“Lost and Found” (Luke 15:11-32)

 

One of my greatest delights in the church where I last served in Minnesota was to be part of a group of men who met faithfully every Wednesday morning for prayer, followed each week by coffee and conversation. Both the prayer and the conversation could be pretty free ranging at times. But I have to tell you that over the years that group was a spiritual lifeline for me.

One of the wonderful surprises for me in coming to All Nations five years ago was to discover that there was a similar group here—at least until covid struck. It even met on Wednesday mornings. One of the disciplines we have followed as a group has been to read chapter by chapter through a book that focuses on some aspect of Christian living.

A couple of years ago that book was a slim volume by the late Roman Catholic priest Henri Nouwen, entitled The Return of the Prodigal Son. In the introduction Nouwen tells how he went to the Hermitage, the world-renowned art museum in St Petersburg founded more than 250 years ago by Catherine the Great.

There Nouwen found a comfortable chair and planted himself directly in front of Rembrandt’s famous painting of The Return of the Prodigal Son. Before he knew it, more than two hours had elapsed. After a short break for coffee and conversation with the head of the museum’s restoration department, he returned for another hour until a guard and one of the cleaning ladies silently made it clear that closing time was upon him.

During those hours Nouwen carefully examined and meditated upon each of the figures in Rembrandt’s masterpiece, beginning with the younger son, then moving to the elder son, and finally the father. We don’t have the hours this morning that were at Henri Nouwen’s disposal in the Hermitage. It is a temptation to allow our familiarity with Jesus’ parable to cause us to skim though it quickly. But for the next few minutes I do want us to take some time to meditate and focus our thoughts on the three principal figures in Jesus’ beloved parable.

The Prodigal Son: Repentance

Let’s start with the son. To begin with, we need to remember that this story follows directly on from two others that Jesus had just told, about a lost sheep and a lost coin. As with the stories of the coin and the sheep, the parable of the prodigal son is also about being lost. But with the son there is a difference. The sheep and the coin were lost through no fault of their own. The sheep had been so busy munching on its own little patch of grass that it hadn’t noticed when the others had been herded back into their paddock for the night. And we would be silly to blame the coin for having been mislaid or dropped or whatever caused it to be missing from the woman’s purse.

But the case of the son stands apart. His lostness was not something that just happened to him. Rather, it was the direct result of his own rebellion and self-centredness. His demand to receive his share of the family estate amounted to treating his father as though the old man had already died. It was an act of consummate disregard for the feelings and the welfare of others. It is likely that his father’s assets were tied up in the form of land and livestock. Was the son really expecting his father to liquidate them and live on just a share of his income for the rest of his life?

Jesus doesn’t bother to delve into details like that or to psychologize. He didn’t need to. His listeners would have been filled with indignation at the brazenness of the son’s demand. And when the son ends up among the pigs longing to eat their slop, I can imagine them muttering under their breath, “Serves him right, the selfish twit!”

Indeed there would have been a certain justice to it if the story just ended there. The camera fades off into the distance with the son lying in rags in the filth of the pigs. But the son has a change of heart. Our Bibles say he came to his senses. Jesus’ words quite literally are, “He came to himself.” It seems to me that perhaps for the first time in his life the son was able to stand outside himself. He began to see himself objectively for the selfish, heedless good-for-nothing that he was.

(And here I can’t help but be reminded of those famous lines from Robbie Burns:

Oh, would some Power the giftie gie us
To see ourselves as others see us!
It would from many a blunder free us.)

However, if repentance is to be genuine, there needs to be more to it than that. It is not just a matter of gaining a new perspective. It is a change of heart and life. As Pastor Dave made very clear in his sermon last week (and here I quote): “Repentance is both remorse and changing our lives… Remorse is feeling badly for what we did … seeing things the way the offended person sees things. But repentance means that then we need to turn away from what we did. Remorse isn’t enough… We need to change.”

So it was that with a heart made heavy by the realization of his own waywardness and the hurt he had caused, the son swallowed whatever pride he still had left and began the journey home.

The Waiting Father: Reconciliation

At this point Jesus shifts the scene back to the family homestead. There we see the father, no doubt appearing somewhat older and wearier through the loss of his son. Perhaps he is a little stooped and frail. We can imagine him at dawn getting up and gazing with sadness towards the horizon where he had last seen the son’s departing figure.

Imagine his surprise one morning when far in the distance he spots a figure that looks hauntingly familiar. Can it be? Are his aging eyes playing tricks on him? But as the figure moves closer all doubts are erased from his mind. Barely able to see though his tears, he hastily straps on his sandals, tucks in his robes and, as quickly as his stiff legs can carry him, he runs down to the road to embrace his son.

Helmut Thielicke was a great scholar and preacher of the mid-twentieth century. He maintained that the central figure in Jesus’ parable was not the son at all but the father. For the story is as much about reconciliation as it is about repentance. Imagine if the son had journeyed all that way only to be met with rebuff by his father: “You were my son but you are no longer. Go back to your reckless living and to your pigsty! It’s where you belong.”

If that were the end of the story, we could not deny its justice. But Jesus’ aim is not to give us a lesson about justice. It is to tell us about grace. The father is the God about whom we read in the book of Daniel: “To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against him” (Daniel 9:9). And the prophet Ezekiel puts it even more passionately: “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:10-11).

So it is that Thielicke could write:

The joyful sound of festivity rings out from this story. Wherever forgiveness is proclaimed there is joy and festive garments. We must read and hear this gospel story as it was really meant to be: good news! News so good that we should never have imagined it. News that would stagger us if we were able to hear it for the first time as a message that everything about God is so completely different from what we thought or feared. News that he … is inviting us to share in an unspeakable joy. The ultimate secret of this story is this: There is a homecoming for us all because there is a home.[1]

The Older Brother: Recalcitrance

It’s all a wonderful story. And as those who have turned to Christ in faith we have the assurance of God’s full and free forgiveness and the promise of an eternal place in his presence. But wait! There is more to be told. Jesus hasn’t finished yet. In Rembrandt’s famous painting a tall figure stands off in the shadows to the side. His hands clasped, he looks down coolly on the scene that is unfolding in front of him.

He is the older brother.

He has been out working in the fields. In the distance he has heard music and dancing and joyful laughter. As he nears the house his nostrils are filled with the rich aroma of a fatted calf roasting on the spit. His outrage is such that he cannot bring himself to step through the door. When his father pleads with him to come in and join the party, his cool silence quickly explodes into a furious outburst. Years of pent-up anger and resentment pour out like a flood bursting through a dam.

At this point let’s take a moment to stand back from the story and look at it objectively.

Surely the older brother had every right to be upset. He had been a dutiful son for years and had never received a whit of recognition for it. Where was the fairness in that? Where was the justice?

Now if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that he has a point. And here I want to suggest that it is not the penitent son who is the central figure in Jesus’ story. Nor is it the forgiving father. Rather, it is this son, who stands outside the party room, his feet firmly planted, his arms firmly folded in a well-justified huff.

Why do I think he is the central character? Take a moment to look at Luke’s introduction to Jesus’ parables:

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

Do you see who Jesus’ audience was? It was all older brothers, people who had spent the greater part of their lives fastidiously seeking to live in obedience to God, right down to the minutest detail. If they weren’t the very definition of older brothers, I can’t imagine who is. And if I’m honest with myself, I am forced to confess that I am one of them too.

Yes, I will freely admit that I am a sinner. I acknowledge that my only claim on God’s salvation is by his grace and through faith in Jesus Christ. Yet I also have to confess that in the course of my years in the family of God I have in many ways adopted the attitudes and perspectives of an older brother. It’s not as though it’s intentional. For the most part it happens gradually and imperceptibly. But it happens none the less—so that I can become critical and judgmental in my attitude towards others, so that I am keener on justice and retribution than I am on mercy and reconciliation. And before I know it, I’m standing outside with my arms folded, while the party’s going on over there.

Yet the most wonderful thing of all is that Jesus leaves the parable open-ended. He does not consign the older son to living outside for the rest of his life in a perpetual state of indignation. It is as though Jesus is saying to all who will hear, “Now over to you…”

How subtly a religion of works can overtake the liberty of grace! How frighteningly easy it is to slip from being a younger brother to an older one! Yet the father’s invitation is there for us all. Is it any coincidence that almost the last words of the Bible are these?

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life. (Revelation 22:17)

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[1] Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father, 29

“The Other Side of Repentance” (Psalm 51)

In this morning’s New Testament reading we heard the story of what may be one of Jesus’ best-known miracles. Mark gives us the picture of Jesus in a house with people crowding around him on every side, jam-packed right to the door. As Jesus is teaching, noises are heard from above, then dust and little bits and pieces start falling from the ceiling, a shaft of light opens up, and last but not least, slowly a man is lowered on a mat into the middle of the room. I can only imagine that everyone was wondering what was going to happen next. But I bet no one could have predicted that Jesus would do what he did, as he turned to the man and said to him, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

Then the reaction began to set in. Not a word was uttered. It didn’t need to be. The atmosphere of shocked condemnation could be felt throughout the room as much as the dust still hanging in the air. “Why does this fellow talk like that?” “He’s blaspheming!” “Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

So what did it mean for Jesus to forgive that paralyzed man? What was he doing that seemed so radical, even heretical, to some of those in the room that day? To look for an answer, I want us to turn to the Old Testament passage we also read a few minutes ago, Psalm 51.

It is recognized as the greatest expression of penitence in all of Scripture. One Bible Commentary goes so far as to say, “As an expression of a heart overwhelmed by shame, humbled and broken by guiltiness, and yet saved from despair through penitential faith in the mercy of God, this poem is unsurpassed.”[1] No doubt that is why it forms the core of the Ash Wednesday service in many churches, including our own.

Of the 150 psalms in the Old Testament, half are attributed to King David. But of those seventy-five, only three contain a precise reference to the circumstances that gave rise to them. And curiously each of these arises out of a low point in David’s life. Two of them were composed during the uprising fomented by his rebellious son Absalom, when David was forced to flee for his life into the wilderness. The psalm we are looking at this morning, however, is the expression of what was undoubtedly the lowest point in David’s life—and unlike the others, it was a low point entirely of his own making.

Many of us will be familiar with the story of David’s infatuation with Bathsheba, the wife of his most loyal general, Uriah the Hittite; of how that infatuation led to adultery; of Bathsheba’s resulting pregnancy; and finally of how David cunningly engineered Uriah’s death in the field of battle. Had it not been for the courage of one man, the prophet Nathan, David’s treachery might never have been found out. Now we find David with his face to the ground, crying out through his tears, “Have mercy on me, O God…”

The psalm is a study in repentance. But that repentance would have been meaningless, were it not for a far greater fact—the fact of God’s forgiveness. The conviction that our God is a God who forgives is one that runs from one end of the Bible to the other. Way back on Mount Sinai God had revealed himself to Moses as “the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7a). Centuries later this same truth is echoed in Nehemiah’s prayer on behalf of his wayward people: “But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love” (Nehemiah 9:17). And elsewhere in the Psalms we read, “But with you there is forgiveness…” (Psalm 130:4a).

But what does it mean for God to forgive? That is what this morning’s psalm is all about. And it comes to us in a series of verb clusters. If you have a Bible open in front of you, we’ll take a look at each of them in turn.

Wipe, wash, cleanse

You can find the first cluster in verses 1, 2, 7 and 9. It involves words that all have to do with “wiping out”, “washing away” or “cleansing”. The first of them, which our New International Version Bibles translates “blot out”, has to do with making a correction in a book, whether it was removing a stain or cancelling a debt. I am told that in the ancient world the way you erased something on a leather scroll was not by blotting, but by washing or sponging off the ink. So perhaps “wipe out” is a better translation than “blot out”—especially when you consider that the word is used elsewhere for wiping a dish clean.[2]

Later, in the writings of the prophet Isaiah we read of the Lord,

“I, even I, am he who wipes out
     your transgressions, for my own sake,
     and remembers your sins no more.” (Isaiah 43:25)

So it is, when God wipes out our sins, not a trace of them is left—and this is made clear in the two other words that David uses in his prayer: in verses 2 and 7: “wash away” and “cleanse”.

When I was a boy there was a detergent called Omo. I haven’t checked the grocery store to see if it’s still on the market and I don’t think we ever used it in our household. But what I remember about it is the ads: “Omo washes not only clean, not only white, but bright! Omo adds bright, bright, brightness.”

Now in the ancient world there was no such thing as Omo. For clothes to be washed they had to be beaten on rocks. When I visited Haiti a few years ago I remember mothers doing this in a stream that ran by a school sponsored by our church—and I’ve never seen school children in such sparkling white clothes as I did there. So to quote one author the washing we’re talking about here is “not a polite rinse but a thorough scrub”.[3] And when it comes to the stain of sin, even that is not enough. As we read from the prophet Jeremiah,

“Although you wash yourself with soap
     and use an abundance of cleansing powder,
     the stain of your guilt is still before me,”
declares the Sovereign Lord. (Jeremiah 2:22)

Yet though we may not have the power to cleanse ourselves from our sins, we have a God who does. The Bible assures us,

If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
(1 John 1:9)

Though your sins are like scarlet,
     they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
     they shall be like wool. (Isaiah 1:18)

Hide your face

The next expression that David uses—and you’ll find it in verse 9—is a curious one: “Hide your face from my sins.” What does it mean for God to hide his face from my sins? Way back at the beginning of creation Adam and Eve tried to hide from God after they had sinned, and it didn’t work.

Last week our older son celebrated a significant birthday, and Karen and I presented him with an album of pictures we had taken of him over the years. Needless to say, we were careful to omit any that might be embarrassing or less than complimentary! One of the things I have said about myself more than once is that I have no desire to have to sit through the complete video of my life. There are just too many things that I have done, words that I have spoken, not to mention attitudes that I have harboured, of which I am ashamed.

So was David asking God to play pretend? I don’t believe so. In spite of the level of moral degradation to which his sin had plummeted him, David nevertheless still had a profound appreciation of the wonder of God’s forgiveness. That is, when God forgives our sins, he forgives them utterly. As we read from the prophet Micah, “You will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19). Corrie ten Boom shed vivid light on this truth in an experience she had following the Second World War. Perhaps some of you have heard it before, but I’ll repeat it again because it is so memorable.

The year was 1947, and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives. This was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed‐out land, and I gave them my favourite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown. “When we confess our sins,” I said, “God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. And even though I cannot find a scripture for it, I believe God then places a sign out there that says, NO FISHING ALLOWED.”[4]

“No fishing allowed.” When God forgives our sins, he forgives them fully, finally and forever.

Restore, rescue

We come now to our third set of words, the first of which is “restore”. If you check a concordance, you will find that the verb for “restore” is found more than a thousand times in the Old Testament. At its heart it means simply “turn around” or “return”. And so more often than not it is speaking about our human part in the process of repentance. Back in the dark ages when I was a teenager, our morning service at church would often begin with these words:

Seek ye the Lord while he may be found,
     call ye upon him while he is near:
Let the wicked forsake his way,
     and the unrighteous man his thoughts:
and let him return unto the Lord,
              and he will have mercy upon him;
     and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
(Isaiah 55:6-7)

Now you can see that these verses emphasize what is required of us in dealing with the sin in our lives. But when David uses this word it is the other way around. In verse 14, he uses exactly the same word when he calls upon God to “restore to me the joy of your salvation”. Why? Because David recognizes that without God’s sovereign intervention true restoration is not possible. The author of Psalm 126 had the same thought in mind when he sang, “Restore our fortunes, Lord, like streams in the desert” (Psalm 126:3).

Linked with that is another word David uses, this time in verse 14: “deliver”. I prefer to translate it, “rescue”, since when most people think about “deliver” these days, what they generally have in mind is a package from Amazon arriving at their door. At its root the word has the basic sense of pulling something out. As David cries out elsewhere,

I sink in the miry depths,
     where there is no foothold …
Rescue me from the mire,
     do not let me sink… (Psalm 69:2,14)

So it is that God finds us up to our necks in a substance that I won’t mention from the pulpit, and he reaches down and lifts us up and cleans us off and sets us on our feet again: another picture of forgiveness.

Now shift back to the little house in Capernaum and to Jesus’ words, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” In those five short words are concentrated all that I have been at pains to say for the last fifteen minutes. “Your sins have been wiped out.” “You are washed, cleaner than any human effort could make you.” “Your sins have been hidden in a place where even God himself chooses not to find them.” “You have been rescued, lifted out of a pit from which you could never have escaped on your own.”

Lent is a season of repentance. And today you and I have the freedom to repent because we have a God who forgives—and because we have a Saviour who cried, “Father, forgive them…” And those words were meant not only for those who stood beneath his cross, but for you and me today.

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[1]     Leslie S. M‘Caw & J.A. Motyer, “Psalms”, The New Bible Commentary Revised, 1970, page 483

[2]     See 2 Kings 21:13

[3]     John Goldingay, Songs From a Strange Land, page 162

[4]    “The Face of My Enemy”, https://www.biblegateway.com/devotionals/night-light-couples/2016/04/22

“Unless I see the scars” (John 20:24-29)

It seems that on the Sunday after Easter there just isn’t another story to tell than John’s account of Thomas and his unwillingness to believe. I have to admit that I looked hard for one, since I just preached on this passage a year ago and did not want just to rehash an old sermon. However, just six weeks ago my wife Karen and I had the enormous privilege of visiting what tradition claims as the sites of the martyrdom and burial of the Apostle Thomas in Chennai, India—so I decided to take a look at Thomas once again.

Thomas is a character who occupies very little prominence in the gospel story up to this point. The first we meet with him 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.

A little more about 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 the disciples (John 21:3), and finally in the upper room once again with the other disciples following Jesus’ ascension (Acts 1:13).

Although 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 some of it has a basis in historical fact. So here is how the story goes. Thomas, a carpenter by trade, was sold as a slave to an Indian merchant and 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 was engaged to build him a palace. The king gave him a substantial sum of money, the entirety of which Thomas promptly distributed among the poor. When the king insisted on seeing some progress, Thomas told him that the mansion he was building was in heaven. His words were these: “You cannot see it now, but when you depart this life, then you shall see it.”[2] For that he 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 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 and a half churches. (I’ve never found out what the half-church was all about!)

The next we hear of him is on the southeast coast of India, in Mylapore, part of modern-day Chennai. Through his ministry both the king’s wife and his son came to profess the Christian faith. Thomas, however, 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 in 72 AD. 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.

The wounds we have received

I confess that all of that is really off-topic. So let’s go back to the upper room, a week to the day after reports of Jesus’ resurrection had begun to circulate. Thomas’s dogged insistence on seeing Jesus’ scars may seem almost ghoulish to our sensitivities today. I personally find it difficult to be faced with the sight of an open wound. Yet I have always appreciated the story of Thomas. It assures me that there is a place for healthy skepticism in the church and that Jesus is more than able to deal with our doubts.

This time around, however, I have begun to see the story of Thomas from another angle. In the past my focus has always been on Thomas and his transformation from doubt to faith. This time reading the story I have found myself attention drawn to Jesus—and not just to Jesus but to those nail marks, those scars that Thomas was so insistent on seeing. I have been helped in this by an article I came across recently by Leonard Vander Zee, interim editor of The Banner. He wrote this:

We all have scars … countless inner wounds: the griefs that never quite heal, wrongs that can never be righted, memories that cannot be erased, hurtful words or betrayals that still seem to have a direct line to our tear ducts or to the recurrent knot in our stomach. We are all scarred in one way or another. You can’t get through life without scars, inside or outside.

So it’s fascinating that when John tells the story of Jesus’ appearance to his disciples after the resurrection, he tells how Jesus shows them his scars—not once, but twice.[3]

A generation after the events in the upper room (as Thomas was far off in south India) the apostle Peter reflected, “Christ himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). Peter was of course quoting from the famous passage about the suffering servant in Isaiah 53, from which we drew our Old Testament reading this morning:

Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:4,5)

And so, as we stand with Thomas and look upon Jesus’ scars, we recognize that those scars are ours: the hurts we have carried with us since childhood, the betrayals that have left us feeling forsaken and destitute, the losses of deep and abiding friendships, or perhaps the physical pain and deprivation of illness and disease—all of what Shakespeare called “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.[4] Jesus has borne all of these upon himself on the cross, so that we can look forward to that day when sorrow and sighing will have fled away and our only tears will be tears of joy.

The wounds we have caused

Yet as I look upon Jesus’ scars, I recognize that these are not the only wounds he bears. What about the injuries, not that others have done to me, but that I have caused to them?

I remember years ago being asked by a doctor friend to visit one of his patients in the hospital who was suffering from intractable pain. It should have been amenable to treatment but it was not, and he had begun to wonder if her problem was not physical but spiritual. She was German originally and in conversation it turned out that she had been a member of the Nazi party, and while she had never personally tortured or killed anybody, she could not forgive herself for her complicity in the untold sufferings of millions of innocent people. Sadly, she was never able to recognize that Jesus had taken those wounds upon himself, never able to accept the forgiveness that God offered to her through the cross.

I don’t know about you, but as I look back on my life, there are things of which I am deeply ashamed: unkind words spoken without thought—and sometimes quite deliberately, not responding to others in their time of need because I was too busy with my own preoccupations, allowing my actions to be dictated by prejudice or preconceived notions about others, not to mention my complicity in global injustices and inequalities. The list could go on and on and indeed it does. And while there are some things for which I may be able to make amends and should, there are far more that I cannot, some of which I am not even aware of. These scars too Jesus has taken upon himself on the cross.

One year after the carnage of World War 1, Edward Shillito, a Free Church pastor serving in England, wrote these words:

If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;

Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;

We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow,

We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars.


The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;

In all the universe we have no place.

Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?

Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim Thy grace.


If, when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,

Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;

We know to-day what wounds are, have no fear,

Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign.


The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;

They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;

But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,

And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.[5]

Today let us thank God for Thomas and his doubts. But even more let us thank him for the scars that Jesus revealed to him. Surely he bore our sorrows and was bruised for our iniquities.

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

[2]       Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions, 51

[3]       “He Showed Them His Wounds”, Reformed Worship, December 2012 http://www.reformedworship.org/article/december-2012/he-showed-them-his-wounds

[4]       Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

[5]        “Jesus of the Scars”

“By this we know…” (1 John 3:16-24)

Have you ever noticed that the one point in the gospel story where you might have thought it was easiest for the disciples to believe is where they showed the greatest doubt? There Jesus was, standing right in front of them, and yet they had to struggle to believe. When Jesus entered the upper room that first Easter evening, he had to ask them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” (Luke 24:38) When they met him in Galilee (presumably some time later), Matthew tells us that even though they worshiped him, there were still some who doubted (Matthew 28:17).

It seems to me, based on passages like this and on my own experience, that doubt is almost invariably the companion of faith. Who among us has not experienced doubt at least occasionally or perhaps on a daily or even hourly basis? I came across a quote about doubt this past week from the Buddha, which runs thus: “There is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt… It is a poison that disintegrates friendships and breaks up pleasant relations. It is a thorn that irritates and hurts; it is a sword that kills.” On a contrary note, the astronomer Galileo claimed that doubt is “the father of discovery”. And twentieth-century psychologist Rollo May once wrote, “The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt.” What are we to think, what are we to say, then, about doubt?

In this morning’s Epistle reading we find John writing to people who were struggling with doubts. In their case these seeds of doubt had been sown in their minds by false teachers in the church. One of those teachers was a man named Cerinthus, who lived in Asia Minor around the same time as John. Claiming to be promoting the true faith, Cerinthus taught that Jesus was just an ordinary human being, different from others only in greater wisdom and righteousness, that the Christ descended upon him at his baptism and departed from him before his crucifixion, and that it was only Jesus the man who suffered, died and rose again. All of this teaching was couched in Jewish piety and gilded with the sophistication of Greek philosophy. So, particularly for those who were new to the Christian faith or were not able to recognize heresy, these teachings could be hugely attractive. The result was that there were many people whose faith had been kind of knocked off balance, who weren’t sure what they ought to believe—and it was to such people that John addressed his letter.

In many ways we live in a similar time today. (Perhaps it has always been the case.) You have only to walk through the religious section of Barnes and Noble to see a proliferation of books proclaiming the health, wealth and prosperity “gospel”, questioning the reliability of the Bible, denying the resurrection of Jesus, or promoting the Gospel of Thomas and other alternative early “Christianities”. In the midst of this confusing mélange of ideas, John boldly claims that there are things that we can know.

Before we go any further, though, we need to recognize that when John uses the word “know”, he is not speaking in the sense of knowing as we might a mathematical formula. It is not like saying the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. We could put statements like that in the category of head knowledge. No, what John is writing about is heart knowledge—and more often than not, when the Bible uses the word “know”, it is referring to that kind of knowledge: personal knowledge, relational knowledge, experience. This is what the Bible means when it tells us that Adam knew his wife Eve; or when in John’s gospel we read that Jesus knew what was in a person; or when Jesus prays on behalf of his followers that “they may know you, the one true God…” It is in this relational sense that three times in this morning’s epistle passage John declares, “By this we know… By this we know… By this we know…”

God’s Love (16-18)

The first thing that John writes to assure his readers about is God’s love. There are many today who would question that love. This past week much of the world observed the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, when 1.5 million people were subjected to wholesale government-initiated slaughter. That atrocity became the model for Hitler’s annihilation of more than 6 million people in the Holocaust. Since then there have been the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and the massacres in Rwanda, which claimed more than a million more lives—not to mention the unspeakable horrors to which our own Karen people have been subjected in Burma. This past week many of us have been horrified by the images on our computer and TV screens of thirty Ethiopian Christians being led to a brutal death by beheading. In the midst of all of this there are many who legitimately ask, “How can you believe in a God of love?”

For the people to whom John was writing events such as these were not something that they read about in history books or saw on a TV screen. They were immediate realities. The Pax Romana under which they lived had always meted out its own rough form of justice. But now, under the emperor Domitian, who insisted on being honored as “Lord and God”, Christians became the focus of an insatiable cruelty. Many were beaten, imprisoned, tortured and put to death. Even John himself would become a victim. As an old man he was spared the sentence of death and instead exiled from his home in Ephesus to the island of Patmos off the Turkish coast. In the midst of this, with relatives and friends and fellow believers being dragged off to torture and execution, it would have been natural for some to find their faith in God’s love being shaken if not altogether shattered.

In the midst of this, John points us to the cross of Jesus. He writes, “By this we know [God’s] love, that he laid down his life for us.” In these few words John tells us that God’s love is far more than a theoretical concept. It is real. It is tangible. It comes to us not merely as a theological principle but as an actual event. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” said Jesus to his disciples at the last supper (John 15:13). And this is exactly what God has done through the cross. This is the measure of his love. “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1b).

God’s Forgiveness (19-23)

A second concern that hung heavy on the hearts of some was the question of God’s forgiveness. Forty years of pastoral experience have left me convinced that one of the core issues of life that all of us face is forgiveness—not only learning to forgive others for the wrongs they have done to us, but also receiving forgiveness for the wrongs we have done to them.

One of God’s little jokes on us was to give us the power to remember the past and leave us no power to undo it. We have all sometimes been willing to trade almost anything for a magic sponge to wipe just a few moments off the tables of time. But whatever the mind can make of the future, it cannot silence a syllable of the past. There is no delete key for reality… If we could only choose to forget the cruelest moments, we could, as time goes on, free ourselves from their pain. But the wrong sticks like a nettle in our memory.

So wrote ethicist Lewis Smedes in the introduction to his book The Art of Forgiving. Forgiving others can be a challenge, especially when a relationship has been betrayed or a wrong has been committed that cannot be undone. Yet we encounter an even greater challenge very often when comes to forgiving ourselves—forgiving ourselves for our less-than-loving attitudes towards other people, for the thoughtless words that sliced into another person’s heart, and for the thousand secret sins about which nobody knows but only ourselves. We are tortured by our own consciences.

If that is the case with you, then John has good news. “By this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” Did you hear those words? God is greater than our hearts. Even when we cannot forgive ourselves, God can. Even when we think forgiveness is impossible, God still forgives us. Even though God knows everything there is to know about us, he forgives us nevertheless. Once again we go back to the cross and to Jesus’ words, “Father, forgive them…” (Luke 23:34) and know that they were spoken not only for those who crucified him, but for us as well. As John wrote in the opening chapter of his letter, and as we will hear once again before we kneel in penitence in a few moments’ time, “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

God’s Presence (24)

We can know God’s love. We can know God’s forgiveness. Thirdly, John says, we can know God’s presence. “By this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.” I think there is a tendency, particularly in our generation, to think of the presence of the Holy Spirit as a kind of emotional rush. In a few weeks’ time we will be celebrating Pentecost. We will remember the mighty rushing wind, those flames of fire that alighted on the disciples, and the miraculous ability to communicate in languages that had never been on their lips before—and we will think that is how the Holy Spirit works. But that is only one picture that the New Testament gives us of the Holy Spirit. How about the one who silently works within us the conviction that Jesus is Lord? How about the one who brings about that wonderful harvest of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control?

For John in this morning’s passage the test of the Holy Spirit’s presence is obedience. “All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us…” The test of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives is not, “Have I had this or that particular experience?” but, “Am I living in obedience to Jesus Christ?”

If my own experience is anything to judge by, obedience is not something that is easily measured. I suppose we can look at standards like the Ten Commandments or Paul’s list of the fruit of the Spirit. There are also various Rules of Life that we can choose to follow and they can be very helpful. Yet as much as we try to measure ourselves, those measures will always be subjective. Depending on our disposition, some of us will be easier and some of us harder on ourselves. I believe in the end that if we are really to get the true measure of ourselves, it will be as we live in community—as we hold ourselves accountable to our brothers and sisters and to Christ in them.

This morning, as we take the bread into our hands and the cup to our lips, may they be tangible reminders of what we have read in this passage. Through them may we know God’s love, mediated to us on the cross. May we know God’s forgiveness and cleansing through Jesus’ blood. And may we know God’s presence, enabling us in company with our brothers and sisters to live in obedience to him.