The one who wasn't there

Acts 5:27-32
Psalm 150
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31

Twenty years ago I was living in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the mountains near Big Sur.  One of my jobs there was to be the ceremonial attendant to the abbot of the monastery.  There were various aspects to this position, and one of them was that when the monks wanted to have a private conversation with the abbot about their religious practice, what we called in Zen jargon “dokusan,” they would come to me.  I would write their name down in a little notebook that I kept tucked away in the sleeve of my kimono, and every morning, he would ask to know who was on the list.  I would pull out my notebook and tell him and then he would tell me which person or persons he wanted to see. 

After we offered incense in the meditation hall, he would return to his cabin, and I would walk quietly along behind the row of monks, sitting very still facing the wall, and when I came to the one I wanted I would lean over and whisper, “Dokusan.”  Then I would lead the way to the waiting room outside the abbot’s cabin, where we would wait for the sound of the bell that meant he was ready.  The monk would ring my little answering bell, and go in. 

After a while I learned which of the monks took a long time in Dokusan, presumably because they had lots of questions, and which ones were finished after only a few minutes, and which ones would no sooner finish and be scratched off the list than they would ask to be added to it again.  I got to see how the abbot would sometimes pass over certain names and ask to see those who were further down on the list.  Then one day, as we were nearing the end of the three-month training period, the abbot asked me if I thought everyone had come to him for Dokusan at least once.  I thought about it for a minute and said I thought maybe Lynnette had not, but he reminded me that in fact she had, way back in January.  I leafed back through old pages of my notebook, and searched my memory a little longer and then I said that I guessed he’d seen everyone.

“No,” he answered, “I never saw Jim.”

“Jim…”  I tried to remember whether Jim had ever asked to be on the list, horrified at the thought that he might have, and that I’d forgotten to write his name down, but now that I thought about it, I had to say that the abbot was right—Jim never did ask for Dokusan.  I felt a little embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed, but to tell you the truth I wasn’t really surprised.  To tell the truth, I never had been able to figure out why Jim was even at the monastery.  He didn’t talk a lot, and when he did say something it wasn’t about any of the customary topics of Zen student conversation.  Usually his comments struck me as kind of sarcastic, the sorts of things that might have been said by a fairly conventional American guy in his early thirties who unaccountably found himself living in a Zen Buddhist monastery in California.  The only thing you could really say with certainty about Jim was that he liked to run.  Every afternoon, in the break time after work and before the evening service, you’d see him heading off by himself, with his trademark limping stride, running up the road that led out of the canyon.

Every religious community develops a kind of common culture, with unspoken rules of behavior and a shared language that holds its members together and helps them feel like they belong.  And every one I’ve been a part of, and there have been quite a few over the years, also seems to have at least one person like Jim. They are the people who don’t seem to fit the mold—who don’t do what everyone else does, or talk about the things everyone else talks about.  The motivations that drew them to the community, and keep them there, are anybody’s guess.  And yet they stick around, sometimes long after other people who seem more natural suited for the place have moved on.  And if the community is a healthy one, it accepts them, and allows them to stay as long as they feel they need to be there.

In John’s Gospel, when the risen Christ appears to his disciples on Easter night, he blesses them with the power of his resurrection.  This power will enable them to overcome their fear and the loss of their leader, and become the nucleus of an enduring and expanding community.  Jesus leaves them the inheritance of his Peace, the Peace that comes from a noble purpose and a shared mission.  He breathes upon them the Holy Spirit, with its freedom to choose forgiveness over the endless replication of hurt.  But one of the disciples is not there to receive the blessing.  Thomas is out and about, on some errand of his own.  And when he returns, and the others try to tell him about what they saw and heard, Thomas is not convinced.

If you think about it, the following days must have been uncomfortable for everyone.  I imagine the disciples who were witnesses to the resurrection must have been unable to contain their excitement, as they told and retold their particular experiences of the shared event.  Perhaps there were conversations that went on long into the night as they remembered the things that Jesus had said and done, all the way up to, and including, his death.  Much that had been puzzling, or even frightening, to them at the time it happened, they could now reinterpret and make clear in the light of his resurrection.  Yet all the while, their enthusiasm would have had to have been dampened at least a little by the presence of Thomas, the left-out one, the one who hadn’t been there, and wasn’t sure that he believed.  And it must have been pretty hard for Thomas, too.

But they stayed together.  Thomas didn’t leave, and the other disciples didn’t cast him out.  And that is a testimony to kind of community that the Holy Spirit creates.  It is a community that is sent in Peace, a community born out of an act of forgiveness, and there is room in it for people like Thomas.  There was a place for Thomas even though nobody knew whether the day he was holding out for would ever come.   When it does come, it is a week later.  It is once again the first day of the week, the day of the renewal of creation, and you could say that the appearance of Jesus to Thomas is an image of the ongoing resurrection of Christ in the life of the church.  The Holy Spirit renews the church again and again, Sunday by Sunday, year by year, century by century, by renewing the relationships between her members, transforming estrangement into belonging with the power of forgiveness.

But, just in case we find ourselves thinking that this transformation is simply the process by which the eccentric and contrary people in the church get over it, and learn to conform to the culture of the majority, this story also tells us that it is Thomas, and people like him, who sometimes have the most intimate and concrete understanding of the human wounds of Christ.  And it is precisely because Thomas knows Jesus in this way that he is the first to recognize him as Lord and God.

All of us are Thomas, at least some of the time, and if we are to keep Christ alive in our midst, we need to keep our relationship with Thomas open and active.  Our own doubt, our own refusal to accept someone else’s word for the truth, our own demand for first-hand personal knowledge of the risen Christ, and desire for a God who comes to meet us in our embodied experience of human suffering—these are essential aspects of a dynamic and living faith.  Likewise, our capacity to respect others who question the received truth, who refuse a neat and tidy confession of faith, our ongoing relationship with people whose religion is different from ours, or who don’t seem to have any religion at all, is what creates a community where Christ himself can visit, not once, but again and again and again.