can
confirm that it’s been faith that has more than anything brought me into a deep understanding and
love of our Lord.
My friends, if we insist on waiting for the absolute slam-dunk, smoking gun piece of irrefutable proof
before we decide to invest our faith in the resurrected Jesus, we may be in for a long wait. Because,
it appears from our Gospel passage that it was never Jesus’ intent to give us that. Instead, he
craves relationship with us, and we open ourselves to that relationship by stepping out and daring to
trust God through the apostolic witness carried to us by His word and by his church. This is what
basic faith is In the words of St. Peter: “Though you have not seen him, you love him and even
though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious
joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”
I’d like to conclude by reading a poem about the Resurrection written by John Updike nearly 50
years ago. This is called the Seven Stanzas of Easter. If you’d like to follow along it’s on the back of
your sermon outline.
Seven Stanzas at Easter, © 1961, John Updike
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. Not as some fluffy metaphor, but as a solid, flesh and blood
body that presages our own resurrection when He comes again to judge the living and the dead. I
pray that we all cling faithfully and joyfully to this truth. “Blessed are those who have not seen, yet
have come to believe.”
Amen.
Belief and Blessing
John 20: 19-31
John 20: 19-31
March 30, 2008
Fr. Dan Tuton
Fr. Dan Tuton