I would like to recount to you a story. It is not my personal story; it is a story that I picked up on one of the commentaries.

At a recent family gathering my mother said that her doctor claimed that he could identify people who baked. She was surprised and asked how he could tell. The doctor said by the scars on their hands and forearms from the hot oven racks, he replied with a smile. And hearing this all the bakers rolled up their sleeves and showed their scars to each other and recounted the breads and the cakes that occasioned the wounds. I looked at my own forearm scars and remembered the first fragrant French rye bread that I baked, a loaf that nourished body and soul. The scars enable a memory and tell us who we are. We are bakers.

On Easter evening Jesus mysteriously appears to his disciples despite the locked doors. Who is this? And Jesus shows them his hands and his side the wounds of the Passion. The scars tell the disciples this is the crucified one, the Risen one. Just as bakers are branded by their ovens and forever identifiable by their scars, Jesus is branded with the wounds that secure his identity in the site of his followers. These are the wounds that have healed us. So close to the Easter time in this Second Sunday of the Easter Octave, I understand Thomas’ difficulty, his hurt and his disappointment in believing.

Poor Thomas, for all throughout history he is known as the words that maybe a lot of us have heard, “the doubting Thomas”, and we may use it sometimes in our own phrases of other people when they don’t believe what we have told them or what we said something had happened or whatever. You’re a doubting Thomas. So throughout all of history he has sort of been maligned as that unbeliever. But I would like to place Thomas in a different light. He was hurt; he was disappointed because he had had a mighty letdown. All of his hopes had been shattered by Jesus’ crucifixion. When we have been deeply hurt or disappointed about all that we have experienced or intense hurt of being abandoned, we are slow to trust that anything can console us or make right the injury we feel has been done to us. Now you think of your own life, you think of experiences in your life and you can say, yes, when somebody betrays my trust, or somebody lets me down, when a marriage always doesn’t work out, maybe there is some infidelity there or other things, when you have deeply loved somebody in your life, your spouse, or a friend, or a spiritual friend, or whatever it may be and they disappoint you somehow, some way, your trust to have that trust again is very hard to once again recapture. It will take time.

Now you say, is it fair in this situation here? Well, Thomas as one of the disciples and followers of Christ he was willing to follow Christ everywhere and he thought he was going to be able to change everything. He had a lot of hope in this man Jesus. Jesus said a lot of words that attracted people. He did miracles at those times too, but those weren’t the big things. We always have been told the miracles were not to be emphasized it was the words - it was his mission bringing a changing of society in relationships and how we relate to one another. So Thomas had high hopes as did probably all of the disciples and they became very, very despondent as we hear in that reading from the Gospel. On the evening of the first day of the week when the doors were rocked and when the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst. So it wasn’t joy and rejoicing and it wasn’t all of that, it was fear of the Jews that they were now going to be also maybe crucified or maybe put on trial for some reason or whatever. So I can understand Thomas’s disappointment and his downcast and sagging spirit. I’ve always admired Thomas because he refused to be talked out of his pain too easily. He must have wondered what had happened to his friends to change their mood so quickly from one of despondency to one of elation. Whatever it was it had not touched him and his refusal to leave his sadness behind too quickly was an error of great integrity about it. It would have been better for him had he been able to believe on the basis of his friends’ testimony, but he could not.

And when Jesus appears he does not condemn Thomas but offers the proof required of him – the scars. Think about your own scars. Think of the times when you have been deeply hurt as I mentioned before from a personal experience. Maybe not all of us are bakers and maybe we don’t always have the scars that baking fine bread for our families and friends and relatives. We may have scars that go deep within ourselves, our spirit, and our soul. Scars of disappointment, scars of a failed marriage, and scars of maybe our children who have not always lived up to expectations. Many, many of the scars that assail this human body of ours are not always visible. They may be inside within us. And only you, maybe you and God, or maybe your beloved or maybe your close friend knows of those scars. And it is through those scars and living through those experiences of pain and suffering and difficulty and tragedy the blessings are a little easier to take. It is the disappointments and the times when we were let down or when were not fully a part of the community for whatever reason you may want to use the term “sins”, that’s fine with me too if you want to use those terms, but in this Gospel it is about scars and do we profess those scars and come through them to Jesus Christ.

That’s what has happened. Jesus’ scars on his hands and on his feet and on his side were not taken away, not covered up, so graphically in the Gospel does he tell his Thomas “put your finger in my nail prints, stick your hand” he says, “into my side.” So he pretty graphically tells them about these scars that I have and be healed and believe. If we have come through our scars each one of us, or if we are at this time experiencing some of those scars, we come through those through Jesus Christ and we have been healed. We have been raised up in this story about doubting Thomas.

The church in her wisdom has placed this Gospel on the second Sunday right after Easter about Thomas, John 20, verses 19-31, once again to give us strength in our belief, strength in our time when we are scarred, when we are disappointed, when we feel that we are left out of that divine love. God never tires of trying to pierce the shield of the contagious new life that each one of us is intended to have. When something finally does break the barricade of disappointment we have erected around ourselves, we find like Thomas that the dramatic and new consolation we experience has been there as an unseen and unacknowledged presence all along. Blessed are we when we can have faith in the presence of the blessed Lord.

So I offer you once again to read the Gospel of John: 20; 19-31. It is packed full of reassuring us in our faith in Jesus, in our faith of healing of our scars and our faith of one another. Two things I love of that Gospel is: Jesus doesn’t take Thomas to task and say, “Oh, you have been bad because you haven’t believed and oh, you haven’t been following the rules, and oh , you haven’t been doing what I have been asking you to do. Remember what I told you, remember what happened to me or whatever. Peace be with you.” That phrase we use so many times over in the liturgy “Peace be with you”. Peace that only our Lord Jesus Christ can give to this anxious heart, this unbelieving soul at times. So may you take away from this liturgy on this Second Sunday of the Easter Octave and look at Thomas, not so much as the doubter and not so much as negative, but once again as a true believer because he does come to say my Lord and my God. May all of us be able to say my Lord and my God in the midst of our scars, our turmoil’s and difficulties.

I love the famous prayer that that Dr. Martin Luther King use to say many time in his speeches when he was under a lot of pressure about his life, threats against his family, and bombings and all of that in the 60’s, he would say “Lord, I believe but help my unbelief.” And I think that prayer is so true. I do believe, but there are times Lord you have to help my unbelief. Amen.

rjs