April 19, 2015 Sermon — No Other God and No Place for Doubt: The Word Was Made Flesh Again, and We Beheld His Glory (John 20:24-31)

Today is the third Lord’s Day of Easter season. But we are going to be looking at what happened on the second Lord’s Day of that very first Easter season. This is eight days after Jesus’ resurrection, which by John’s way of inclusively counting days puts us again on a Sunday, the first day of the week.
By meeting with His disciples on consecutive Sundays in the upper room, Jesus is establishing a pattern, a pattern that the church has kept from the first Easter Lord’s Day down to this very Lord’s Day. It is the pattern of Christ meeting with His people to give His people His peace and His gifts on the first day of the week as a recurring celebration and memorial of His resurrection.
The Lord’s Day meeting we read about here in John 20 is especially noteworthy because of what happened with Thomas. Thomas had not been there on the previous Lord’s Day, that first Easter Sunday, when Jesus met with His disciples and showed them His hands and His side and spoke peace to them and breathed on them the Holy Spirit. And so when the other disciples said to Thomas, “We have seen the Lord,” Thomas did not believe them.
Ancient people, just as much as modern people, knew that once you die, you are dead. Bodies tend to stay in their graves. You do not need a PhD in biology from a modern university to know that bodies just do not pop out of tombs at random. Ancient people knew the finality of death just as much as we do. They knew that what goes into a grave stays in the grave. So Thomas was not out of line to ask for proof. A claim that someone has come back from the dead is such a radical claim, such a wild claim, it needs to be demonstrated. Words mean what they say. And if Jesus is resurrected, then Thomas knows he should be able to see Jesus’ body with his own eyes. Thomas is not gullible. He is honest. He sets the highest possible standard of proof. He has to see for himself. He knows that the claim the other disciples are making about the resurrection of Jesus is not just a claim about their private religious experience. It is not just a spiritual claim, as it were. It is a historical claim, a public claim. And so it must be verifiable and it must be verified.
We could criticize Thomas here as well as the rest of the disciples. They all should have expected Jesus’ bodily resurrection because He had predicted it. He had spoken of it time and time again. But they seem to have either forgotten about those predictions or to have misinterpreted them. Whatever the case, all of the disciples began as doubters. Thomas is not any more of a doubter than the others had been. And in context, his doubt is understandable. In fact, Thomas may have had a bit more of an excuse than the others had. We know that the other disciples reported to Thomas what they had seen. In verse 25, they tell Thomas, “We have seen the Lord. The Lord has appeared to us.” But no doubt they also told Thomas the rest of the story, how when He came to them in that locked upper room, He spoke peace to them and He breathed on them His Holy Spirit and He sent them on a mission to undo sin, to proclaim the forgiveness of sins. And yet the problem is, despite having met with the risen Lord, the disciples really are not acting any different. Here they are a week later, locking themselves again in the same upper room. How is Thomas supposed to believe Jesus is alive if the disciples are not living any differently? For all practical purposes, the disciples are still acting as if Jesus is dead. They had been given the Spirit by the risen Christ, supposedly. They had been sent on a mission to forgive sins by the risen Christ, supposedly. But if that is true, why is it not manifest in their lives? If the disciples really have the Spirit, where is the power? Why are they still fearful and timid, locking themselves away in an upper room? If they have been sent by the risen Christ, why are they not going anywhere? Thomas might legitimately wonder, “Guys, if Christ is risen, why are you still acting like He is dead? Why has not anything changed?”
This is very noteworthy. When Christians look just like the world, when our lives are not any different, when we do not manifest the power of the Spirit in our lives because we are too cowardly to speak Christ’s truth to the powers that be, or when we do not submit our lives to Christ’s rule so that our lives look different from the world in every area, in a way, we are giving the world an excuse for not believing in the risen Christ. Now, really and truly, there never is a real excuse for not believing in Christ’s resurrection because the historical evidence is so abundant. But people often need more than that. They need not just historical evidence, they need experiential evidence. People need to see the power of the risen Christ at work in our lives. They need to see Christ’s power in us, Christ’s patience in us, Christ’s love in us, Christ’s wisdom reflected in our lives. If you are lazy on the job, none of your co-workers are going to want to hear about how the risen Christ changes lives. They are just not going to be interested. If you are disrespectful when you are under authority, or if you are tyrannical when you are in authority, nobody around you is going to want to hear about the glories of the risen Christ as Lord and Savior. How you live matters. The whole letter of 1 Peter, in fact, is really written about the quality of our lives, how the quality of our lives as Christians is essential to our witness and to our mission. The holiness of our lives matters. Jesus has tied His reputation in the world to our love for one another as His disciples. He makes that clear in John 13. He has tied the success of His mission in the world to our willingness to go and proclaim to the nations the good news of forgiveness in His name. The success of His mission hinges, in a very real way, on our willingness to go in the way that He has sent us.
Many Christians today are like the disciples after that first Easter Sunday. We say Jesus is alive, but we live like He is dead. We say we have seen the risen Christ, but then we go on with life as usual. It ought not to be. The disciples really have let Thomas down. They say we have seen the risen Lord, and that is good, but they are still fearful, timid, and ineffective. And so Thomas says to them, “Unless I see Him for myself, unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and unless I touch the print of the nails in His hands and in His side, I will not believe.” The disciples have let Thomas down. Jesus, however, is not going to let Thomas down.
When the disciples were again gathered on the first day of the week in the upper room with the doors locked, Jesus miraculously again comes and stands in the midst of them, and just as before, He speaks to them. He says, “Peace to you.” Jesus is the Prince of Peace, always passing peace to others. He speaks a word of peace to them, and then He directly addresses Thomas. Jesus speaks directly to Thomas. And He is willing to meet Thomas’ request for visual and tactile proof. Jesus says to Thomas, “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side.” And Thomas sees the risen Jesus. He sees the scars on the body of the risen Jesus. And he confesses, “My Lord and my God!”
This is really about seeing and touching God. Thomas wants to see Jesus. And in seeing Jesus, John’s Gospel comes full circle. John’s Gospel really begins with something of a problem. It is the same problem Moses faced. Moses asks to see God. And what does God say? God says, “You cannot see Me. You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live.” And so God says to Moses, “I will pass before you and show you the back of My glory.” John’s Gospel really starts with that problem. John 1:18 says, “No one has seen God at any time.” But here at the end of John’s Gospel, when Thomas sees Jesus, what does he proclaim? “My Lord and my God.” In other words, Thomas believes that in seeing Jesus, he has seen God and lived. What Moses longed to see, but could not, Thomas now sees. He sees Jesus and he exclaims, “My Lord and my God.” In Jesus, the invisible God has made Himself visible. The untouchable God has made Himself touchable.
Thomas suddenly realizes the meaning of what Jesus has been saying all along. In passages like John 6:40, where Jesus said, “Everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him will have everlasting life.” What does seeing the Son have to do with everlasting life? Why does seeing the Son bring everlasting life? In John 12:45, Jesus explains, “He who sees Me sees Him who sent Me.” In John 14:9, it is the same thing. Jesus says, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.” In other words, if you do not see Jesus, the Father remains hidden from you. And if He is hidden from you, you do not have eternal life. All throughout John’s Gospel, seeing God is salvation. And now we find God is only seen in Jesus. In Jesus, we behold God. God’s glory is revealed in Jesus for us to see.
All through John’s Gospel, seeing is closely linked to believing and to knowing. To see is to believe is to know. So in John’s Gospel, we have statements like, to know God is eternal life. To believe Him is to have eternal life. And to see Him is to have eternal life. With Thomas’ confession here in John 20, we finally get a character in the Gospel who makes a confession that matches the opening declaration of the Gospel. John, as the narrator of this Gospel, says in chapter 1, verse 14, “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father.” The Word became flesh. That is obviously a reference to the Incarnation. But then what happened? The Word’s flesh was crucified. The Word lost His flesh in death. But now in the resurrection, the Word has become flesh again. And Thomas now beholds His glory. And in beholding Jesus’ glory, he beholds the Father’s glory, the glory of God.
Thomas is known as Doubting Thomas, but that is not really fair. He is not the only disciple who doubted. They all doubted. Thomas should really be known as Confessing Thomas, because he is the first to see what the resurrection really means. He is the first to see Christ for who He really is. He is the first character in the story to fully grasp the identity of Jesus. To really see Jesus for who He is. Thomas should not be remembered for his doubts. He should be remembered for his faith, his confession.
What Thomas’ confession tells us about Jesus is what really matters. Thomas had asked for empirical evidence of Christ’s bodily resurrection. He wanted to see and touch the risen body of Christ for himself. He was not gullible. He just wanted to make sure that his faith was rooted in facts. He wanted his faith and reason to work together instead of sacrificing reason on the altar of faith. He wanted faith and reason to cooperate. He did not want just a blind faith. He wanted a seeing faith. But when he gets to see the risen body of Christ, he makes a claim, he makes a confession that seems to go far beyond the empirical evidence. When he saw the risen Christ, should not he have exclaimed, “It is really true. The man Jesus is raised from the dead”? But his exclamation says nothing about that. It says nothing about Jesus’ humanity or even His resurrection body. Instead, he declares Jesus to be his Lord and his God.
Readers of the Old Testament will know that that double name, Lord and God, is really a way of identifying the Creator God and the Lord of Israel. Just start reading in the book of Genesis and you will see again and again how often God is identified as Lord God. For Thomas to exclaim, “My Lord and my God,” means he believes that Jesus is Yahweh, the God of Israel. The Lord and God of the Old Testament is now the one who is standing in front of him in the flesh. Thomas jumps from this empirical data to make a spiritual and theological claim. He jumps from this sight of the risen Christ to confessing that He is the Lord and God of Israel, the Maker of heaven and earth, the one who brought Israel out of Egypt in the Exodus.
Thomas is not the only one to make this kind of jump from the empirical to the theological. In Mark 15, the Roman centurion is standing at the foot of the cross where Jesus is crucified. And when Jesus cries out with a loud voice and breathes His last and the veil in the temple is torn from top to bottom, the Gentile soldier says, “Surely this man was the Son of God.” For that Roman, it happened when he saw Jesus die, when he saw the manner in which Jesus died. He concluded that Jesus must be God’s only begotten Son. Only God could die this way. Only God could die this kind of death. Only God could die in this manner. For Thomas, it happened when he saw the nail prints on Jesus’ hands. He concluded Jesus is Lord and God. Thomas finally snaps the pieces of the puzzle together. He realizes the one that he and the other disciples have been interacting with and following the last several years truly is God made flesh. The Lord incarnate. The one who was crucified and raised is God.
In that very moment, Thomas laid eyes on the risen Christ. He learned a whole new way of reasoning about who God is. It was a theological revolution in one glimpse. He realized that the man Jesus had done what only God could do. He realized the meaning of what Jesus had been saying and doing all along. He realized that in God power and service are one and the same. That in God greatness and humility are identical. That in God sacrifice and glory are totally intertwined. That in the life and death and resurrection of this man Jesus, God had revealed Himself to His people. He realized the very Godness of God, the very Godhood of God is revealed in the scars of this man Jesus. Only God could love like this. Only God could die like that. Only God would pursue those who had abandoned and denied and forsaken and betrayed Him, not in order to punish them, but in order to speak peace to them. Thomas realized Jesus must be God because only God could have done these things. Only God could have died this way. Only God could have conquered death and returned from the grave in this way.
We do not know if Thomas touched Jesus or poked his finger into the wound of Jesus, but it does not matter. When Thomas saw Jesus, he knew he was looking not at a mere man, not even at the back of God’s glory like Moses. He knew he was looking into the very face of God. He knew he was beholding God’s glory. In looking at the scarred body of the risen Christ, he was seeing the fullness of God in human form. We behold the glory of God in the death and resurrection of Christ.
That is not counterintuitive or shocking to you only because you have heard the gospel so many times before. But for Thomas and the other disciples, it was shocking. For the Jews and Greeks and indeed everyone else, it proved to be an offense and a stumbling block. We think this is not the way a God should act. This is not how a supreme being is supposed to be. Every temptation Jesus faced before the cross was to avoid it. Every temptation He faced on the cross was to come down from it. People said to Jesus when He was hanging on the cross, “If you are really the Messiah or if you are really the Son of God, come down from the cross.” Surely God’s Messiah or surely one who is so aligned with and identified with God could not die this kind of shameful death. That is not what gods do. That is not how we expect gods to act. But Jesus turns all of that upside down and inside out. Jesus stayed on the cross not because He was not really God, but precisely because He was God.
The great question of life is always, what is God like? What is God really like? Even for atheists, that is really the big question. Thomas figured out the answer to this question when he saw the risen Christ, scars and all. He came to see in a flash. Christ is the one who has existed from all eternity in the deepest closeness with God. And now He displays the innermost reality of who God is. And that is because He is God. He is God of God, light of light, very God of very God. As Athanasius put it, the Son is the Father’s all. In seeing the Son, we see the Father. He is very God of very God. He shares the same deity as His Father. He reveals Godhood to us. That means there is no God who is unlike Jesus. No God hiding out there somewhere in the universe who is unlike Jesus. There is no other God than the one we meet and see and know in Jesus. He is the very unveiling of God, the heart of God open to us, the life and love of God poured out in human flesh and poured out in death in order to redeem us and rescue.
His nail-scarred hands are the very hands of God stretched out to embrace the world. His death was God’s death. His blood shed was God’s blood shed. His pierced side is the side of God pierced for us. His suffering was God’s own suffering for us. His resurrection is God’s victory for us. God is like Jesus. And what do we see in Jesus? Jesus hanging on a cross. Jesus as He is showing off His scars. The prints of love. Proof of His love for us. With Jesus, what you see is what you get. If God is like Jesus, then we know God wants to befriend sinners. God wants to eat and drink with sinners. God wants to shower sinners with grace and love and compassion and mercy. God wants to make the sad sing for joy. He wants to make the lame leap with gladness. He wants to make the leprous clean. He wants to make the dead spring to life.
Mark’s account of Jesus’ death tells us that when Jesus breathed His last on the cross, the veil in the temple was torn. And certainly that meant that now God’s people were free to go in, to enter into the very presence of God, to come before God’s throne of grace, where God’s presence and God’s gifts are found. But the tearing of the veil also means now God can come out and be with His people. And that is what God has done in Jesus. He comes out from behind the veil in order to give us His gifts, life, glory, and wisdom. God’s gracious presence has now been turned loose. And God’s gifts and God’s grace are being spread far and wide. In Jesus, God is turned inside out. Jesus turns God inside out so we can see the truth of who God is. In looking at Jesus, we see the true meaning of love and power and wisdom and justice and righteousness and holiness. All of God’s perfections shine out and are put on display in Him. And so when you look at Jesus, you can cry out with Thomas, “My Lord and my God,” or you can sing out with Charles Wesley, “Amazing love! How can it be that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”
Jesus ends this by saying to Thomas, “Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Jesus said these words for our sake because certainly we do not get to see the risen Christ the way Thomas did. But remember in John’s Gospel, believing is seeing and seeing is believing. True seeing happens by faith. Even for Thomas, that was true. The eyes of his body saw a man with scars. The eyes of faith saw “My Lord and my God.” And so it is with us. In believing we see God in the man Jesus. We behold God’s glory in Him. In believing we take ownership, as it were, of God as He offers Himself to us in Jesus. He is now my God and my Lord. We now identify God in terms of Jesus and we describe Jesus in terms of God. God has shown Himself to us in Jesus and by faith we see Jesus for who He is. He is our Lord. He is our God.
How does Thomas’ story end? Thomas makes the greatest confession anyone makes in any of the gospel accounts. It is the fullest confession possible. He is the first disciple to really penetrate the mystery and see fully and truly who Jesus is. That He is God and Lord in the flesh. The one in whom we behold the fullness of God’s glory. Thomas realized that in Jesus God had done what only God could do. God had died to undo the sins of man. God rose to rescue man from the curse of death.
What does it mean to live after God’s death? What does it mean to live and to do mission after the Word was made flesh and crucified and then made flesh again in the resurrection? Thomas can show us. In light of Thomas’ recognition here of all these things, what did he do? Thomas was not there the previous Lord’s Day when Jesus sent His disciples, when He commissioned them, when He gave them their marching orders, their missionary mandate: “Even as the Father sent Me, so I am sending you.” Thomas missed all of that. And so he fell behind the other disciples. But that next Lord’s Day and beyond, he quickly caught up and even surpassed them. When Thomas saw who Jesus was—My Lord and my God—what did he do? When it was time to go, Thomas went. There are well-established traditions that tell us Thomas was one of the very first apostles to go out from Jerusalem after Pentecost. And indeed, he traveled further and faster than all the other apostles, eventually taking the good news of the crucified and resurrected God all the way to the tip of India where he was finally martyred. Even today, he is known as and regarded as the patron saint of India. And indeed, history tells us his body was pierced by soldiers with spears, much as his Lord and God had been pierced by a spear. Even so, Thomas died being pierced by a spear.
What does it show us? Life after God’s death, life after God’s resurrection, is a new kind of life. It is new creation life. It is sacrificial life. It is missional life. It is a life of love and service and joy. If we have been sent, even as the Father sent the Son, if the Son has sent us to do His work in the world, to carry forward His mission in the world, what does it mean for how we live? It means we are to live God-like lives, which means living Christ-like lives, which means living sacrificial lives. It means we are to live like God has died for us, and we are to live like Christ is risen for us. And as we worship this God that we meet in Jesus, we become like the God we worship, ever more humble and sacrificial, and when we live this way, we leave the world no place to hide.
Christ has put His Spirit in each one of us, and Christ has sent us. What are we to do now? We are to let the world see Christ in us. How can the world see Christ in you? By how you work, how you speak, how you play, how you parent, how you study, how you serve your neighbors, how you bless your enemies, how you forgive those who sin against you, how you are thoughtful and kind. Pour your life out, for in dying we live. Pour your life out, for when we die to ourselves in this way, we give the world a glimpse of the God-man who died and who triumphed over death for the world’s salvation. We have put our hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. He is our God, our Lord. When we live faithfully as His disciples, loving one another, speaking His truth, serving Him and submitting our lives to His Lordship in every facet of what we are called to do, we show the world that Christ is Lord and God as well.