Betrayal – Peculiar Faith

The second Sunday of Easter is often referred to as “low Sunday”—after the intensity of Holy Week and Easter Day, both attendance and energy are a bit low by comparison. It’s also the day on which we always hear the story about “doubting Thomas,” but I never want to refer to him that way again.

Poor Thomas has been branded as the “doubter” for far too long, as if he were the only one who wanted to hear the voice of his beloved, as if he were the only who needed to see the risen Jesus in the flesh, and to touch him.

Contrary to how I usually read this story from John’s account of the Gospel (20:19-31), I no longer think doubt is the focus of this story at all, and it isn’t even mostly about Thomas. This story is about the healing of a fractured community—and the love Thomas has for Jesus becomes the occasion for that healing to happen.

John constructs this story, broadly speaking, in two parts—the first, when Thomas was not there, and the second when he was. How John stitches these parts together is where the insights simmer.

The first part is framed with fear. The closest friends and disciples of Jesus have gathered together on the very first Easter Day. They are afraid that what happened to Jesus might also happen to them. They’re meeting behind locked doors, John says, for “fear of the Judeans.”

Christian communities need to note carefully whom those first disciples feared. Among first-century Semitic peoples, the Judeans were the religious elite among the Israelites, and they had conspired with Roman authorities to execute Jesus.

So while John doesn’t tell us directly why Thomas wasn’t there, it seems rather plain: he was afraid. There’s the first insight: nothing will fracture a community more quickly than fear—fear of the “other,” fear of the self, fear of change, fear of honesty and vulnerability and even intimacy. Fear gathers to itself a whole herd of toxic energies.

Then suddenly, right there in midst of that toxic stew, Jesus appears—locked doors be damned! John is not writing about a clever magician’s trick with this remarkable appearance. This is instead a second insight we might note: fearful isolation dissolves in the light of love.

“Peace be with you,” Jesus says. He would have said this in Aramaic, echoing the Hebrew word “shalom.” This ancient and beautiful word means much more than merely the absence of conflict; it evokes wholeness, harmony, and completeness.

Jesus blesses them with peace once again and then, John says, he “breathed on them.”

It’s worth considering how close you have to be to someone in order to breathe on them. We have certainly become accustomed to that calculation in this era of Covid. Interior “perimeter alarms” go off whenever somebody gets too close! In this story, the risen Jesus gets close to his friends, very close, close enough to breathe on them—a touching moment of tenderness and intimacy.

It’s also an ancient intimacy of life itself. John uses the very same verb here that the Greek version of the Old Testament uses in Genesis to describe the creation of humanity, that moment when God breathes life into the creature God has just made from the dust.

Into a dusty room of fear, John’s Jesus breathes life.

John could have stopped right there and we would have a lovely story. But this is only Part One, because Thomas isn’t there. You can’t have a story of wholeness, harmony, and completeness when someone is missing.

Part Two begins with the disciples gathering once again, a week later—the original Greek says, eight days later, and that’s not a random number. Returning again to Genesis, this gospel writer is reminding us that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh; the eighth day is for the new creation.

Eight days later and Thomas is there, symbolizing a restored community of friends and the healing of this household of companions—a new creation wrought from the wreckage of violence and grief. Thomas shows up on the Eighth Day, a symbol for our shared healing toward a brand new world.

I’m reminded of some words from Methodist minister and poet Steven Garnaas-Holmes: If you want to see resurrection, don’t trot out your success stories or your jubilations or your triumphant marches in front of defeated enemies. No, if you want to see resurrection, look at your wounds; look at those places in your life and in your communities that need healing, those places we try to cover over, repress, push aside, prefer to ignore, even find shameful.

Thomas knew all this, maybe better than all the rest of them. All this talk of resurrection, he says, is just a sham if we can’t talk about how we betrayed Jesus, and how we deserted him, and how all of us fled when our Beloved needed us most—well, all of us men did, I’m sure Thomas would be quick to add; the women actually remained, and at great risk to their own lives.

Rather than referring to Thomas ever again as the doubter in this story, let’s call him the truth-teller. “Fear of the Judeans” doesn’t hold a candle to the fear we harbor about ourselves, the fear of our own capacity for betrayal, the fear of our own spite and hostility, the fear of our self-destructive patterns that plunge us into isolation and violence.

Thomas will not let us off the hook for that; show me the wounds, he says. Show me that we’re being honest and transparent and real with each other—otherwise this whole resurrection business is worse than pointless; it’s delusional.

Denial and avoidance won’t save us—this is the (annoying) truth Thomas insists we confront. And John’s brilliant story-telling speaks directly to each of us many centuries later: be brave and look at your failures; reach out and touch your betrayals; put your hand out where so much has been lost, where the emptiness breaks your heart, and where your deepest wounds go deeper still.

Don’t be afraid—reach out and touch the healing.

Recalling that we can plausibly read every story in John as a Eucharistic story, a recent commentator suggests that John wrote this morning’s story for future believers, for us. John wrote this for all those who would gather around the Eucharistic Table, for the ones who would reach out their hands to touch the bread and the cup.

Don’t be afraid—reach out for healing.

Holy Week – it’s a rich but difficult week, filled with imperial politics and religious collusion, with betrayal, suffering, abandonment, and death.

I appreciate Holy Week for all sorts of reasons. I’m almost always grateful for its annual appearance. But I can’t say that I look forward to it, exactly. I can’t imagine any of us needing, much less wanting still more reminders about corrupt institutional systems and state-sponsored torture and mob violence. For that, we can just turn on the evening news – or keep up with presidential politics.

Last Sunday, many Christians heard some biblical texts that sounded a note of encouragement, subtle though it may have been.

We heard the ancient prophet Isaiah remind us that God is always about to do a “new thing,” make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

We heard Paul tell the Philippians that just trying harder at religious observance is basically rubbish. Faith is not about our own grasping after God; it is, rather, realizing ever more deeply that God in Christ has grasped us, has made us God’s very own, Paul says.

And as we embark yet again on a river of grief and loss this coming week, John reminded us that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead; a reminder that love is strong, stronger than even the waters of death itself.

It’s interesting to me, though, that in that particular story at the beginning of John’s twelfth chapter, John directs our attention elsewhere; he makes resurrection almost an afterthought, a parenthetical remark.

He shifts the spotlight to a dinner party and a circle of close, intimate friends. Jesus is in Bethany, in the household he loved with the people he loved – Mary and Martha and their brother, Lazarus, “whom he had raised from the dead,” John writes. Oh, and Lazarus was also at the dinner table.

Quite honestly, if I’m sitting down to dinner with someone who had just recently been dead, I think I would have some questions. At the very least, I think I might want to pause and say, “So…how are you feeling?”

But no, John rushes past that part, as if he’s eager for us to see something else. He shows us two things actually, that have puzzled scholars and commentators for a long time.

First, Mary does something rather strange and scandalous. She breaks out that expensive, scented ointment, an aromatic lotion that she has perhaps been saving for a special occasion. And it is expensive – worth nearly a year’s salary! mary_anoints_jesus

Mary then proceeds to anoint the feet of Jesus with this precious lotion and then wipes his feet with her hair.

This is strange? Yes. And scandalous: Feet are not anointed unless you’re dead. Faces are anointed, heads are anointed – but here, Mary tends to the feet, and moreover, lets down her hair in public. Women didn’t do that in the presence of guests, not even in their own home.

Then the second peculiar thing: Judas was there.

Even J judas_jesus ohn seems to think this was odd. Remember, John writes, this is the one who betrayed Jesus! And, he adds, he was a thief!

John, by the way, is the only one of the gospel writers to call Judas that – as if John doesn’t want u
s to miss how terribly strange it is to find Judas included in that circle of intimates, in that household Jesus held so dear.

Yes, all of this is puzzling – and I think John wanted it to be.

I think John wanted the tenderness of this ancient household to be just as unnerving and disorienting as resurrection. Better still: the fruit of resurrection is precisely an unimaginable intimacy.

Love is strong, stronger than even death, stronger, therefore, than all the forces that would divide and fragment us, all the hateful speech that breeds violence, all the categorical classifications that make us view each other with suspicion, as threats, as enemies.

For John, love scandalizes by dismantling the barriers between men and women, and even between the betrayer and the betrayed, and still more – bridging the gap between Creator and creature.

And all this around a dinner table as beloved friends share a meal.

I’m so intrigued that some of the earliest Christian communities and commentators read nearly every story in John’s gospel as a Eucharistic story, a story about the Table.

So this coming week I will be taking John’s story with me, something like a talisman of hope. I’ll take and cling to what John wanted us to see: Jesus sits at table, the bestower of life from the dead who is about to die, welcoming the intimate touch of a woman who should not have touched him and the companionship of the one who would betray him.

Resurrection is shocking, not least for the kind of intimacy it creates.

Perhaps a mashup of all three biblical texts we heard last week would help, too. Perhaps mushing Isaiah, Paul, and John together we can find some buoyancy for the week ahead.

The mashup might sound something like this:

I am about to do a new thing, God says. I will take hold of you, and make you my very own; you shall be my own beloved friends.

May this holiest of weeks bring all of us closer to the Friend… last_supper_judas

Tag: Betrayal

Thomas the Truth-Teller

A Lenten Lazarus for Holy Week