2^nd Sunday of Easter  2026   Thomas

In our human ways of imagining I sometimes forget that Jesus’ resurrection is inevitable because the person of Jesus with a human nature is intimately one with God the Father and the Spirit.  At no time did the Father have any other plan for Jesus with his human nature, body and soul, except his return to being one with God in that unimaginable realm where God lives.             

 

And this risen Jesus also, as he promised, sent the Spirit to the men and women who had followed him.  As clear as it was that Jesus died, Jesus is alive.   That conviction came even to St. Paul who had persecuted the early Christians and who had never even met Jesus.  Paul, himself, tells of a personal experience with Jesus.  We have in Paul’s very own writings in First Corinthians his own first person testimonies that he has seen the risen Lord.    I quote: “Did I not see Jesus the Lord?”  And elsewhere after speaking of the risen Lord’s appearance to the disciples he writes: “in the end he appeared even to me.”  That experience convinced him that Jesus lived.  The power of his encounter with the risen Lord is evident in his stunning transformation from a persecutor of Christians to an apostle.  

 

All the other early Christian reports of experiences of the risen Jesus are written by third parties in the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John).   These third parties are members of a community of believers in Jesus’ resurrection.  And oddly none of these third parties explicitly testifies to their own personal experience of the Risen Lord in the way that Paul testifies about his, however brief his testimony.    At least Matthew of the four gospel writers must have seen the risen Lord.  He writes about himself in that gospel but oddly not a single word about his personal experience of the risen Lord.  

 

Certainly all the third party accounts of the risen Lord are genuine expressions of the faith and hope of the witnesses of the resurrection and their communities.  But I so wish we had some other first person versions of a vision of the risen Lord similar to Paul’s. Take Peter, for example.     There is some doubt that the apostle Peter is the writer of the Second Epistle of Peter.   But if he is, he in this Epistle describes himself as a personal witness of the Transfiguration.    But he writes not a single personal word about his experience as a witness of Jesus’ resurrection.  How instructive in his Epistle would be Peter’s first person account, of what he himself saw, for example, when Jesus made that second appearance to the disciples and there responded to welcome Thomas.    

 

And how instructive would be Thomas’ own first person report about his encounter with the Risen Christ.    I would like to hear Thomas tell it.  He might have answered my questions!   Why, Thomas, did you raise the stakes so high?    “I won’t believe,” the third person account so reads, “unless I can put my hand into the wound in his side.”  Yes, I would like him to answer my questions.   What kind of sorrow moved you to make this extreme demand about the wound?    Why did you doubt your own friends’ testimony?  Were you angry because Jesus appeared to them and not to you?   But did you not expect that Jesus might appear again?   Is that why you returned to the group?  And then after Jesus encouraged you to touch him, were you afraid?    I wish that we had some personal supplements to the testimony in the four gospels.   How about, for example, Thomas giving us a Ted Talk?

 

As the whole story is recorded, however, by John, surely, the story clearly records the faith of Thomas and of John and of the whole early community.  They came to understand that God’s exaltation of Jesus in some way restored an integral physical presence after the suffering and humiliating death on the cross.  His wounds on his resurrected body become the sign of that consolation.  His wounds become badges of honor.  His wounds encourage all of us who suffer in our humanity. We imagine this and remember the words that Jesus had spoken during his life:  Blessed are those who mourn…blessed are those who suffer persecution…Blessed are the merciful…        

 

But let me address my disappointment that we have no first person accounts, not from Peter, not from Thomas, not from Matthew.  And, excuse me, not from John, either.  There is more doubt than certitude that the writer of John’s gospel is the same person who is described in that gospel as entering the empty tomb with Peter and as seeing and believing.   Is this John the evangelist?          

And not from Mary Magdalen.   In John’s gospel we have a third person account of her in the cemetery garden thinking Jesus was the gardener.  And an account of the two guys on the road to Emmaus.   They like Mary seem to be quoted exactly.   But they and she and the other women do not record their own experience of the risen Lord.

 

But let’s be clear:  the principal appearances of Jesus are with groups of his disciples where they recognize him.   They hear then about his personal love for them and his instructions for the future.

 

And I think that is the point.    We are not being called simply to follow Mary Magdalen or the women, or Thomas, or Peter or John or the men on the way to Emmaus.   We are called today by the risen Jesus to membership in the community of men and women disciples to whom he returned in resurrection.  Jesus commissions them together to preach the mystery of his enduring love shown in his risen self.  The community’s faith in Jesus transcends the faith of all others.

 

So yes, admire those individuals to whom Jesus appeared.   The gospels call us to believe them, yes, but calls us more so to faith in the  community.   The New Testament is the story of the first Christian community of believers called by Jesus Christ and he calls us now to be one with them.   Jesus saves us in a community.             

And, of course, Paul had to give first person testimony. He himself had to write “I have seen the Lord.”  He was not like the members of that first community whose testimony was credible in the third person.