Today we had the joy of a baptism in the service! Congratulations to Eliza, her parents and godparents.
Names matter. I know that Eliza’s names were chosen
carefully, not just picked at random, for all they meant to you, for the precious
people they reminded you of. What we call our children says something about our
feelings about them, our hopes and dreams for them, what we believe about them
and their identity. I’ve never met parents who have called their children a
name they don’t like, at least at the time, however the child feels about it
when they grow up.
We give people titles too, which say a lot about what we
think of them. Being addressed as Sir or Madam by someone serving you or
helping you implies respect, “Oi you!”, not so much.
In today’s Gospel story, the names, or rather the titles, Thomas
uses for Jesus are equally important. Who does he think Jesus is?
At the start of the story, the only labels he has in his mind
for Jesus are the labels “dead” and “failed”. He has just seen Jesus arrested,
crucified and buried. Whatever Thomas
had hoped for has died with him. Like all the other disciples, Thomas had
invested a huge amount in the idea that Jesus was the Messiah, leaving home and
family and livelihood to follow him, putting his own life in danger, but it has
all been for nothing. He is just another dead, failed leader.
But then the other disciples start to tell him that it isn’t
so. That Jesus has been raised from death, and has appeared to them. We don’t
know why he wasn’t there with the rest on that first evening after the
resurrection, when the rest of the disciples saw Jesus. He might have run away,
needed to be alone after the crucifixion. He may just have gone on some errand
– someone presumably had to buy food. But he wasn’t there, so he missed seeing
Jesus. And, understandably, he wasn’t going to accept the word of the others.
Why should he? Would we have done?
But a week later, Jesus appears again. For him. Just for him.
And he invites Thomas to do the very thing that Thomas had said he needed in order to believe. “Put
your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side”
says Jesus. There’s no judgement in Jesus’ words. He just gives Thomas what he
needs, meets him in his doubt and gives him the time and space to come to his
own conclusion. But Thomas turns out not to need much convincing. We’re not
told that he actually does touch Jesus - the sight of him seems to be enough.
And suddenly those awful labels “dead” and “failed” are
replaced by the joyful acclamation, “My Lord and my God!”. My Lord and my God.
He doesn’t call Jesus “Rabbi”, or “teacher” – titles that he
had often been called during his ministry – he calls him Lord and God. But what
does that mean to him? Why is it so significant?
Let’s start with the second word – God. John’s Gospel, in
which this story is told, was the last of the four Gospels to be written,
around the end of the first century, about 70 years after Jesus’ death, and it
is the one which goes furthest in identifying Jesus as God, one with his
Father. The early Christians had had 70
years to ponder the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. During his life they’d
had the sense that he showed them what God was like in a new and unique way.
They didn’t understand it, but somehow they knew that although he was completely
human, there was something very different happening through him. The doctrine
of the Trinity doesn’t appear in the Bible, but it came into being because those
early Christians came to believe that in meeting Jesus, and later encountering
the Holy Spirit, they were meeting the same person they had always known as
Creator. That idea that God could be
three in one doesn’t make a lot of sense, logically, but it made complete sense
psychologically and spiritually to those who formulated it. It was what they
experienced.
When Thomas meets Jesus again after his resurrection, he
knows that whatever has happened is completely beyond his grasp, infinitely
bigger than his brain can comprehend. He knows that he is in the presence of
total mystery, in the presence of God, just as Moses does when he encounters
God in the burning bush, something he can’t deny, but can’t explain either. God
himself.
But Thomas doesn’t just call Jesus God. He also calls him
Lord. What does that mean. In the Greek the Gospel was written in, the word is
“kyrios”, and it was used of anyone who was in charge, who led others.
It was the title given to the head of a household, who, at the time would have
had complete power over and responsibility for the family and the servants. Not
every “kyrios” was good, but a good “kyrios” would lead the
household well, caring for its members, and they would follow him and play
their part in the household as a result. Our English word “Lord” comes from an
Anglo-Saxon word “Hlaf–ward”, literally the “loaf-ward”, the one
who guarded the bread, who provided for those under his authority, so it
carried the same sense. You didn’t call someone Lord simply because you thought
they were important or good; you called them Lord because you recognised their
claim on you, their authority over you, because you recognised that your life
was tied up with theirs, that you had thrown in your lot with them.
When Thomas calls Jesus, “Lord”, that’s what he means. His
faith in Jesus isn’t about intellectual assent to a set of ideas, it is a
commitment to live in the way that Jesus wants him to. From now on, what Thomas
does, his priorities, his actions, will be shaped by the message of Jesus.
Legend says that Thomas eventually travelled to India, taking the Gospel there,
and that he was the founder of the first Indian churches. It’s not impossible
or unlikely, as there were well established trade links between the Middle East
and India at the time. There are all sorts of legends about what happened to Thomas,
but whatever the truth of it, we can be sure that, like all the other apostles,
it wasn’t how he had thought his life would turn out when he was young.
We don’t know what Eliza will do or be when she is grown up,
but our prayer for her today is that she will find a sure anchor, a firm
foundation in her life, that she will see, and find for herself good things,
and good people to look to for guidance and help, and ultimately that, like
Thomas, her life will be rooted and grounded in the love of God, her Lord and
her God.
Amen
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