April 7, 2013 at Saint Mark Catholic Church in Norman, OK
Acts of the Apostles 5, 12-16 + Psalm 118 + Revelation 1, 9-11, 12-13, 17-19 + John 20, 19-31
Sadly, the world in which we live does not believe in miracles. The way we live today and the way we examine and process information is for the most part completely closed. I am here. You are there. God is somewhere else. Everything has a place. Science can and must explain everything. If it does not, it will, sooner or later, given enough research explain everything to our satisfaction. This kind of thinking raises lots of problems with the New Testament, and especially with the miracle stories. Those stories, all of them, too often find us wondering: “How did he do that?” or “What really happened?” Then some begin wondering about the people who reported those miracles. You know how that thinking goes. They were simple people living primitive lives a long time ago. Lacking the technology of our sophisticated times, they were easily impressed by magic tricks. Think how they would have been astonished over a lightbulb! They would have called that miraculous!
Nowhere in this thinking is there any place for God. Our compartmentalized lives have isolated God to heaven, and left us very much in charge of things, and this makes openness to the meaning of miracles a challenge. The miracles performed by Jesus Christ, and in his name by his disciples were not magic tricks to attract and entertain a crowd of simple people who did not have the entertainment opportunities we enjoy. They did not experience these miracles and report them as just ordinary events that happened all the time. They were astonished. They were stunned enough to drag the sick out into the streets hoping that Peter’s shadow might pass over them. They knew something that we in all our sophistication can’t quite seem to grasp. Something is different here with these disciples of that man Jesus. Something has happened in this life on this earth. Something has changed.
Now this is what we see in the story of Thomas. Something kept him from believing. I think he could not believe because he could not imagine that God would act this way: that in the death of Jesus Christ God could accomplish something. Thomas wanted evidence. It was not enough that the boundaries or the distinction between matter and spirit were broken as Jesus passed again and again through locked doors. Thomas had to have more proof. He wanted scientific proof: touch. But he didn’t touch. It never says that he did. He was invited to do more than touch. He was invited to believe. He was invited to believe that God could do more than Thomas could imagine. The limits that Thomas had placed on what God could do as well as where God was had to go before Thomas could believe.
This all started with a young girl who said “Yes” to a messenger who invited her to believe that God could do something unheard of and unimagined. That incident, called the Incarnation, challenges to this day minds closed to God’s intervention, involvement, and presence in this physical and real world. The Incarnation is the first miracle, the first unmistakable evidence that something new is breaking into humanity. To think of it shakes open closed minds and hearts that live in the absence of God or indifferent to God’s presence and action.
Miracles are signs of God’s care for us. That is what they mean, and that is why the stories of them have been passed down to us for so long. What happened to Thomas that day when he spoke those memorable words: “My Lord and My God” was that the boundaries of his limited expectations of how God works and where God is to be found broke open. God was present in that nail-pierced man with an opening in his side. God was acting and saving, raising up, and healing in a way no one ever thought of. The old expectations of how God would save his people collapsed in a moment. Old ideas about those categories of spirit and matter, heaven and earth, could no longer be sustained, because something new has happened and something new has begun.
Easter is still a challenge to boundaries we imagine and the expectations we have about how God works and where God is to be found. Easter is also a challenge to our ideas about life and death, power and weakness, suffering and strength. Easter can also awaken our expectations about miracles, and stir again some honest astonishment over things science does explain which for those who are invited to believe suddenly become once again signs of God’s love for us.
The final word from these readings today is that God is still expressing God’s love for us in the forgiving and healing ways of real disciples, and believers are still astonished at the discovery of God’s presence and action in the most unexpected and unimagined ways.