Contradictions or Paradoxes?

The Second Sunday of Easter 2008 ~ March 30

Teach us, O God, to doubt when our certainties lead us astray and to have faith when our doubts do not lead to a higher truth. Amen.

Dear friends, our Orthodox sisters and brothers call this Sunday "Thomas Sunday," because we always hear today's Gospel about the archetypal "doubting Thomas" on this Second Sunday of Easter. I love this account of Thomas' encounter with Jesus in his resurrected reality. In narrative form we hear an aspect of the Good News, which is at the heart of resurrection hope: Faith and doubt are not opposites. Doubt is indeed a part of faith; were it not so, faith would degenerate into fanaticism. Also this Gospel challenges us to move from an apparent contradiction to contemplate the possibility of paradoxical truth.

First, let's look at the contradiction in this Gospel. We are told at the outset that the disciples were in a house, the doors of which were shut and locked. The house was sealed shut so to speak; no one could enter or leave. Suddenly the resurrected Jesus stands in their midst. His is obviously a reality, which is not constrained by locked doors or thick walls. To use a metaphor from the realm of science fiction we might say that the resurrected Jesus was "beamed" into the room, that he was de-materialized and then re- materialized in the room. At the same time we are told that Jesus is present in his physical body and that he challenges Thomas to touch him, to see the wounds of his violent death. His is obviously a reality, which is physical, corporeal. He is not simply a ghost or a figment of their collective imagination. Locked doors, a physical body: on the surface this is a contradiction. Physical bodies cannot walk through locked doors or thick walls. On the surface this is indeed a contradiction. At a deeper or perhaps we might want to say "higher" level this contradiction becomes a paradox, a seeming contradiction which expresses a profound truth. It's the profound truth, dear friends, which the Apostle Paul expressed in the oxymoron of a "spiritual body," the phrase he uses to describe resurrection.

Resurrection is paradoxical, there's clearly no doubt about that. All of the biblical accounts of the resurrection appearances of Jesus emphasize - as does today's Gospel - the identity of the Jesus who died on the cross with the Jesus of resurrected reality. All the sources we have maintain that the tomb was indeed empty at the same time that they proclaim a reality which is more than, if not different than, a resuscitated corpse. Jesus' wounds were visible even as his appearance must have been altered in some profound way - to the extent that his disciples did not always recognize him - as in the encounter of the two disciples with the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus. It would be a mistake - in my estimation - to see contradictions where there really is a profound paradox. Perhaps it is not surprising that the central event at the heart of Christian faith as well as the central teaching of Christian faith are both paradoxical: the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, God is one in three, three in one, is hardly less than paradoxical.

Dear friends, we are encompassed by paradox in our faith and in our lives. We ourselves are a paradox, are we not?: sinners and yet also justified and redeemed by Christ. And the Kingdom of God, for the coming of which we daily pray in the prayer that Jesus taught us, is paradoxically already here even as it is still to come. Easter faith and paschal joy are part of living this paradox of the Not Yet and the Already Accomplished. As we now baptize Tatum and Sophia we welcome them into this paradoxical world of the Not Yet and the Already Accomplished.

Allow me to quote in conclusion a prayer attributed to the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador:

"O God, help us, now and then, to step back and take the long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts; it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church's mission
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they will hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capacities.
We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in knowing that:
It enables us to do something and to do it well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the Master Builder and
the worker.
We are workers, not Master Builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own." Amen.

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