April 13, 2021

Who Ya Gonna Call? Lock Busters!

 

People say that it takes a lot of repetition before we remember something.  Well, it took more than a few years of repetition before I realized that we always hear the story of Thomas the first Sunday after Easter.  The early church thought it was so important, that it is right up there with the Luke passage on Christmas Eve.  Even the Road to Emmaus is only once in three years.  It’s a pretty special story, and one that is trying to get the critics and cynics to hear a message they don’t want to hear.

There’s a lot of that around these days.  Locked doors, locked minds, locked up emotions, locked up because we’ve been living with Covid and we humans are not very good with dealing with curtailments of our freedoms and our lives.  We have a difficult time with thinking about short term sacrifices for long term gains.

There’s an old experiment where children were told that they could chose to eat a marshmallow right away or they could wait and eat two marshmallows when the tester came back.  They were left in an empty room. A third of the kids ate the marshmallow as soon as the tester left.  The rest were able to wait, some as long as 15 minutes.  Interestingly, the kids who waited were more successful in school, in work and in their personal lives.  Waiting for the future, giving up things for a benefit down the road, these were all predicted by their ability to hold off eating the marshmallow. 

We want what we want when we want it and some folks want it now.  Some of us can wait, some of us choose not to wait.  When tragedy hits, we don’t know what to do with our wants.  We don’t know how to deal with the loss of our dreams and expectations.  We go into trauma mode.

That’s where the disciples were.  The anguish of losing their leader to state-sanctioned torture and brutal execution, the fear that they would be the next victims of that violence, the grief of having their dreams and hopes brutally stopped unexpectedly had put them into full-blown trauma reactions.

When we are faced with a stressful situation, we will instinctively respond in one of three ways, fight, flight or freeze.  We see that most clearly in war zones.  Some choose to become refugees and take flight, some pick up weapons to join a side and some hunker down waiting for the war to pass.  All are normal responses to conflict.  We too are likely to respond in one of those three ways.

Given the circumstances that the disciples were living in, an occupied country with extreme poverty amongst the Jewish people and extreme wealth for the upper-class elite especially the Romans and the collaborators, there was already a sense of Fight and Freeze.  The disciples thought they were going to serve Jesus as the king’s advisors and the Zebedee brothers were squabbling over who would get the best seating near Jesus’ throne.  Insurrectionists were a source of constant trouble for the Romans, and the temple authorities didn’t want Jesus to continue to stir the pot.  So, there was already trauma and conflict brewing.

No wonder the disciples, after facing the arrest of Jesus, scattered and ran and denied they knew Jesus.  No wonder after the execution, they gathered in fear and trembling behind locked doors.  They were living with trauma!

So what takes people who are locked down, scared for their lives, denying their faith and afraid to take a stand and transforms them into powerful public preachers?  How do we reconcile the fearful disciples with the man who wrote boldly, “We declare to you what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands…”  That is a strong and passionate statement to start a letter with, don’t you think?  How do we connect the dots between the locked doors and the courageous writer?

It keeps coming back to Jesus.  Not once but twice does he do his magic Houdini act, appearing behind locked doors.  He keeps showing up!  Again and again.  He’s willing to have Thomas touch him in his wounds, a most intimate act.  “See my suffering!  Hear my comforting words! Touch my trauma!  And please, let’s not wag fingers at poor Thomas.  After all, the rest of the disciples saw Jesus first and they still met behind locked doors.  What is striking about Thomas is that one appearance was all it took.  The others needed more, and could not convince Thomas that what they were saying was true.  Not because he was at fault but maybe because they still were not completely sure themselves.  They were teetering on the edge of transformation, from disciples to apostles, from students to teachers, and they were not quite ready.

What pushed them from trauma to new life, new hope, new vision and goals and expectations?  Jesus.  He pushed past the locks they had put in place to keep themselves safe.  He encouraged them to ask questions, comforting them with new challenges and thoughts.  He kept showing up in their lives and they grew to trust him.  He gave them choices and opportunities to touch him.  Thomas didn’t take Jesus up on the offer to touch the bloody cuts, but he appreciated the invitation.

We all are invited to a new holy and loving life.  We are invited to care about ourselves, our neighbors and our God.  We make mistakes and fall short, struggling to be honest even to ourselves about our flaws.  To hear John write that we all make mistakes is to hear that he too struggled with his own mistakes, his own fears and failings.  He too hid in a locked room, afraid to come out and share his truth.  But he testified that Jesus keeps breaking the locks to our own rooms and keeps coming into our own lives with the glorious Easter news that we are not alone, that God loves us with a passion beyond human experience and guides and supports us all in our times of trial.  Truly, blessed are those who have not seen Jesus and yet believe even in their fears and traumas.  Easter comes to us all, Halleluiah!

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