Listen to the sermon with the player below, or, download the audio.
+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
“I will believe it when I see it.” Probably all of us at least have heard others say that, if we ourselves have not said that to others. “I will believe it when I see it” commonly indicates that someone does not think something will happen and will not believe that it did happen until having visual proof. Saying “I will believe it when I see it” may well go back to Thomas’s words in today’s Gospel Reading, which mentions “believing” five times, a frequency surpassed only by the Gospel Reading’s six times mentioning “seeing”. Those frequencies and the words’ combination on this Second Sunday of Easter give us the theme “Seeing and Believing”.
We are observing the Second Sunday of Easter, but the Gospel Reading covers events of Easter Evening itself, the rest of the week that followed, and the next or Second Sunday of Easter. The divinely‑inspired accounts of St. Mark and St. Luke at least mention the Easter Evening event, but St. John’s account alone gives us the details about the institution of the Office of the Holy Ministry and about Thomas. Poor Thomas! People usually pick on him for not believing without seeing, but in that regard he really was no worse than the other ten disciples. What really makes Thomas worse than the others was his strong refusal to believe coupled with his demand to touch the nail marks in Jesus’s hands and the spear’s hole in Jesus’s side.
What demands might we make as part of our believing? Do we demand archaeological or other proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that what is to be believed is actually true? Do we wrongly think that such proof can convince us to believe or that we choose to believe? Or, do we think that there really is a need to believe at all? Do we even think that we need forgiveness? Do we recognize that we not only are sinners but that we are also sinful by nature? Or, do we “believe” but perhaps not completely repent of our sin? Are we truly sorry for the sins we commit? Do we really want to stop committing them and to do better?
Such sins are the kind Jesus in the Gospel Reading tells Thomas to stop committing. Such sins are the kind Jesus in the Gospel Reading gives the disciples the authority to forgive. Such sins are the kind Jesus forgives us, when we repent and believe. As St. John writes in the Epistle Reading (Revelation 1:4-18), the day is coming when every eye will see Him, and those who do not repent and believe will wail on His account. Yet, whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he or she has not believed in the Name of the only‑begotten Son of God (John 3:18). We who repent of all our sin and believe in the Name of the only‑begotten Son of God are forgiven of all our sin and our sinful nature—we are forgiven by grace through faith in Jesus.
Some of you watched all or part of The History Channel’s miniseries “The Bible”. Did you happen to notice that in the miniseries Peter reportedly said that Jesus did not actually die and that Stephen said that they tried to kill Jesus but failed? Perhaps that understanding, which is essentially what the Muslims believe, explains both why the miniseries also played down Jesus’s resurrection (saying simply that He was “back”, like the poltergeist in the second movie with that name) and why the series omitted Thomas’s confession of Jesus as Lord and God (instead suggesting Thomas maybe had mistaken Jesus for someone else). No, Thomas did not make a mistake identifying the man in front of him: Jesus died and rose to save him, the ten, and each one of us.
In the Epistle Reading, we hear Jesus describe Himself as the one Who had died but is alive forever, and St. John in that same Reading calls Jesus the firstborn of the dead. Jesus is the firstborn of the dead because we similarly will be raised from the dead—we whom, St. John also says, Jesus has freed from our sins by His blood. Thomas saw and believed, and then Thomas confessed Jesus to be his Lord and his God (not as the Jehovah’s Witnesses think, that Thomas confessed Jesus to be his Lord but then looked up and confessed a distinct Jehovah to be his God). As evident from the passing through the walls and the nail‑prints and spear-hole, Jesus is God in human flesh—the same human flesh born of the Virgin Mary, crucified, died, buried, and risen from the dead—for us. In one way, Thomas was right to be fixated on the wounds of Jesus: those wounds identify the crucified Jesus with the risen Jesus, and so those wounds meant forgiveness for him, as those wounds also mean forgiveness for us. We have not seen as Thomas saw, but we still believe and confess the Christian faith and so are blessed, as St. John wrote, by having life in Jesus’s Name.
The written and spoken words of the Gospel of life figure prominently in all three of today’s Readings. In the First Reading, an angel of the Lord frees the apostles from prison and charges them to speak to the people all the words of life. In the Epistle Reading, Jesus tells St. John to write what he saw, and, in the Gospel Reading, St. John explains that he wrote what he did so that people might come to believe and continue believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing they might have life in His Name. God uses the written and spoken words of the Gospel, as Jesus prayed in His High Priestly Prayer about those who would believe in Him through the disciples’ words. Yet, God uses more than the written and spoken words of the Gospel: He also uses the written and spoken words of the Gospel attached to means. Just as Jesus in the Gospel Reading spoke twice and then did something (showed His hands and side and breathed His creating and life-giving breath on the disciples), so God not only works through the written and spoken words of the Gospel, but He also works through His Sacraments.
God works through the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, as He did this morning for Avery Claire. Baptized in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Avery Claire joins all who are baptized and believe in being forgiven their sins, delivered from death and the devil, and given eternal salvation. God works through the Sacrament of Holy Absolution, a part of the Office of the Keys understood to have been instituted on that Easter Evening, as we heard in the Gospel Reading. (The Epistle Reading also mentioned “the keys” of absolution and excommunication.) The Keys remain Jesus’s, but, for the benefit of His Church, He has entrusted their exercise not only or chiefly to Peter and his successors, as some think, but also to all the apostles and to their successors, pastors today. In the place and at the command of the Lord, such pastors individually forgive those who privately confess the sins that trouble them most. And, God works through the Sacrament of the Altar. As on Easter Sunday and the Sunday that followed, Jesus incomprehensibly came, despite locked doors, to be physically present with His disciples, so, Sunday by Sunday, Jesus is incomprehensibly physically present with us, in bread that is His body and wine that is His blood. The disciples saw nail-marked hands and a spear-pierced side, and we see a host and chalice, but the peace of the Lord is the same: forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Unless you eat His flesh and drink His blood, you have no life in you. There is debate about whether or not Thomas took Jesus up on His invitation to put his finger in the nail-marks and his hand in the spear-hole, but, whether or not Thomas touched Jesus that night, St. John can say elsewhere that they all touched the Word of Life with their hands (1 John 1:1), just as He had touched them. Likewise, through the Sacraments, He touches us, and we who believe not only see Him with the eyes of faith, but we also touch Him through the Sacraments. Our Gospel Reading, with its mention of Jesus’s side from which water and blood flowed and its giving of the Spirit for Absolution, well points us to the Sacraments.
We have been talking about “Seeing and Believing”. Jesus one time pointed out that not all seeing leads to believing (John 6:36). Nor is the spiritual transformation that the Holy Spirit by Word and Sacrament brings about through believing necessarily visible to our human eyes (2 Corinthians 4:18), but that spiritual transformation is itself necessary. People usually say “I will believe it when I see it,” but motivational and marketing speakers sometimes say “You will see it when you believe it.” Such speakers think you need to believe in something before you can see it. They are right, in a sense, though perhaps not as they intend. As mentioned in today’s Epistle Reading, our crucified and resurrected Lord is coming again with His Kingdom. There, when He comes or if we die first, we who believe will be with Him. In the lyrics to U-2’s 2000 hit song “Walk on”, lead singer Bono refers to “A place that has to be believed to be seen.” For us, in a sense the Kingdom of Heaven is such a place that has to be believed to be seen. We live every day repenting and so believing so that we will see that Kingdom of Heaven when He comes.
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +