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Easter 6
5/5/2024

1 John 1:5-9
Psalm 98
John 15:9-17

Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock

‘Love one another as I have loved you.’

Today in our lectionary reading, Jesus recalls, or perhaps better to say, foreshadows, last week’s reading from the first letter of John. In that letter, John says:

‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.’

This reading forms part of what is called Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. The final series of solemn words that Jesus imparts to his disciples as they gather together in apprehensive and furtive communion with Jesus for the last time. As they begin to face the cold new possibility of going on without Jesus. As they wrestle with the prospect of being left alone in a hostile world. I can only imagine how they must have drunk in these words, memorising them, meditating on them, arguing over their meaning, parsing over them again and again for crumbs of guidance and comfort in the days ahead.

We might think of this sequence as a kind of spoken Last Will and Testament. I think it is important to see it that way because it is generally at the end of our lives that we clarify, amongst all the tumult and distraction and day-to-day ordinariness, what is really important. We distil what our lives have meant and what we hope for the future. We seek the company of those we love. We express with a decisive finality who we are. What Jesus chooses to say now, we should regard as of supreme importance. It is a final summation of who he is and what he teaches. He reveals to the disciples what previously has been concealed, and he names them as his equals. No longer servants, but friends.

And this is his final summation:

God is love. Love one another as I have loved you.

How often have we heard these phrases? If you had to distil Christianity down to its barest elements, you could do worse than those. God is love. Love one another.

How good are you at loving, friends?

I wonder if familiarity dulls us to these words and their radicalness. How can we hear them today as though for the first time? How can we access their urgency, their insistence, their revolutionary character, as they must have been for the disciples who hear them firsthand?

One way, I think, is to remind ourselves of the context in which they are spoken.

We know that the world of the first century was a universe teeming with gods. It was an intensely polytheistic place. For the ordinary Roman, or the Greek, or the Egyptian, the gods were an inherent reality of what you did and what you experienced. It was expected that they would play a role, either in favour, curse, or indifference, the small affairs of your day-to-day living, and the great affairs of your kingdom. To the gods who presided over every aspect of life, you would appeal for the success of your business, for the safe passage of your ships, for the health of your household, for advantageous and harmonious marriage, for victory in war and stability in peace.

But what were the gods like?

The most influential of the ancient gods has always been the Greek. It is they who preceded the development of the Roman gods, and whose mythology has shaped divine stories throughout history and its many cultures.

The foremost of the Greek gods was Zeus. Presiding over the pantheon of Olympus, Zeus reigned, having overthrown the Titans and their primordial parents. Zeus was the god of sky and thunder, honoured above all, and deserving of sacrifice and worship befitting his station. But Zeus was also married to the goddess Hera, and was serially unfaithful to her. Zeus was a god driven by his lust. Again and again, he would see a mortal woman and desire her. He would couple with her, and his children became the demigods. But very often these couplings were violent and brutal. Sometimes he would disguise himself to get what he wanted. Sometimes he used force. Zeus was, in blunt terms, a serial rapist.

Perhaps you have heard of Prometheus, the god who, taking pity on humanity, gave them the gift of fire. And Zeus, furious at this unsanctioned act of initiative, punished Prometheus by chaining him to a mountain and condemning him that every day an eagle should come and peck out his liver.

Or Poseidon, the god of the sea. He too was as power-hungry and rapacious as his brother Zeus, and on one occasion forced himself upon a woman named Medusa, or was then transformed by Athena into a snake-haired monster.

These were the gods of the ancient world. They were not always so brutally callous. And the mythological stories are, in part, moral tales that serve an instructive, ethical purpose as well as a religious one.

But the gods of the Greek pantheon could never be accused of being characterised by ‘love’. Certainly not in the way that we understand it, and the way that Jesus or John means it. All the love of the ancient gods was directly inwardly. They loved themselves. They loved their pride and their vanity and their desire. They loved power and they loved to exercise it.

That’s why the historian Tom Holland in his excellent book ‘Dominion’ asserts so strongly the impact that the Christian gospel of love has exercised on the Western view of ourselves and our place in the world. What a transformation it must have been for those who had spent their lives making sacrifices to the capricious and self-loving gods of the old Pantheon, to think that God might love them. Not just favour them, but to enfold Godself, by God’s very nature, into loving relationship with them through God’s given son.

It changed the world.

And it must continue to change the world, through us.

The most important thing to say about this love that changes the world, is that it is not a feeling. It is not a chemical reaction that occurs in the brain and is exhausted. Not sentimentality. Not a temporary feeling of passion or nostalgia. It is not affection. Affection and passion may accompany love, but love in this theological sense encompasses so much more than the heart that beats harder.

Love is the greatest of all the gifts of the spirit. Love is our law. It is our constitution. It is our judge and our government. It is our yardstick and our scale. It speaks in our heart in no uncertain terms, to tell us what it requires. Love longs for reconciliation and forgiveness. It insists on mercy. It is patient and it is kind. Love is not proud, but it will fight for what is right. It is not jealous, but will make sacrifices for justice. Love is revealed in Jesus, God incarnate, who shares our life in the world. It is in love that the world is made, and toward love that all things bend.

Love is relationship. It is the obligation of being created things. We love because God first loved us. So it cannot rise and fall with our mood or our sentiment. It is for that reason that it is possible to love strangers, or our enemy. It makes it possible, above all, to die for what is right, as Jesus does.

It is for the law of love that we must be known for our staunch opposition to violence against women. It is for the law of love that we must be known as enemies of violence against children. It is for the law of love that we must be squarely against colonisation and unjust war and capricious injustice. We haven’t always been good at that, but we must become better. That is how we redeem the Gospel in the eyes of the world. The law of love places us in opposition to all those things that the old gods were. It places us in opposition to all the things that the gods of our day represent. The god of money, the god of power, the god of sex, the god of profit, the god of consumption, the god of novelty. The god of self-love is like a still pond, stagnant and unclean, and rotten. Nothing grows there. But the love of relationship, love that is given and received, is a river. It has movement, it gives life. It is clear and clean. You can drink from that water.

There is no fault in the law of love. It can never lose its power. It can never lose its revolutionary character. Only we, who can fail to live up to it. We don’t need a new story. The old story is still strong. It is ever young. We just have to keep telling it, keep holding on to it, keep making it real in our lives, and it will vindicate us. It cannot fail to vindicate us. The law of love will live on after us. No institutional failing of our making can diminish it. We can only diminish ourselves as its representatives and its disciples. But through it, we may abide in the great love of Jesus Christ. That for which there is no better thing to live for.

May the spirit strengthen and renew us as we seek to live out this final will and testament of Jesus Christ the lover:

Love one another as I have loved you.

Amen

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Easter 5
28/4/2024

1 John 4:7-21
Psalm 32
John 15:1-8

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love” (1 John 4).

John speaks here of the fear we carry because we do not believe that we are loved. But we need to unpack John’s logic a bit to see this.

“There is no fear in love”, he writes, “but perfect love casts out fear”. By itself, this can’t be true. Love fears losing what it loves: our children, perhaps, or our health, our identity, our independence, our beautiful and meaningful things. Our newspapers are filled with the loss – or the fear of losing – things we love, and so also our lives are filled with insurances, locks, seat belts and child safety policies. These things are not the absence of love but the presence of love’s fear. We secure ourselves in such ways in the hope that they will keep us safe.

But John continues: “…for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love”. John is interested not in the fear of loss but in our fear of God’s judgement (and our judgement of each other). The fear of such judgement arises from our freedom. Our capacity to make decisions – to choose one thing or another – carries the possibility of error and the reality of responsibility, and that responsibility brings with it the likelihood of judgement: an affirmation or rejection of what we have chosen. What if I make the wrong decision? What will God – or you – make of that?

There are certain kinds of decisions in which this hardly matters. Being wrong in daily decisions may simply cost us a bit of extra time, or maybe even thousands of dollars, but for many of us neither of these would be a particularly significant loss. We might cop a bit of flak, but being wrong on the small scale is something with which we’re quite accustomed and is often not much more than inconvenient.

But there are other kinds of decisions where it does matter and so where we do worry. Do I risk giving up my day job for something much less reliable but seemingly more faithful? Do I stay in or leave a shaky marriage? Do we close the congregation down, turn off the life support, or send the troops to war? Decisions like this give rise not only to the fear that I might lose something I love. If I make what is judged to be the wrong decision, I might also now stand exposed, accused and shamed, and so lose even more. What does John’s “perfected in love” mean here? What has love to do with such fear? How does one “get” such love, generate such love?

This is rather the wrong question; love is not a moral possibility, something we can generate to secure ourselves within that risky venture we call life. John does not say that if you love “enough”, you will have nothing to fear, so just love more. This merely restates the problem. If we fear we might do the wrong thing, we fear that we have not loved properly. The problem is that we don’t know what love is in this or that specific situation. Love has been turned into “doing the right thing”, but we can’t ever know just what the right thing is.

What, then, is it to be made perfect in love? What will break fear’s grip on us?

To be perfected in love doesn’t mean we have been made perfect lovers – that we now always do the right thing. It means rather that we have been perfected by a lover. The love which matters here is not, in the first moment, the love we generate. The love which matters has already been given: “Behold the manner of love the Father has given to us”, says John. And what is this “manner of love”? It is that we are called the children of God (1 John 3.1). There is no punishment to fear because, while our righteousness can be denied, our status as children cannot. This is love: not that we love God, but that God loves us. The love which really matters is the love that this one has for us. Perfection in love is knowing that, no matter what, this love will not let us go.

Three consequences flow from this, or perhaps just one in three modes.

First, John says to us: You are loved in this way. You are called the children of God. And nothing can change that. You do not stop being children by virtue of mistakes you make, and neither are you more God’s children by virtue of any good you might do. There is nothing to fear because you cannot be lost.

Second, John says to us: you are then, deeply, deeply free in all things. This is not a consumerist freedom of choice, not freedom to choose. It is freedom in choosing. In fear and trembling, we must say that, so far as our relationship with God is concerned, we cannot make the wrong choice. Love without fear springs from the confidence that nothing we can do can separate us from the love of God. This is the moral horror of the gospel, and our only hope.

But third, John says to us: we can only know ourselves to be free in this way by becoming God-like lovers ourselves. We can only know the freedom God’s love brings by loving in the way God loves. This is the meaning of grace, mercy and forgiveness. These are not merely nice things to do. They set aside punishment which might rightly have been imposed, and so set aside the fear of punishment.

Love like this is radically disruptive. Grace and mercy set just punishment aside. Forgiveness breaks the cycle of violence which generates the fear which makes us violent in the first place.

If Christian talk about grace means anything, it means just such a rupture of the tragic cycles within which we are all caught and by which we are tempted.

There is no fear in love; the love which perfects casts out our fear because, despite everything, it brings us to our completion as children God will not let go.

Love, then, as you have been loved, Jesus says. Become lovers with the height and depth and breadth of the love of God.

This is faith.

This is life.

This is hope.

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Easter 4
21/4/2024

1 John 3:16-24
Psalm 23
John 10:11-18

“All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them.”

The notion of “abiding” is an important one in John’s writings. The Greek word translated here could also be translated as remain, stay, live, or dwell. There is a strong sense of “where we are.”

Yet this is not simply a nice idea by which we evoke a sense of cosiness with God. Most of the things which matter in the scriptural descriptions of the relationships which ought to stand between ourselves and our gods are a matter of polemic: not this, but that; not here but there; not this way, but that way. It is the same with John’s call to abide in Christ: abide here, not somewhere else. Or, let this one abide in you, and not some other.

There are indeed many places where we might abide and many things which might abide in us. Among these, the geographical options are the least interesting. Much more important is how we are living wherever we happen to be. This is, in one sense, a matter of morals – what we do and don’t do to ourselves or each other. There is certainly a strong commandment to be heard in our reading this morning: “Love one another”. And there is some basic shape given to that as well: “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” But the idea of abiding is as much a matter of our approach to our situation – the choice we make about where we find ourselves.

So, what kind of abiding places present themselves to us? The past is one tempting place: nostalgia for a time when things seemed simpler. Perhaps they were not simpler, but we were more energetic or had more power over the events which affected us directly, or were simply less aware of what was actually going on. Another tempting place of abode is the future – putting off making the most of where we are now, even perhaps denying justice to others now because we think that this will get us where we want to be in the long term. Whether it is nostalgia or a vision of where we imagine we are heading, where we actually are here and now is reduced to a iife we simply have to endure, either because the best is now behind us or we must wait for it to come.

Alternatively, we might desire to abide in an identity other than the one which is really ours – denying, or at least lamenting, the religious or cultural or gender or age or economic identity we actually have. This is the cry for justice, whether in economic or social or “psychological” terms. We are not acknowledged for what we think we are worth or for the effort we have put in.

Or perhaps we just don’t know where we are, but that it’s not yet the right place.

And then there are the kinds of things in might abide in us.  These are about the role we play in the story we seem to be living. Positively, Goodwill, compassion and love might abide in us. Or less negatively, selfishness, distraction, self-delusion, or fear. The difference between these two outlooks is the difference between choosing to be fully alive where we are, whatever its realities, and living as if we are is just a place to escape. It is that latter option which John addresses in his letter today: in this God, we have the power to live where we are – here, now – whether in green pastures by still waters, or on a cross.

Where we would abide – where would we live if we had the choice – is an intensely personal thing but it has to do with where we think we’d feel safest and most able to be ourselves. But life is not simply a matter of safety; it is also a matter of truth. And truth and life meet in the idea of vocation, or calling – God’s calling of us into where we actually are – and it engages every level of our lives. At the personal level, it has to do with being with the people to whom we actually are married, or with whom we actually do work, or next to whom we actually live, or with whom we share an identity as members of a church congregation. Who wants to abide with the cranky or noisy neighbour, the lazy colleague, the self-righteous or indifferent pew-sitter? Which nation wants to be in the political context of massive human displacement, bringing in refugees for whom we haven’t budgeted, who are different from us, whom we don’t understand? Which church would not choose a different time and space to be church – perhaps one of not-so-distant memory, rather than one in which congregations get smaller by one or two each year, find it harder to keep the budget balanced, find a minister, or simply keep going?

In contrast to so many of the realities of our lives, who would not choose rather to be led by green pastures and to lie down beside still waters? And, yet, the psalmist who speaks of green pastures and still waters speaks also of walking through the darkest valley, of a table of abundance spread even in the presence of his enemies, his head anointed, his cup running over. St Augustine declared that the singer of the psalms is Jesus himself. This is a helpful thought to the extent that it claims the psalms as the prayer the prayers of the one the church believes to be the true human being, the prayers of one who lives as and where it is given him to be. Green pastures or the valley of the shadow of death – these are much of a muchness when lived in and watched over by this Shepherd.

To abide in this Shepherd is to rise to a life of courage, although not bravado. There is here no call to brace ourselves, to muscle up as best we can and charge at those obstacles which seem to stand in our way. Rather, we are called to abide in a different reality – in the reality which is the humanity of Jesus himself, properly connected to the very source of life itself.

This, John says, is possible because Jesus himself abides in us. This is not a mystical or spooky reality – a merely spiritual thing which no one can see. If it were, then John would not speak of the commandment by which the reality of Jesus is proven: love one another. Love, that is, those real and tangible others who are within your reach, who constitute the place, the story, in which you live. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for those who are your particular ‘other’ .” (cf. John 13.35). By this, we will also know ourselves to be his disciples – if we have love. In this way, Jesus abides in us, as we are to abide in him.

In the end, this is all that we need to concern ourselves with along the way. What does the moment demand? Love of those with whom it is given to us to abide: to be present, to respond to the demands of the present.

This is the work of our lives. This is how we abide in him, and he in us. In this way, what the psalm-singing Christ himself knows can become what we too come to know: a life – a troubled life, most likely – shot through with goodness and mercy, a dwelling place with God all the days of our lives.

By the grace of God, may such a life be our place of abode, our habitation, our home. Amen.

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Easter 3
14/4/2024

Acts 3:12-19
Luke 24:36b-48

Festering
Many of you will have noticed that the Brittany Higgins-Bruce Lehrmann case returned for another of its many, many regular appearances in the newspapers this week. The case concerns an alleged rape in Parliament House in Canberra and has been accompanied by vigorous commentary from all sides about what happened and what it signifies in a culture of fear, duplicity and suspicion. The whole affair has become the kind of thing for which the word “sordid” is perhaps the most apt description.

Nonetheless, the story still claims the headlines. This is likely because it tells us something about ourselves, touching as it does upon the dynamics of power, desire, trust, guilt, safety, justice. It is a classic tale in which we ourselves are played, and we look on wondering whether it will turn out to be a tragedy or a comedy, in the literary sense: will it end low or high? We watch to learn our own prospects in similar situations: are we living tragedies or comedies?

I raise the matter today not to risk speculating or commenting on the allegation but simply because it is now five years since the alleged attack. As well as being luridly captivating, the story lingers as a festering wound. Even if a “resolution” finally comes, that wound will not likely ever be healed. This will probably be so for those directly involved but more broadly, we know that this story is neither unique nor not the last of such stories. We know these kinds of struggles, and that they will not end.

The Higgins-Lehrmann case, of course, is not the only thing in the news or our lives which has this character. This festering dynamic is replicated in most of what ends up in the news, apart from those contrived little comedies we call “human interest” stories. What is the Gaza war but such an open wound, or the Ukraine conflict or, more profoundly, the ongoing impact of colonialism, racism, sexism, or rapacious capitalism?  Whether it’s the continuing impact over five years of an alleged rape, or of the 80-odd years of the Palestinian conflict, or of the 400 or so years of Western imperialism, or of 2000 years of Christian antisemitism, it looks suspiciously like the peace we hope for is not coming. The stories we are forced to live continue to be agonised ones we hope will turn out to be comedic, but we fear will be tragic. As hopelessly pessimistic as this might seem, none of us turns on the news expecting anything other than more such struggle.

Ignorance
Let’s hold that thought for a moment as we turn to our reading this morning from Acts, in which we hear part of a sermon by Peter (Acts 3.12-19). The death of Jesus was another sordid tale now slowly slipping from public interest. Peter lays the blame for Jesus’ death unambiguously at the feet of the crowd he addresses, and then comes to my focus text for this morning:

“I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer”

The meaning appears straightforward: it is because of “ignorance” that the messiah suffers. The implication seems to be that had his audience known, they would not have crucified him. Jesus’ death now looks like an accident, in the same way that we might not notice that we put red knickers into the washing machine with the whites, delivering to us a new, rose-tinted wardrobe: “Oops, if I’d known they were in there, I would have pulled them out!” Oops, if I’d known you were the messiah, Jesus, I wouldn’t have crucified you. My bad.

The problem with this is that it suggests the error was one of not having the right information. But now, finally, the knowledge is given, and the endless, festering suffering will cease. We want to hear this kind of story, of course, because it finally resolves things: the hidden truth is now known, the confusion melts away, the estranged lovers are reconciled, the music swells in the background as the credits begin to roll and all is now right with the world, at least until the house lights come back up.

But the ignorance with which Peter charges the people here cannot be a mere lack of knowledge. One of the features of Jesus’ ministry is that it is often rejected precisely at the point that it is most appealing, most persuasive, most informative. In John’s gospel in particular, Jesus’ power and so identity are as close as possible to being irrefutable because of what he has done, yet still his opponents cannot see. Ignorance is here not the absence of knowledge; it is the inability to know. And so it is the inability to act differently, to change radically how the story will end, the inability to stop the rot, to close the festering wound. This kind of ignorance is a condition and not a matter of information. More concretely, it is the likelihood that, had we known that Jesus was the messiah, we would still have crucified him because knowing who he is would not be enough to stop us from doing so. Our capacity to crucify the image of God in Jesus springs not from ignorance but from the fact that we very often crucify the image of God in this Rachel or that Abdul.

While a lot has changed since Peter preached, a lot has not. We live in an age in which we might have expected that we had worked a few things out, that a few wounds would now be well healed. We have managed this, of course, on the relatively simple level of nature, at the level of mere knowledge. Penicillin, bypass surgeries and organ transplants treat wounded bodies very well. But wounded souls are a whole other matter, whether the souls of individuals or the souls of whole societies. While we tell ourselves that we live in an increasingly complex world, this is an evasion. Despite our sense of increased complexity and despite the promises we might have imagined the modern world would bring, we still see our troubled selves in ancient texts like the Scriptures. And while “religion” lingers as a convenient scapegoat in our modern context, this defence masks the painful reality, even where the wounds look to be religiously inflicted. Religion is one feature which distinguishes Israelis and Palestinians, but it is not why they are killing each other; religion is not why men rape, or someone might turn to alcohol; it is not why psychotherapists are flat chat treating fractured spirits. Our problem is profoundly human, not religious.

And neither is any of this about how much we do or don’t know. When Peter speaks of ignorance, he speaks of what we cannot see without the specific light of the resurrection: You could not know him then, Peter says, but now you can. You could not know yourselves, but now you can. Peter’s “in ignorance” is not that we crucified the wrong person; it is that we crucify at all, that we imagine that crucifixions heal our festering wounds, rather than exacerbate them. What are the reports which fill our newsfeeds but crucifixions, or fear of crucifixions? Our ignorance is our condition, is our suffering.

Light
This would all be utterly hopeless if Peter stopped there, for what can such ignorance do to teach itself? But he continues: In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his messiah would suffer. The messiah suffers because our ignorance causes our suffering, and he is one of us. The messiah – the image of God – suffers because we are the image of God, and we suffer.

But while our suffering only festers, the suffering of God in the messiah changes things. God’s suffering changes things because it reveals something we cannot otherwise see. This is why Peter’s talk of ignorance and suffering arises in the context of his proclamation of the resurrection. The risen Jesus is not merely risen, not merely un-deaded. The resurrection reveals the crucifiers’ knowledge of Jesus as ignorance. To say that Jesus is risen is to say that the crucified one is risen, the one who apparently deserved crucifixion because such a thing surely could not have happened to God’s anointed.

But if this one is raised, then the resurrection is a light which reveals what we could not know, what we could not see. The resurrection reveals how very, very dark it has been, how dark it still is, and what it would take for us to begin to see.

But Peter’s proclamation is that “what it would take” has already been achieved. If Jesus is risen, then there appears now a revelation by which hidden things might now be seen, by which unknown things might now be heard, by which untouched things might now be felt, by which broken things might begin to be healed.

This light makes possible a radical re-valuation of what we are, what we do, and what is done to us. If we saw by this light, what would that mean for even the possibility of rape, or for the idea that bombs are an efficient instrument of justice, or for our assumption that a person is only what we can imagine her to be, or for the conviction that tomorrow is better secured with money than by trusting each other?

Whatever it would mean, we won’t know unless we heed Peter’s call: Repent, and turn to the God who embraces the crucified and crucifier alike, so that our wounds might no longer fester but be healed in God.

Repent.
Re-think.
Re-view.
Re-imagine.
Re-form.
Res-urrect.

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Easter 2
7/4/2024

John 20:19-31
1 John 1:1-2:2

Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock

Friends as we consider our text today, I am mindful that two occasions of cultural significance have occurred over the past week. The first is Easter Sunday – the ringing day of joy and disorienting triumph at the risen Christ’s conquest over death. The second is April Fool’s Day.

I wonder what these two days might have to do with each other. Perhaps more than we might imagine.

Were you fooled this week, friends? One great example of comic deception I saw this year was a post on social media by Jim Penman, the head Jim’s business empire (responsible for Jim’s mowing, Jim’s plumbing, etc) announcing the formation of Jim’s Political Party, offering a pragmatic, practical, common-sense platform to bring down housing costs and end the dysfunction on Spring St. Finally, a man to take a whipper-snipper to the weeds growing in our political system. Very amusing!

On the other hand, I have a friend who hates April Fool’s Day. She thinks pranks are mean-spirited and the tricks and stunts of the day to be tedious and annoying. So, all through April 1 she holds herself in a state of sceptical readiness – on her guard, alert and vigilant, determined not to be made a fool of.

In our text today, Thomas holds himself in a similar state of determined scepticism. He says the famous words: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” For this moment of disbelief, theological history has branded him Doubting Thomas.

Consider the resonance of those words. Thomas does not say that he ‘does not believe’. He is not professing an intellectual absence of belief. He is not a neutral agnostic. He is not a post-Enlightenment modernist, scorning the possibility of the miraculous subversion of nature’s laws. Thomas is not a philosopher or a physician. Thomas will not believe.

What’s going on here? We may lack conviction in all manner of things. But to refuse to believe – that is something different. There is more there than meets the eye.

It’s tempting to read the acts of the disciples as shallow theological parables. Vignettes, offering simple lessons of faith. Read superficially, Thomas offers a straightforward moral: trust God. Believe in Him. Persevere through doubt. Do not be troubled by what seems to you to be impossible, but hold fast to the promises of God.

Not necessarily a bad moral at all. Perhaps an encouragement that we need more than we realise.

But I remind myself that Jesus’ disciples are not fictional characters. They are real, historical human beings. Complex, contradictory, flawed. Subject to all kinds of influences, wishes, concerns, fears, and motivations. The Gospel writers have theological agendas in the way they include and frame their narrative, but there is flesh and blood behind the text.

Take Judas, for instance. He plays a simple role in our story. We need him to play his part in order to bring about the dramatic climax of Good Friday. But Judas too is only a man. Why does Judas betray Jesus?

The Bible suggests one explanation when it speaks of ‘the Devil’ entering Judas as he sits at the table with Jesus. Perhaps we can identify with that experience – moments of sudden, involuntary impulses to evil and to violence. Sometimes we recognise them, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we resist them, and sometimes we give in. Perhaps Judas’ betrayal was a terrible moment of surrendered temptation. Sometimes people who have been convicted of violent crimes speak of this. An instant of almost demonic madness, in which everything is changed irrevocably forever.

Others have thought Judas an envious figure. Hovering always at the shadowy edge of Jesus’ brightness, perhaps he couldn’t bear any longer to be the second man. Jealousy has the power to drive us to places that we’d never have believed that we could go. Perhaps in the early hours of the morning, Judas would lie unsleeping, imagining himself as Messiah. Imagining the crown upon his own head. Hearing the hosannas cry out for Judas Iscariot.

Perhaps in the end it was not vice at all that drove Judas to Caiaphas, but frustrated longing. Some have seen in Judas a radical, a zealot. Maybe it was political liberation he longed for. The long-awaited uprising against Roman oppression with the Messiah, the new David, riding at the head of its army. Maybe Judas had grown tired of hearing about the Kingdom of God instead of the Kingdom of Israel. Maybe he is impatient with spiritual and moral teaching. Maybe he doesn’t want to love his enemy. Maybe he is tired of forgiveness. Maybe by leading those temple guards into the garden he hoped to waken Jesus from his slumber, that it would be the striking of the match, the first trumpet-call of a new and momentous age.

I wonder if something of this kind is taking place with our Thomas.

Doubt is so rarely a matter of indifferent scepticism. When Thomas says, ‘I do not believe’, that is not the voice of incredulity. That is the voice of pain. Those are the words of fear.  Thomas is afraid. Terrorised by that most painful wound of all – disappointed hope. For Thomas had already drunk too deeply from that cup. He had already surrendered his heart to that cross-shattered illusion. He had already wept too long for that buried fantasy. No, says Thomas. I will not endure that black agony a second time. I will not expose my heart again to the knife. I will not believe. My hopes are ash, and I will not suffer them to be reignited.

Disappointment is a terrible thing. When a long yearning for marriage goes unsatisfied. When paths that we thought would always be open to us are closed by age, or injury, or illness. When long-held, secret dreams and ambitions come to nothing. When a husband or wife with whom we expected to grow old just slips away.

The worst of it is that when once we have tasted the bitterness of disappointment we look sceptically at every cup that is then offered to us. We do not allow ourselves to trust in joy. There is a spectre that haunts our mind in the midst of hope. It arises like a ghost from the grave of past hopes long dead. And it whispers to us, ‘This is not real. It shall not last. Your joy will pass away and when it does it will subside with such a dreadful agony that you will wish that you had never known it.’ It is not a malicious thing really, but arises from a dark, self-protective corner of ourselves that knows that a heart that is entirely given may be entirely broken. For disappointment is not merely sadness. Disappointment humiliates us for having had the audacity to have been happy.

But in Jesus, the disciples’ hopes had seemed so secure, so safe. Surely this Nazarene was not one of those false saviours with each of whom Israel’s hopes had risen and fallen so pitifully. For with Jesus it was no longer a matter of hope. Their eyes had beheld his miracles and their ears had rung with his authority. The skies and waves themselves had seemed to shimmer and bend away from him in awe. And so Thomas had placed his fragile heart, whole and entire, at the feet of Jesus, sure that he would keep it safe. But then Jesus had borne it to Calvary and nailed it to the cross.

So when Peter came bursting into that room Thomas had no more heart to give. How could Peter do this to me again? How could he be cruel enough to raise a second seed of hope only to crush it beneath his heel. For if Jesus was not the one, then no one ever could be. If this good shepherd, this man whom earth and sky obeyed, this healer and exorcist, this prophet and teacher, if this man was not the Messiah, then our Messiah is never coming, and nothing will ever be good and true again.

But Thomas had merely glimpsed the beginning and mistaken it for the ending. For when Jesus strode from that empty tomb he carried Thomas’ poor heart in his hands like a delicate treasure. He had kept it safe through Hell and death and brought it out again to the sun. And in that darkened upstairs room, as Thomas touched the scars on his palms and felt his side, smoothed over with vulnerable grace, Jesus gave Thomas’ heart back to him.

May we be so bold as to open ourselves to the fear of disappointment. Not to make ourselves free of doubt, but to make ourselves vulnerable, and let the healed hands and feet of Jesus lead us again on the road of discipleship.

Amen.