Sermon: Easter 2 Sermon

Preacher:

Chris Hollingshurst

Date:

Sunday 27th April 2025

Venue:

Guildford Cathedral

Service:

Cathedral Eucharist

This week, I came across a quote from an eighteenth-century atheist French philosopher called, Denis Diderot. In case you are wondering, that particular school of thought isn’t at the top of my reading list but, as I stumbled upon it in passing it provoked a reaction in me. 

Diderot wrote:

“Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me, ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.’ This stranger is a theologian.”

Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t disagree more. But of course theologians are frequently still derided. ‘Oh that’s just theology’ is a phrase sometimes used to suggest that what is being offered is theoretical, all very nice perhaps but not much use, even irrelevant.

I heard it often in the planning meetings and operational contexts of the logistics and distribution company I worked for prior to ordination.

Properly defined and understood, theology – the study of, the wrestling with, the nature of God and of God’s relation to the world - is crucial. Indeed, for the Church, what could be more important?

We might not think it, but most or all of us ‘do theology’ one way or another. Consciously or otherwise, we all study, or wrestle with, the nature of God and of God’s relation to the world.

And in these days when so many people tell me the world is going mad, it matters what conclusions we reach, however subliminally. It matters to others around us, and it really matters to our own peace of mind.

We know that it is not always easy to make sense of faith and life. Nearly thirty years ago, I was walking with an old Salvation Army Captain when he said, ‘The more I know the less I know’ - and I have mused on these words often.

All the same, I’ve realised that sometimes the less I know the more I can, against my given personality, let go in prayer and trust again in face of those things I can’t grasp at all. By contrast, when things seem clear and ordered, I default to managing in my own strength – which is often when the problems start.

Ironically, the quote I began with, from Denis Diderot, can be positively reframed. When I look back afterwards at the most difficult times in my life - when I have looked for God in spiritual or emotional darkness, and wrestled with the nature of God in the world and in my life - there will have been gifts I have been given and lessons I have learned which faint light, and even blinding light, might have obscured.

The Thomas of this morning’s gospel reading was, for centuries, held under a collective judgement and disapproval, poor man. Doubting Thomas, the one less believing than the others. Somehow a failed disciple. A man who misses the mark.

That seems harsh when we know that a week had passed between when Jesus first appeared to his disciples in the upper room and when he appeared again when Thomas was with them.

Thomas hasn’t wandered off and left the group in his disbelief and disappointment, has he? He has, as we say, ‘hung in there’. For all his probable regrets as well as his doubts, his remaining faith has at least made him want to believe.  And wanting to believe is always a good start.

When it comes to it, perhaps Thomas is the one who is honest enough to wrestle with, to question, the nature of what the others were given (as it were) on a plate. Perhaps he is the only one honest enough to articulate what at least some of the others were still feeling.

Perhaps this ambiguity was true for at least some others in the upper room but surely also for some who encountered the newly risen Christ elsewhere. For example, Luke’s gospel (in chapter 24) records the Emmaus Road disciples as (and it’s a great turn of phrase) ‘disbelieving for joy and still wondering’ – so Thomas isn’t even the only one!

We humans veer so easily between utmost certainty and utmost doubt. It seems to me that a position forged from falling from over-confidence on one hand, and picking ourselves up from doubting everything, is actually where we want to be. And a theology forged in the library of life experiences helps us to see this.

Thomas doesn’t want second-hand resurrection passed on via the others. He longs for his own encounter, his own meaning. And Jesus meets him exactly there—not to rebuke him, but to invite him to come closer: “Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out and touch.”

It is through the wound that Thomas comes to faith. “My Lord and my God!” is the Gospel’s clearest confession of Christ’s divinity, but it is a confession initially obscured by doubt, born not of immediate certainty, but arrived at in intimacy.

Resurrection does not erase suffering or pretend it didn’t happen. It transforms and dignifies it. When Christ appears before the disciples in that upper room, he does not hide his wounds.

He says, “Here is where I was broken - and still am. Here is love, still wounded, still alive.” It is in this that Doubting Thomas becomes Convinced Thomas – and, we might say, becomes a theologian.

Thomas’ exclamation ‘My Lord and my God’ was the most sure, instantaneous response of any of the people to whom the newly risen Jesus revealed himself. It suggests, I think, that Thomas had pondered the implications of what the others had told him about the first appearance in the upper room.

So convinced was he, tradition tells us, that Thomas travelled to southern India to proclaim the resurrection; and the Mar Thoma churches there bear his name.

I wonder how you are hearing this account of the Resurrection and Thomas’ response today… What draws you in? What speaks to you, I wonder? Are you convinced? Do you have doubts but nevertheless want to believe?

Does all this today leave you wanting to wrestle in the dark with the nature of God and of God’s relation to the world and to your life?

A closing word of encouragement. The gospels are not afraid to let doubt sit alongside the resurrection. Even at Jesus’ final appearance to his disciples, as he is about to ascend to his Father, Matthew’s gospel tells us that the disciples worshipped him but ‘some doubted’.

The Church today needs to be comfortable with letting doubt sit alongside the resurrection, too. Many will be failed by a rush towards the cast-iron certainty that dishonours faithful questions. There is nothing wrong with, or unusual about, Easter alleluias that embrace doubt. They still count! The praise is still offered!  And through these fragile alleluias God is still glorified, and faith is proclaimed.

Like Thomas, the risen Jesus invites us to bring our doubts to his wounds, and in doing so, He invites us to be convinced that, even in brokenness, there is new life.  In Jesus’ words to the disciples in the upper room that night: ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and have yet come to believe.’

Alleluia! Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Let us pray.

God of life, source of all faith, through baptism you have raised us up in Jesus and given us life that endures.

Day by day, refine our faith we pray, that we who have not seen the Christ may truly confess him as our Lord and our God, and share the blessedness of all who believe.

Grant this through Jesus Christ, the resurrection and the life, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever.

 Amen.