A space to explore and enquire, to doubt and to praise.
The Second Sunday of Easter, 11.00am Sung Eucharist
You don’t need to be a theatre buff to recognise what may be the most familiar and much loved quotation to be heard from the stages of the nation: I refer, of course, to the immortal line, ‘He’s behind you!’ To spell it out, ‘He’s behind you!’ signifies a situation where the audience can see something one of the characters on stage cannot. In the language of theatre studies, this is called ‘dramatic irony’. In a pantomime, it’s funny. But dramatic irony can also be tragic, as when the whole theatre knows that Juliet is merely asleep, while Romeo is convinced that she is dead.
In today’s reading from John’s Gospel, there is a single person who does not know what everyone else does: Thomas, sometimes referred to as ‘doubting Thomas’. The other disciples know that the crucified Jesus has risen; he has appeared to them in a locked room on Easter evening, and showed them his wounded hands and side. We, a congregation rather than an audience, are in the know – especially if we were here on Easter Day. It is true that last week we heard that most of the apostles didn’t believe the women who returned from the empty tomb with news of the resurrection. They thought this an ‘idle tale’. Now they know better – except for Thomas. All the disciples tell him of the wonders they have seen, but he won’t take their word for it.
Last week, in my Easter Day sermon, one of my themes was a widespread lack of trust in government and other institutions – including the church – seen at its most pronounced amongst conspiracy theorists, but certainly not only there. I hardly need spell out for you why our public life is currently so full of controversy about truth and lies, transparency and deception, trust and the lack of it. So perhaps we should have considerable sympathy for Thomas. Not least because so many of his fellow apostles didn’t at first believe the women, and yet now expect him to believe them.
For some, indeed, Thomas is a kind of hero, speaking up for common sense and honest doubt. Thomas is the one who stands for all our modern misgivings. The one who, we imagine, will sympathize with our wondering not only about the resurrection, but all our other questions and doubts too. Continuing this line of thought, we might be tempted to reverse the shape of the story in John’s Gospel, with the disciples looking rather credulous and unsophisticated, while Thomas is the one rightly recognising the ambiguity and uncertainty of our lives.
But let’s just pause a moment, and remember how dramatic irony works. In both the pantomime and the tragedy, the person who’s caught out is the one who thinks they can see the vital thing, whereas in fact they’re missing the vital thing. The danger of making Thomas into a hero is that we might start to see ourselves as the clever ones who are best placed to judge what is true and what is not; our doubts (of course) being more informed and intelligent than the faith of our forebears. And we, advanced 21st century people that we are, clearly qualify as the ones most able to decide who and what to trust.
Certainly we live in times where trust is fragile, and this morning we have heard a Gospel in which Thomas does not trust his fellow disciples when they speak about the resurrection. Perhaps he suspects them of making something up to reassure themselves. After all, he knows as well as anyone else the fear and confusion they all showed when Jesus was arrested.
Jesus appears to Thomas and and invites him not to be so mistrustful; not, to put it paradoxically, to believe so strongly in his own doubts, and his own criteria for faith.
You don’t have to see everything in order to believe; those who trust without seeing the full picture are called ‘blessed’; that is to say they are in tune with the truth, they have encountered the risen Christ even if they cannot fully comprehend how this is possible. And Christ seems to be saying to Thomas, and to us, that we must learn to grow in trusting one another and trusting in God. And that doing so does not remotely make us credulous, or suggest we should cease to ponder and reflect in a critical way.
Indeed one of the things that I love about Cathedrals are that they offer a capacious space to explore and enquire. No-one is required to sign up to anything in order to visit or to worship. And it’s not that long until the Portsmouth Cathedral Institute will be hosting a series of talks and discussions on a number of texts that challenged the religious and political status quo, including John Robinson’s Honest to God, Mary Daly’s The Death of God the Father, and Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. So yes, we welcome and encourage an honest and penetrating consideration of what and why we believe, or don’t believe – not to forget a similar interrogation of our actions, or lack of them.
But there are many aspects, many notes, to our individual and collective journeys of faith, as we can see from today’s readings. There we do indeed see Thomas struggling with what he has been told by others, but we also hear his affirmation of faith. Note, however, that today we have also heard Psalm 150, in which the predominant note is one of worship and of praise: praise of God’s mighty acts, in which the whole of creation is invited to celebrate its sheer existence. And our first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles, sees a different note again, in which Peter courageously proclaims to the religious authorities what they have seen and experienced in the death and resurrection of Christ. This same Christ is also named in the reading from Revelation, in the context of a letter to seven churches in Asia: encountering the one described as the ‘firstborn of the dead’ has led to the formation of a community called together to love God and neighbour, caring for another and serving God’s world.
So yes, struggle and affirmation, praise and proclamation, community and service, worship and action. There is nothing wrong with doubts, honestly explored, but they are not the be all and end all.
We seek to be a Cathedral community where all may find a spiritual home, whatever their struggles and doubts, and to be a place of praise, proclamation, and partnership. Today begins our second Season of Generosity, in which we focus both on what the Cathedral is about, and the way in which it is funded – congregational giving having a vital part to play. Many of you will shortly receive a letter from me about this, if you have not already, together with two booklets: one about the season of generosity, and one about legacies. All this has been long in the planning, and the daily news about rising costs and energy prices makes it a strange and perhaps unwelcome time for such a focus. But then again, generosity is surely not for times of plenty only, as the work of the Toilet Twinning charity evidences, providing clean water, toilets and hygiene kits in a way that saves and transforms lives. We as a Cathedral support the work of this charity, and there is a chance to hear about the difference it makes after this Eucharist.
I began this sermon with the line, ‘He’s behind you!’ And I end it with the affirmation that whether we can see it or not, whether we know it or not, the presence of the risen Christ is behind and before and below and above this act of eucharistic worship, and everything that we seek to be as a Cathedral. Without God’s overwhelming act of generosity, seen and known in Jesus Christ, we are nothing. So let us today, in the words of Psalm 150, ‘Praise God in his holy temple’. ‘Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Alleluia!’