The Rebellion of Resurrection

I want to invite you to use your imagination with me for a moment. Put yourself in the shoes of the disciples on that very first Easter evening. What would you do if you had just heard the most incredible, mind-bending news imaginable? What if you had heard that the tomb where you laid your teacher was empty? What if your friends, specifically Mary Magdalene, had come running to you, out of breath, saying she had seen Jesus alive? What if you suddenly started to realize that, by all accounts, the things he had promised were actually coming true?

If you were in their shoes, what would you do?

Would you hide in the upper room?

Friends, it’s a profound and slightly humorous question: why aren’t the disciples out looking for Jesus? Did the disciples simply not believe Mary’s testimony because she was a woman? Was Peter not utterly amazed by what he discovered in the empty tomb when he picked up the discarded grave clothes? Did they suddenly forget the words that Jesus had spoken to them for three years about his life, his death, and his ultimate rising?

Why didn’t they go out into the streets of Jerusalem looking for Jesus?

Our passage this morning from the Gospel of John brings us face-to-face with these questions, and it introduces us to the story of the one we so often call “Doubting Thomas.” It is a passage that asks us to confront our own hesitations. It asks us whether we are willing to trust, on faith, that Christ is alive and that love has overcome the grave. This is famously known as the “if I don’t see it, I won’t believe it” passage.

But still, the question lingers: why didn’t the disciples go looking for Jesus?

Well, perhaps the beautiful, grace-filled answer is this: they didn’t have to go looking for Jesus, because Jesus comes looking for us.

Jesus comes looking for us during those difficult, messy moments when we’d rather he not show up. He finds his way into the locked rooms of our lives and the closed-off parts of our hearts and minds. For some reason, just like those early disciples, we are sometimes afraid of his presence. We are afraid that God might judge us, that God might find us unworthy of being loved, or that we might be chastised for the mistakes we’d rather not admit. And so, we close ourselves off. We build up thick walls to protect ourselves. We roll a heavy stone in front of the entrance to our hearts, just like a tomb.

But let me tell you the good news: those are exactly the places that Jesus comes looking for us. And when he miraculously arrives, stepping right through our carefully constructed defenses, he doesn’t scold us. He doesn’t roll his eyes at our fear. All he says is, “Peace be with you.” Shalom. Wholeness. Grace.

Like those disciples hiding in the upper room, we are called to move from a place of fear into a place of life. At its very heart, this is a passage about life. It is about life which is full, life which is deeply valued, and a life which is fiercely cherished by the Creator. We are called to move from merely surviving and existing, to living in the abundance and eternity of God. The disciples are called to move from a life rooted in anxiety to a life overflowing with God’s abundant joy. And it is with that abundant life that we eventually find the disciples in the Book of Acts, boldly declaring that they must follow God, that they must teach, and that they must talk about Jesus!

But they couldn’t get there until Jesus first met them in their fear, repeating that beautiful refrain: Peace be with you.

So, what of Thomas? Was he wrong to doubt? And what exactly is he doubting? Is he really doubting whether Jesus was raised from the dead? Let’s be fair: hadn’t all the other disciples doubted the words of Mary earlier that morning, calling her testimony nonsense? I’m not entirely sure that Thomas is doubting the resurrection as much as he is doubting what his friends are telling him. It almost makes you wonder if Thomas had been the target of practical jokes in the past. Has being cooped up in the upper room for a week gotten the best of his friends’ sanity?

But perhaps a better, deeper question to ask is whether the title “Doubting Thomas” is fair, or even accurate.

We love to focus on Thomas’s doubt, but let’s be brutally honest. If you had any serious doubts about who Jesus was after watching him be brutally crucified by the state, you would have left. You would have jumped ship, packed your bags, and caught the first caravan out of town. But Thomas doesn’t do that. Thomas stays. He stays with the community. He doesn’t doubt who Jesus is to him; he just wants what everyone else has already been given.

Theologian Karoline Lewis puts it beautifully. she writes, “All Thomas wants, all Thomas needs, is what everyone else had and, if we are honest, what we want, to see Jesus. One more time. Mary saw the Lord. The disciples saw the Lord. Because the Word made flesh isn’t real, if you can’t see and feel Jesus one last time.”

Thomas doesn’t maliciously doubt; he simply yearns for affirmation in what he so desperately wants to believe. It is Thomas, in fact, who gives us the most heartfelt, profound confession in all of John’s gospel.

This week, while reflecting on Thomas, I encountered a rather unconventional quote that perfectly captures his spiritual yearning. It comes from the lyrics of the classic 90s song Wonderwall by the band Oasis. Imagine the encounter between Jesus and Thomas through these words:

Jesus said to Thomas, ‘I’m sure you’ve heard it all before, but you never really had a doubt.’
And putting his hand in Jesus’ side, Thomas said to him, ‘Maybe you’re gonna be the one that saves me.’

The words that Thomas eventually speaks in the Gospel, “My Lord and my God!” highlight what the author of the gospel follows up with: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” Thomas is looking for the one who will save him, not just from eternal death, but from the despair and grief of the present moment.

But how exactly does Jesus save us in this moment? He does it by showing up in a profoundly unexpected way. When Jesus appears to Thomas, he does not appear as a glowing, pristine, untouchable spirit. He appears with his scars.

Theologian Yolanda Pierce reflects deeply on this. She asks, “How do we understand God-in-flesh, broken and vulnerable, and yet also resurrected and triumphant? How do we, like Thomas, make meaning of Jesus with his still visible wounds?” To Thomas, Jesus speaks the words, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.”

Pierce points out that there is a profound intimacy to Jesus’s command to Thomas. It is a closeness that we cannot, and must not, overlook. Christ invites him to touch the unhealed wounds, to feel the very places where the nails and the Roman spear had pierced his flesh. In progressive theology, we often talk about how much bodies matter. Well, here is the ultimate proof. This invitation is a divine proclamation that the physical body still matters. Our human frailty matters. God does not erase the trauma of the human experience; rather, God redeems it. As Pierce notes, “Wounds, too, are a part of the divine story.” Jesus shows us that our own scars, our physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds, do not disqualify us from holy, resurrected life.

What we also tend to forget is that this upper room encounter isn’t an isolated incident. It is the climax of John’s gospel, where the writer has been telling us something very particular about who Jesus is, what his life means, and what his death represents.

Scholar Andrew McGowan reminds us that since chapter 3, when Jesus met Nicodemus under the cover of night, Jesus has been speaking cryptically about his “exaltation,” his being “lifted up.” When Jesus is lifted up on the cross, he cries out in triumph, not despair: “It is finished.”

McGowan writes that this is no generalized smoothing-over of suffering. Rather, it is a claim that this narrative of power can be read from an entirely different, subversive standpoint. For the Gospel of John, this is the story of the kingdom that is “not from this world” a kingdom of peace and justice that has actively overcome the violent, cynical empire of Rome. Remember Pilate, the representative of the empire, whose best effort at answering the deepest questions of humanity was a cynical scoff: “What is truth?”

McGowan suggests that Thomas’s doubt is therefore not so much about the fact of a resurrection, but about its nature and its purpose. Thomas is grappling with this ultimate triumph over the false, violent power of the empire an empire that vaunted itself in piercing, but ultimately failing to break, the body of Jesus. So, the wound or the scar that Thomas seeks in order to identify the risen Jesus is the ultimate sign of subversion. It proves that the very same man who was executed by the state to draw the world to himself, the one from whom blood and water flowed, has defeated the powers of death. While the blood and water carry many symbolic meanings, they act as the ultimate guarantee of Jesus’ completion of how “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

This brings us to how we live out this story today. Too often, our assumption about resurrection is that it is merely a one-time historical event. We think that it is over, done, and finished, and that we simply need to intellectually assent to the fact that it occurred so we can go to heaven when we die. But that is far too small a theology for the God of the universe. What we fail to see is that resurrection happens all around us, every single day.

Christ’s dying and rising is synonymous with our own lives, and with the life of our world. How often have we felt that something in our own lives was lost to us, or completely dead? We stare into the terrifying void of grief, or addiction, or broken relationships, or systemic injustice, and we wonder, how do we recover? How do we move forward? Then, miraculously, resurrection occurs. Our eyes clear, the locked doors open, and we realize that we can move forward in faith, surrounded by a community of grace.

But this forward movement is not passive. Biblical scholar Paula Gooder writes something deeply challenging. She says, “Belief in the resurrection is an act of rebellion against the evil, corruption, and oppression that can so easily swamp us.” Let me say that again: belief in the resurrection is an act of rebellion.

Gooder continues, “Believing in the resurrection can be a refusal to accept the world as it is, that it can never change…. Believing in resurrection allows us to see the world with a long view, a perspective that looks backward to resurrection and forwards to the end times, recognizing traces of resurrection and end times in what is happening now. Believing in the resurrection can and should transform not only how we view the world, but how we live in it.”

When we look at the poverty, the violence, the exclusion, and the hurt in our society today, the resurrection empowers us to rebel against it. We refuse to accept that the world as it is, is the best it can be. Because we follow a wounded, risen Savior, we are called to be agents of peace and justice in a world that so desperately needs both.

Thomas helps us understand that the Word did indeed become flesh. He teaches us that resurrection matters deeply because of the intimate, transforming encounter we have with God. Thomas reminds us of the profound importance of this moment, and the next one. He teaches us about the intentionality of our actions as we live in the abundance of God’s love, working to bring heaven to earth, and finding true life with God.

So, my friends, wherever you find yourself this week—whether you are boldly standing in the light of day, or whether you are hiding behind the locked doors of your own upper room, grappling with your scars and your doubts, remember this promise:

No matter your circumstances, Jesus will always come looking for you. He will walk right through your walls, he will show you his scars to remind you that he understands your pain, and he will call you out into abundant, rebellious, world-changing life.

Peace be with you.
Amen.

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