“Who do you say I am?” (Matthew 16:13-20)

Perhaps you’ve noticed it before. But as you read through the gospels you’ll find that Jesus is constantly asking questions. He puts them to strangers; he puts them to his critics; he puts them to his closest friends. He asks questions in moments of crisis. He asks questions when he already knows the answer. He asks questions that make people uncomfortable…

You’d think it would be the other way around—that people would have questions for him. And certainly we do meet with people who came to Jesus with questions of their own. But no, by far the greatest number questions in the gospels are posed, not by Jesus’ disciples, not by people in the crowds who gathered to hear him, not by those he met along the dusty roads of Galilee and Judea, but by Jesus. Here are just a few among the many that I came across as I leafed through the gospels in preparation for this morning:

·  To a couple of John the Baptist’s disciples set on following him: “What are you looking for?” (John 1:38).

·  To a paralyzed man lying helplessly on his mat: “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6)

·  To his disciples after healing another paralyzed man, “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’?” (Mark 2:9)

·  To a woman caught in the act of adultery: “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?” (John 8:10)

·  To a blind man sitting by the roadside: “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:51)

·  To a crowd of listeners gathered to hear him: “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”

·  And a moment later to that same multitude: “Why do you worry about what to wear?” (Matthew 6:27,28)

·  And not very long after that: “Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye but ignore the beam in your own?” (Matthew 7:3)

·  And to another crowd: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?” (Luke 6:32)

·  To a circle of his critics trying to find a way to undermine him: “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil?” (Mark 3:4)

·  Holding up a coin before another cluster of detractors he asked, “Whose head is on this, and whose title?” (Matthew 22:20)

·  To a group of his followers he posed this one: “What good can it be for someone to gain the whole world in trade for their life?” (Matthew 16:26)

·  And after they had been tossed about in their boat by a violent storm at sea and practically scared out of their wits: “Where is your faith?” (Luke 8:25)

·  Finally and most poignantly, to the disciple Peter following his resurrection: “Do you love me?” “Do you love me?” “Do you love me?” (John 21:17)

Jesus’ question

So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when this morning’s gospel reading opens with Jesus asking yet another question. And on this occasion he addresses it to the disciples: “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”

Now we mustn’t think that it was as though Jesus were attempting to carry out some kind of first-century opinion poll. Frankly I can’t imagine that Jesus was all that concerned about what people thought about him. He was not like contemporary politicians, constantly checking the latest surveys to find out their standing among the public.

Jesus didn’t have any need to worry himself about that kind of thing, because he was perfectly secure in his identity. Elsewhere he confided to his disciples, “I have come … not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.” (John 6:38) It was plain that Jesus’ path was not determined by public opinion, but by the mission entrusted to him by his heavenly Father—and he knew that that mission would lead ultimately to his rejection and death.

So it is that when you look at the gospels, who did Jesus spend most of his time with? By and large it wasn’t the movers and the shakers. It wasn’t the influencers. It wasn’t the affluent or the well-heeled. It was the poor and the downtrodden, the crippled, the incurable, the prostitutes, the tax collectors and those pushed off to the sidelines of society.

But going back to Jesus’ question in this morning’s gospel reading, I imagine there was a gap of barely a few seconds before the answers came tumbling out from the disciples: “Some say John the Baptist.” “Others are thinking along the lines of Elijah.” “Still others are putting you in a category with Jeremiah or one of the prophets…” Jesus had been the talk of the town wherever he went. Even King Herod had heard about him. But in fact none of that stood behind Jesus’ motivation for asking the question, “Who do people say I am?”. The real question he was aiming at was the one he asked next: “But who do you say I am?”

Peter’s response

Now at this point I imagine that there was more than a brief pause. In my mind’s eye I can picture the disciples all standing there in dumbfounded silence. We can hardly blame them. For I wonder, how often have you or I taken the time to give serious thought to this question? Sunday by Sunday we repeat the words of the creed: “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God…” But when did we last give them any meaningful consideration? Have we ever reflected on their consequences? Have we asked, what does all this mean for me, for the way I live my life today? When you take a moment to think about it, the implications are massive and have the potential of touching on every area of our lives.

But, going back to our gospel reading, it was predictable that Peter would be the one to answer—honest, impetuous, impulsive Peter. I can’t think he had to reflect for more than a fraction of a second before he found himself blurting out: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God!”

Remember that Peter had been among the first to respond to Jesus’ challenge to “Follow me…” He had wasted no time in leaving his boat and his nets behind to accompany Jesus (Matthew 4:18-20). It was Peter who had fished all night and had nothing to show for it. He began to object when Jesus said, “Let down your nets for a catch.” But his skepticism was proved wrong when his nets couldn’t contain the fish that were flipping back and forth to the point of almost sinking their boats (Luke 5:4-9). It was Peter who at Jesus’ word stepped out of his boat onto the roiling sea in the midst of a raging storm and began to walk towards him (Matthew 14:22-33). And later, in the darkness of Gethsemane on the eve of Jesus’ crucifixion, it would be Peter who would take out his sword and slice off the high priest’s servant’s ear to prevent Jesus’ arrest (John 18:10).

And so it was hardly a surprise, when Jesus asked, “Who do you say I am?” it would be Peter who would respond: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus’ promise

Now I suspect that Peter did not come to this conclusion entirely on his own. In my mind’s eye I can see the disciples clustering together on more than one occasion—perhaps following one of Jesus’ miraculous acts, perhaps after listening to another of his arresting parables. And I can hear them asking themselves, as they did after Jesus calmed that violent storm at sea, the waves swamping their boat and threatening to take them all down with it: “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?” (Matthew 8:27).

The question of who this Jesus was had to have occupied the minds of the disciples for some time. But it always would have remained a question. What they must increasingly have been wondering seemed too stupendous to be true. Now it was Peter who gave voice to their growing suspicion: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

In a moment’s time I will ask you to stand and invite you to affirm that same faith in Jesus in the words of the Nicene Creed. It will not be a spontaneous outburst as it was with Peter. Instead, it will be in the carefully crafted words that have been echoed down through the centuries by men and women of faith.

However, let us not allow their familiarity to lull us into simply rattling them off. Let us place ourselves with Peter and the other disciples as Jesus asks not, “Who do people say I am?” Not, “Who does the church say I am?” But, “Who do you say I am?” And let us answer in humble amazement and with full conviction of faith…

 

“The Assurance of Better Things” (Hebrews 6:9-12)

 

Last Sunday those of you who were here or were watching on YouTube will recall that Pastor Doug Mott led us through the first eight verses of Hebrews 6. Early on in his sermon he quoted one biblical scholar who described those verses as “perhaps the most severe warning that occurs anywhere in the pages of the New Testament”.

The words that he was referring to were in verses 4 through 6 and they were these:

It is impossible, in the case of those who have been once enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God…

“It is impossible to restore them.” “They are crucifying once again the Son of God.” Can you imagine a more telling condemnation? Imagine if you were among those hearing those words for the first time. I can almost hear the stunned silence and see the faces of the congregation turn grey as the dreadful meaning of what they were hearing began to sink in. Could it really be true? Might it be possible for someone who is a believer to put themselves in a place where they are outside the reach of God’s grace?

A few weeks ago I told you that my introduction to Hebrews came when I was part of a group Bible study as a student at university. To this day I clearly remember both the puzzlement, the fear and the fierce debate that erupted when we came to these verses. “You mean it’s possible to lose your salvation?” Very quickly the discussion spilled out of our little group and into the wider campus fellowship. Some members began to worry that they might one day find themselves that God had rejected them. Fortunately our very wise and patient staff member got wind of what had now become a full-fledged debate. “Yes,” he said, “those are stern words. But take a moment to look at what the author says just two verses later…” So we opened our Bibles, and what did we find but these words:

Though we speak in this way, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things…

“We feel sure of better things…” You may not have noticed it, because the Greek term is translated in several different ways into English, but this is the second time the author uses that word “better”. I draw your attention to it because he will use it again on another nine occasions before we come to the end of the letter, for a total of eleven times. In fact, it is one of his favourite words. Outside of Hebrews it’s found only four times in the rest of the New Testament.

The first time we find it in Hebrews is in chapter 1, verse 4, where we see that Jesus is infinitely superior to the angels. The final time will be in chapter 12, verse 24, where the author tells us that Jesus’ blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. If you’re familiar with the Old Testament, you’ll know that Abel’s blood cried out for the guilt and condemnation of his murderous brother Cain. Jesus’ blood cries out for the forgiveness and restoration of sinners like you and me.

Thus, when our author writes, “In your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things,” he means stronger, higher, superior… And so the letter moves swiftly from warning to encouragement, from condemnation to hope. So let’s take the next few moments to see for ourselves what reasons the first readers of this letter had, even in the midst of their weariness and despondency, to take courage and to regain their hope.

Work and love

Those reasons come in three pairs: work and love (in verse 10), earnestness and hope (in verse 11), and faith and patience (in verse 12). Let’s look at each of them in order—so first: work and love. Turning to verse 10: “For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints.”

In our day and age, we think of love as an emotion, a feeling. It’s when you’re attracted towards another person. It could be romantically. It could be because you have shared a common experience or have a common interest, or any other of a whole host of reasons.

Our English language is poor in that we have only one word for love. In the Greek of the New Testament there were three. There was one that described the bond that unites friends to each other. There are people who have been my friends for decades. In some cases, we may not have seen one another for years. But when we get together that bond of friendship still remains and it is as though the passage of time means nothing. I suspect that most of you have had that experience as well.

The second kind of love in the Greek-speaking world of the New Testament was the one that gets all the attention. It is romantic love—the kind of love that makes our hearts go pitter-patter, the love that so many of our hit songs are about and so many of our movies focus on—the love between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife.

But it is neither of these loves that is the focus of our passage this morning. It is the love that that apostle Paul wrote about in his famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13: the love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, the love that never ends.

It is the love that Ruth expressed when she refused to abandon her mother-in-law, Naomi. It is the love that the good Samaritan showed to that hapless traveller who lay naked and beaten by the side of the road. It is the love that Jesus showed for you and for me when he hung dying on the cross. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” “Jesus…, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” (John 3:16; 13:1)

That kind of love is more than a feeling. It calls for practical engagement. So it is that work and love go together in our passage this morning, because genuine love invariably shows itself in hands-on, concrete action and self-giving service. And this was the kind of love that was being demonstrated daily in the everyday lives of the congregation of the Hebrews in Rome.

Earnestness and hope

So there we have it: work and love. The second pairing that the author puts together (in verse 11) is earnestness and hope. And once again, hope, like love, needs some defining.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think for most people today hope is little more than some nebulous kind of wish. “I hope that the weather will improve soon.” “I’m hoping for a bigger bonus next Christmas.” “Let’s hope that covid will soon be in the past.”

For the early Christians, however, hope was not just that vague “pie in the sky when I die” but a driving force that motivated and transformed them in the present.

Jeremiah in the Old Testament has sometimes been called the weeping prophet or the prophet of doom. Over a span of forty years he tirelessly warned the people of Judah that their disregard for God and his laws would bring destruction upon them. Yet some of the most stirring pictures of hope can also be found in Jeremiah’s writings. One of them came to him one day when he was visiting a potter’s workshop. It happened that one of the vessels the potter was forming on his wheel began to be misshapen. Did the potter give up and toss it away? No, he simply continued at his wheel and skilfully reworked it.

That was an “Aha!” moment for Jeremiah. “Then,” he wrote, “the word of the Lord came to me: O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.” The point is that, amid all the mess and injustice of this world, God is still at work. Even when things seem to be going terribly wrong, we are still in the Potter’s hands. They may even seem to have gone beyond the point of no return. Yet God is sovereign and he will surely work his good purposes out.[1]

We may think today of the grim situation facing the people of Ukraine, as the seemingly unstoppable Russian army, more than 150,000 of them, mercilessly pound their cities with bombs and missiles. Yet they refuse to surrender. They will not give up hope, as the rest of the world watches and waits and prays. And we have to believe that somehow, in the midst of this evil and injustice, God is still at work.

It was the same kind of hope that sustained the believers in the struggling Hebrew church in Rome. Christians were held in contempt. And all the signs were that their circumstances were only going to become worse. Yet they continued to cling to their hope, to sing their joyful hymns, to pray with conviction, to show acts of mercy—and all with what the author commends as earnestness.

The word in Greek means eagerness, effort, never letting things get in the way. And they could do it because deep in their hearts they had the conviction that, in the end and spite of all outward appearances, “all things [do indeed] work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

Patience and faith

The hearers of these words were to be commended, then, for their work and love, for their earnestness and hope. And now in verse 12 the writer prays that they would not be sluggish—that is, that they might never grow weary or lose energy in running this race—but that through faith and patience they might push through to the finish line.

The author will have more to say about that in due course. But for the moment his concern is that they continue in faith and patience. When you think of it, those two qualities are really the two sides of the same coin.

Faith in God and in his good purposes for us enables us to be patient in the face of setbacks, disappointments and pain. If God is really to be trusted, then we can be sure, even in spite of the direst of circumstances, that in the end he will not let us down—even if that end is death. For we know that then we shall see him face to face. And as we gather and with the faithful from down through the ages, including those Hebrew believers of the first century we will be greeted with those welcoming words, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:23).

Centuries before the Letter to the Hebrews, the people of Israel faced even more discouraging circumstances. Their city of Jerusalem had been crushed, its glorious Temple reduced to rubble, and they themselves had been held in captivity for a generation. It was no wonder that many of them were beginning to question God’s purposes. Yet in the midst of their despondency God inspired the prophet Isaiah to write these words:

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
     the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
          his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
         and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
         and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
         they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
         they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:28-31)

“So we do not lose heart” wrote the apostle Paul. “Though our outer self  is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison…” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18a)

If you’re like those Hebrew believers who were the first to hear these words, if you find yourself at times struggling just to keep your head above water, I hope that you will take heart from these verses this morning—and that by God’s grace and in his power, you may show forth in your life God’s priceless gifts of love and hope and faith.

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[1]     I owe this insight to Bill Hockin, The Habit of Hope, pp 13, ff

“Sarah” (Genesis 18:1-15, et al.)

No doubt many of you have heard it said that behind every successful man there is always a woman—and I’ve heard it added that she couldn’t be more surprised. Originally when I was planning to preach in July I thought I might do a series of sermons on the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But then I began to ask myself, what about those largely overlooked women who stood beside them? What about Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel, the Matriarchs, each of them a towering figure in her own right? So it is that I want us to take a three-week journey together as we meet ever so briefly with each of these three remarkable women.

As I do so, I am reminded of another quotation, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” As I have been preparing this series I have received numerous warnings from my wife, Karen, whose wisdom has proved itself countless times over the years of our marriage. “Do you think the women in the congregation haven’t been over these stories countless times at women’s conferences and retreats?” That may be so, but perhaps we men in the congregation also need to hear them and to allow God to speak his word to us through Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel.

I should also say at the outset that I am indebted to a contemporary author named Carolyn Custis James, whom Karen and I were privileged to hear as she gave the convocation address at Bethel University early in our years in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her book, Lost Women of the Bible, was in large part the inspiration that got me started looking at the great parade of amazing women whom we are privileged to meet on the pages of Scripture.

So let’s turn to Sarah, whom we first encounter in Genesis 11:29. There, and for the next six chapters, her name is not Sarah but Sarai. Scholars differ on exactly what distinction can be made between the meanings of the two names. However, one possible meaning for “Sarai” is “my princess”, while “Sarah” is simply the Hebrew for “princess”. In Genesis 17:15-16 God speaks to Abraham and says to him, “As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai [“my princess”]; her name will be Sarah [“princess”] … I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.” Perhaps I am trying to derive too much from a name, but my take on this is that what God was declaring about Sarah was that she was a princess not because of anyone else’s assertion about her, but entirely in her own right. Whatever the case, there can be no doubt that the character we meet with in these thirteen chapters of Genesis was a regal woman.

Sarah’s faith

Like Abraham, Sarah came from the city of Ur, a cosmopolitan oasis in the midst of what was then and is today a chaotic and dangerous desert region in modern-day Iraq. Even in their time, the city had more than 2000 years of history. In Sarah’s day it was an important trading centre for precious metals such as gold and silver, and gems like carnelian and lapis lazuli. Archaeologists have excavated tombs containing immense amounts of wealth. Fields were kept fertile through an extensive irrigation system. Its skyline was crowded with temples, including an enormous ziggurat. All in all, the picture we are left with is of a city of unparalleled prosperity in the ancient world.

All of this Sarah left behind in response to her husband’s call from an unseen God. “She gives up certainty for uncertainty, acquaintances for strangers, civilization for wilderness, the amenities of the city for the hardships of the desert,” wrote the Scottish preacher and hymn writer George Matheson.[1] And to quote another Scotsman, Herbert Lockyer,

If Abraham is ‘the father of all them that believe’, surely Sarah is their mother… Sarah speaks of that which is in faith, and by promise, and is free—and therefore is carried on in those who live on God’s promises by faith in Christ, and have that perfect freedom which is alone found in his service, and thus belong to the heavenly Jerusalem.[2]

So it is that we find Sarah in that great portrait gallery of the faithful in Hebrews 11: “And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise.” Like her husband Abraham, she “was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:11,10).

Sarah’s beauty 

Alongside her faith, one of the things we learn about Sarah early in her story is that she was a woman of exceptional physical beauty. Centuries later the rabbis would comment In the Talmud, “She was so beautiful that all other persons seemed apes in comparison.”[3] No doubt that was something of an embellishment on the facts. Yet Sarah’s beauty was such that when Abraham ventured into Egypt to escape a famine, he had her pose as his sister, not his wife, for fear that the Egyptians might kill him in order to claim her.

To be fair, what Abraham and Sarah professed about themselves was not entirely untrue. It was a fact that Sarah was Abraham’s sister, sharing the same father but born of a different mother. Yet both of them knew very well that their marriage vows took precedence over their blood relationship and their deception quickly came back to haunt them. It did not take long for news of Sarah’s beauty to reach the ears of none less than Pharaoh, who took her into his harem. Within a very short time the whole household was stricken with a series of illnesses and Pharaoh began to suspect that the problem lay with Sarah. People in power have ways of finding things out, and when he discovered that Sarah was in reality Abraham’s wife, he had the two of them banished from his kingdom.

Now you’d think that Sarah and Abraham might have learned a lesson from that. However, it appears that twenty years later Sarah’s striking beauty had not diminished. This time they were living in the little kingdom of Gerar, a Philistine town in what is now south-central Israel. It was almost an exact repeat performance, with Sarah masquerading as Abraham’s sister. This time around Abimelech, the king of Gerar, was warned in a dream that the woman he had taken into his harem was already married. However, instead of ejecting them from his kingdom, he gave them the freedom to live wherever they chose.

So we discover that while Sarah was a woman who trusted God (and I think honestly trusted him with all her heart), she discovered, as many of us have, that it was not always easy to live out that faith though difficult challenges or adverse circumstances. She did not possess the boldness of Deborah, who accompanied the Israelite army against the chariots of Sisera. Nor did she enjoy the quiet confidence of Esther, who risked her life to plead the cause of her people before the emperor of Persia. Like Peter outside the high priest’s court, Sarah along with her husband Abraham allowed her faith in God to fade into the background in the face of danger.

So we see that the picture that the Bible gives us of Sarah is not some paragon of perfection, the “ideal” woman. No, beneath her extraordinary physical beauty we find a frail and flawed human being like the rest of us, yet whom God still used to advance his purposes in the world.

Sarah’s pain

Beneath that beauty Sarah also carried a secret pain—her inability to bear a child for Abraham. In fact one of the first things that the Bible says about Sarah, before it mentions her beauty or almost anything else about her, is her inability to conceive. In Genesis 11, where she is first introduced, a list of all of Abraham’s family with their wives and husbands and their children tersely concludes, “But Sarai was barren; she had no child.”

“These words would have sent a dagger straight through Sarah’s heart,” writes Carolyn Custis James, “… exposing an open wound and simultaneously eliminating her from the big things God was doing in her family…” She continues,

In the ancient world the value of a woman was measured simply by counting her sons. By this calculation, Sarah scored a zero. Her sole contribution … was to produce a son for her husband, and she didn’t have what it took… She was a woman in a man’s world, and she was barren.[4]

I have no doubt that Sarah and Abraham agonized and prayed for years over what can only have been a source of deep and abiding sorrow for both of them. After all, had God not promised that Abraham would be the father of a great nation whose numbers would be like the stars in the sky or the sand on the seashore? Yet as year followed year what had been a promise must have felt for them more like a curse. Finally, as any possibility of childbearing became for Sarah a thing of the past, she hit upon a plan. In the words of Alexander Whyte, “Sarah sacrificed herself on the cruellest altar on which any woman ever laid herself down.”[5]

Sarah’s decision to give her slave Hagar to Abraham as a sexual surrogate seems strange to our ears, but in fact it was not an unheard of custom in the ancient near eastern world. There is, for example, an Assyrian marriage contract, dating from around 1900 BC, which specified of a newly married wife, “If within two years she does not provide him with offspring, she herself will purchase a slave woman, and later on, after she will have produced a child by him, [she] may then dispose of her by sale wheresoever [she] pleases.”[6] So it was that Abraham slept with Hagar and Hagar conceived. And as anyone who is familiar with this story well knows, the results were disastrous. Hagar, now pregnant with Abraham’s child, began to despise her mistress, with the result that Sarah became cruel to Hagar, and that rivalry and ill will continues through their descendants right down to our own time. But that is another story.

What is germane to us is that for years Sarah was forced to live with the silence of God. Again and again we can picture her alone in her tent sobbing and crying out with the prophets and the psalmists, “How long, O Lord?” And she is not alone. How many of us have not had times when we have been faced with the silence of God? Mother Teresa was one of the towering figures of Christian faith during the twentieth century, but little was known of her decades-long inner struggles until after she died. Listen to one of her prayers:

Lord, my God, who am I that you should forsake me? The child of your love—and now become as the most hated one—the one you have thrown away as unwanted—unloved. I call, I cling, I want—and there is no one to answer—no one on whom I can cling—no, no one. Alone… I am told God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.

Sarah’s laughter

As far as we know, Mother Teresa never emerged from that silence. Mercifully for Sarah the silence ended one hot noonday as she rested inside her tent. Suddenly Abraham was bursting in and saying, “Quick, get fifteen kilos of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread.” It was no small order; and as she stood there exhausted at the end of the day, she could hear the conversation that Abraham was having with his three strange guests: “Where is your wife Sarah?” “There, in the tent.” Then she could hear one of them saying, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.”

At this Sarah could not control herself. After all these years? After I have prayed and wept and entreated and begged again and again for a child? Now, after my childbearing years lie in the dust of the past? Now after all hope is gone you say I am going to have a child? All she could do was laugh. I suspect she didn’t intend it to come out audibly as it did. But she couldn’t muffle it. It simply had to come out.

In her embarrassment Sarah tried to deny that she had laughed. Yet that laugh—an anguished combination of derision and despair—was the occasion of one of the most profound statements of the Bible, the very words that her sorrowing heart needed to hear: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”

Nine months later Sarah’s laugh of bitterness would become one of joy as she brought her son into the world—and she and Abraham named him “Laughter”. Countless generations later and just twenty kilometers away their joy would be echoed in the “good news of great joy” proclaimed by the angels at Jesus’ birth. And Sarah’s story remains as a testimony to the utter faithfulness of our God, who is true to his promises, who in spite of our weaknesses and sometimes our strengths, remains forever faithful. And so we sing with the prophet Isaiah,

Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness
      and who seek the Lord:
look to the rock from which you were cut
      and to the quarry from which you were hewn;
look to Abraham, your father,
      and to Sarah, who gave you birth. (Isaiah 51:1-2)

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[1]        Portraits of Bible Women, 36

[2]        All the Women of the Bible, 155ff

[3]        “Sarah (Sarai)”, The Jewish Encyclopedia, [http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13194-sarah-sarai]

[4]       Lost Women of the Bible, 68

[5]        Bible Characters, Vol 1, ch 13

[6]       James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 543

“Thomas” (John 20:19-31)

 Our Gospel reading this morning has to be one of the most dramatic and arresting in all of Scripture. It all has to do with a man who occupies very little prominence in the gospel story up to this point: Thomas. The first we meet with Thomas is in the lists of Jesus’ apostles in each of the first three gospels. The lists divide into three groups of four, and Thomas is in the second group, suggesting, in the words of one scholar, “neither eminence nor obscurity”.[1]

We do not meet with Thomas again until towards the end of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus had been informed that his friend Lazarus was grievously ill. The disciples tried to dissuade him from going to him for fear that Jesus’ life might be in danger. Thomas, however, challenged them, saying, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16). The next time Thomas comes into the picture is in the upper room. Jesus had been saying puzzling things about going away to somewhere that they could not come and yet that he was preparing a place for them. It was Thomas who protested, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” To which Jesus famously replied, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:5-6).

Fast-forward now a few more days. The disciples were again in the upper room—all of them, that is, except for Thomas. The doors were locked, just in case the religious authorities decided to come down on them now that they had managed to dispose of Jesus. A mixture of fear and puzzlement filled the room because of the recurring reports that Jesus, who had been executed only days before, had been seen alive. Whether it was the weak flickering of the oil lamps or whatever, we do not know. But for some reason they were not aware of the other person in the room until they heard the familiar words, “Peace be with you.” Their fear turned to joy as he showed them his hands and side and they realized it was Jesus. When they told Thomas what had happened, he could not bring himself to believe them. We all know his 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.” It was a week later, when Jesus appeared to the disciples once again and this time Thomas was among them, that his adamant refusal to believe melted away. “My Lord and my God!” was all that he could manage to sputter out—one of the greatest and most famous professions of faith in all of history.

Introducing Thomas

The story of Thomas does not end there, however. Twice more we meet with him in the New Testament: the first time on the shores of Lake Galilee as Jesus appears to his disciples there (John 21:3), and finally in the upper room once again with the other disciples following Jesus’ ascension as they all awaited the coming of the Holy Spirit in power (Acts 1:13).

Yet, while the New Testament has nothing more to say about Thomas, early Christian tradition does. And while we cannot guarantee its accuracy, the odds are pretty good that much of it is at least close to the truth. So here is how the story goes. According to the early fourth-century Christian historian Eusebius, the apostles divided up the world, with Thomas and Bartholomew being assigned to Parthia (roughly modern-day Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan) and India. Arriving in the north of India, Thomas, who was said to have been a carpenter by trade, ended up in the service of a king named Gundaphor, who is known from contemporary records and coins to have reigned from about 20 AD at least until the year 46. Thomas offered to build him a palace that would last forever. The king gave him money, which Thomas promptly passed along to the poor in its entirety. When the king insisted on seeing some progress, Thomas explained that what the king was building was a mansion in heaven. Thomas was immediately sent to prison but miraculously escaped, and King Gundaphor was converted to Christianity.

Thomas’s missionary journey then led him more than a thousand miles southwards along the west coast of India, where he arrived in the ancient city of Muziris in the year 52. Muziris had enjoyed a longstanding trade relationship with the Roman Empire, in addition to a Jewish settlement that had been established there for six centuries, and it was probably both that drew Thomas there. Clearly Muziris was ripe for the gospel. During his short stay Thomas is credited to have founded seven churches, and through his ministry both the king’s wife and his son came to profess the Christian faith. For this Thomas was sentenced to execution. Under the king’s orders he was led to a hill outside the city by four soldiers, who pierced him to death with their spears. Nearly fifteen centuries later, when Portuguese missionaries first traveled to India, they discovered that there were already well-established Christian communities, which traced their origins back to St Thomas’s evangelistic exploits. Right down to the present day the Mar Thoma Church of India, or Nasrani as its members are called, continue, as Thomas did, to worship Jesus as their Lord and their God.

Independence

But at this point we need to go back to the upper room, where the disciples had gathered after Jesus’ crucifixion. We have already recalled the scene, as suddenly, without their being aware of it, Jesus was in their midst. And there was no mistaking that it was he. It was his voice greeting them, “Peace be with you.” Then, to make sure there was no doubt about it, he showed them his hands, where the nails had been driven through, and his side, where the spear had been lunged.

When Thomas returned to the group it was clear that something had changed. Instead of the fear that had pervaded the room, there was a mystified joy. No sooner had he come through the door than all the others were trying to speak to him at once. “Jesus is alive!” “The stories the women told us were true.” “We’ve seen him with our own eyes—the nail holes through his hands, the spear wound in his side.” I can only imagine that Thomas did not know what to think. His whole world was spinning around him. Then it all stopped as Thomas took hold of his senses and resolutely declared, “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.”

Those famous words have earned him the name “doubting Thomas” ever since. Yet I think we do him an injustice if we simply write Thomas off as a cynic or hard of heart. In fact, I think that quite the opposite was true, that Thomas was speaking with passion. He had become so devoted to Jesus, so invested in him, that he was not willing to set himself up for another disappointment simply based on what someone else had told him. Like Peter who had declared, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68), or the two disciples along the road to Emmaus who had professed, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21), Thomas too had put all his hopes in Jesus. And he was not willing to settle for a faith that was simply based on what someone else said. It had to be his own. With Paul he would want to shout, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection” (Philippians 3:10).

We’ve all heard it said that God has not grandchildren, and Thomas did not want to be God’s grandchild. He wanted a faith that was his own. This morning we are baptizing two darling little girls, who cannot yet speak a word for themselves. On their behalf their parents and sponsors will affirm their Christian faith. Much as they depend on their parents to be fed and taught and cleaned, so they will depend on their parents for faith. But we pray that it will not stop there. Baptism is just a first step—and we look to the day when these children will be able to say with conviction, and not just because their parents told them, “I believe in God the Father Almighty…; I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord…; I believe in the Holy Spirit…”

Years ago I had a parishioner who told me how as a child with his siblings he had been taken to church every week by his father. They never missed a Sunday. Then he went off to university and (unlike most of his peers) he continued to be in church—simply because that was where you were on Sunday mornings. At some point, however, and it was probably a gradual process because he could not pinpoint the moment, he said that what had once been a discipline became for him a faith. That is our prayer for these children: that they may move from a second-hand to a first-hand relationship with Jesus. And that was the desire that lay deep within Thomas’s heart: “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.”

Interdependence

In the mercy of God, that was exactly what happened. A week later Jesus returned to the upper room and this time Thomas was there. There was no question of his readiness to believe. There was no need to feel the nail marks in Jesus’ hands or thrust his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side. All Thomas was able to do was to stammer, “My Lord and my God!” But Jesus’ words in response are instructive. “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

I do not believe that what Jesus said to Thomas was intended as a rebuke. Rather, I believe it contains a principle. That is that, while our faith in Christ must always be a personal faith, it is not an independent faith. Whether we acknowledge it or not, our faith will always depend on the faith of others. Jesus does not call us to be hermits. He calls us into community. I remember another very wise parishioner describing how in youth we move from dependence to independence. But, he said, the mark of true maturity is not independence but interdependence. So it is that as Christians we do not live in isolation. As members of the body of Christ we are nourished and fed, we are challenged and encouraged to use our God-given gifts, we are instructed and sometimes rebuked—and all so that we may live to our utmost for Christ, to trust him and to serve him as our Lord and our God.

This morning we will welcome these children into the body of Christ, receive them into the household of God. Part and parcel with that, we have made a pledge that by our prayers and witness we will help them to grow into the full stature of Christ. I pray that we will take that promise seriously not only with respect to them, but also in our relationships with one another. May we take it as a part of our mission to help our brothers and sisters to grow and to flourish in their relationship with Jesus—and may we recognize and receive with gratitude the role that our brothers and sisters play in ours—as together we proclaim him “my Lord and my God”.

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[1]     Robin E. Nixon, “Thomas, Apostle”, The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church