| Honest Thomas- Part III |
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[This is the third and final
sermon in a series that began with the honest doubts of Thomas, the Disciple.]
“Honest
Thomas- Part III”
John
14: 1-11(b)
Douglas S. Long
Three boys are in the school yard bragging about their
fathers. The first boy says, "My Dad scribbles a few words on a piece of
paper, he calls it a poem, they give him $50."
The second boy says, "That's nothing. My Dad
scribbles a few words on a piece of paper, he calls it a song, they give him
$100."
The third boy says, "I got you both beat. My Dad
scribbles a few words on a piece of paper, he calls it a sermon... and it takes
eight people to collect all the money!"
I’ve been scribbling on this sermon
for three weeks now… and along the way I stopped calling Thomas …Thomas, the
one who says to the other disciples after they claim to have seen
Jesus post crucifixion, death and burial… Thomas who says, “What?! You’re
telling me you a saw a dead man walking and talking and moving among you. I’m
guessing you saw someone else and
thought it was him. I’m thinking you wanted so badly to believe Jesus was alive that your psyches created this experience.
Look guys, I saw them bury him. I’d
have to see him alive for myself to
think anything differently.”
…In the course of this series I’ve
stopped referring to Thomas as “Doubting Thomas" and started calling him “Honest
Thomas.”
If Thomas’ first reactions are not normal… if such doubts are out of
bounds… then folks like most of us are in a heap
of trouble.
So I’ve been pointing out, the past couple of Sundays
that there was actually a huge diversity of opinion on the earliest church
about central matters of faith.
What the very first followers of Jesus struggled with was
whether he was like one of us.
...and after Jesus’ death, within the Christian community,
a raucous dialogue took place. Somehow, for the most part, we’ve missed the
conversation captured in our Gospels in addition to the part of the
conversation that was buried along the way.
How do we know it was buried?… Well, it
got dug up! Literally! There are continued archeological finds, but
specifically, in 1945 near the northern Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, 13
parchments were found… 13 scrolls of ancient texts, from the earliest Christian
writings Now, I don’t know how many of you have been paying close attention to
the first two sermons in this series, but last week I said there were 12 Nag
Hammadi parchments. There are 12… There
were 13.
What happened to the other one? It was
used as fire starter by the peasants who found them.
True. Hey, they didn’t know what they had found. It’s a miracle that the other
12 survived for almost 2000 years and eventually ended up in the hands of
scholars who could study them.
…and one of those scholars was Elaine
Pagels, now a professor of religion at
Succinctly, and here’s the crux of the
matter that I’ve been leading up to for the past two weeks, Pagels claims the
early Church Fathers felt they had to make a choice between the gospel as
Thomas presents it and the gospel as presented by John.
In a nutshell, Thomas says Jesus is
divine, and that we have divinity within us as well… that the image of God in
Jesus is also in us and that, not only through Jesus but also by our own
experience we can come to know God. That's Thomas.
John says that, without Jesus, we have
no hope at all.
I was at having coffee a while back at
the Starbucks at Falls of the
“What about this, the young woman began…
Jesus said:
‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the Father except by me.’
Do you believe that at your church?”
Ah… the Gospel of John.
Back to Pagels, she says… “As a teenager
I found in the Gospel of John what my evangelical community craved “the
assurance of belonging to the right group, the true flock that alone belonged
to God.” In John, Jesus is not only a man, but a mysterious, superhuman
presence, and he tells the disciples to love one another. The undercurrents are
there … everyone who doesn’t believe is condemned already to eternal death. (p. 30 "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel
of Thomas" by Elaine Pagels.)
But contrast this to the sayings
attributed to Jesus in Thomas’ Gospel:
These are the
secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymus Judas Thomas recorded.
3… "When
you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you
are children of the living [God]. But if you do not know yourselves, then you
live in poverty, and you are the poverty."
5. Jesus said, "Know what
is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.
For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed."
This is hardly a Jesus who proclaims
exclusively “I am the truth, the way, the life. No one comes to the Father but
by me.”
In the Gospel of Thomas, recognizing
one’s affinity with God is key to the
John was written in the heat of controversy
about who Jesus was.
(p.34) “John says explicitly that he writes so that
‘you may believe, and in believing, may have life in [Jesus’] name."
What John opposed includes what the Gospel of Thomas
teaches- that God’s light shines not only in Jesus but, potentially at least,
in everyone. The sayings of Jesus in Thomas’s Gospel encourage the hearer to
know God through one’s own divinely given capacity, since all are created in
the image of God.
A few chapters into her book, Pagels
recounts a conversation with a convert to Buddhism at the
“Had I known the Gospel of Thomas,” the convert explained
smiling (Buddhist always smile), “I wouldn’t have had to become a Buddhist!”
Thomas…. Within you, within each of us, there is a part
of the divine that connect with THE Divine… God.
What if Thomas had become the gospel of
choice for the early church fathers… and why was it not… and why was it not at
least included as a fifth gospel?
Why was this part of the dialogue buried
so deeply?
It was Irenaeus, bishop of
Irenaeus agreed that all humans are
created in God’s image BUT (and this is going to sound familiar to many of
you) “the original affinity between God
and ourselves was obliterated when the human race surrendered to the power of
evil… the Devil alienated us from God…and made us his own.’ Thus we were all in
a desperate situation and would have been utterly destroyed had not the divine
word descended from heaven to save us, for there ‘is no other way,’ says
Irenaeus, ‘that we could learn about God unless our Master, existing as the
word, had become man’ and shed his blood to redeem us from the evil one.’ (p.
147)
And so Irenaeus used all of his
influence to demand that all versions of the gospel that were contrary to this
interpretation be destroyed, while also claiming only four versions were true.
Of the four (Luke, Mark, Matthew and John) the favorite of Irenaeus was John,
because it is in John that Jesus is so clearly elevated to the level of Divine
Pagels contends that prior to Irenaeus backing,
John’s Gospel was not central at all and not really known by many Christians.
This makes some sense as most scholars place the writing of John decades later
than Matthew, Mark and Luke.
John, and really John alone, gets it
right, claims Irenaeus.
But how did Iraneus’s view make such a
categorical leap into orthodoxy, you ask? You’re asking that, right? You should
be… I mean, if there were opinions all over the known civilized world (How
weighted and biased is that phrase?!) If there were strong opinions from
These are broad brush strokes folks so
don’t think of this too simply, and remember that Christianity was, for the
most part, outlawed by the Roman Empire early on… but because Christians DID
follow the servant lifestyle of Jesus, because they were sacrificial in their own
lifestyles and loving in a manner that could not be denied, converts came… and
one, a century and a half after Irenaeus, who himself lived 150 years after
Jesus… one of these Christian converts was named Constantine. Constantine,
Roman Emperor in the early 4th century… and Constantine was a disciple of
Irenaeus’s school of thought.
Constantine wanted a unified Roman
Empire and, though scholars disagree on the exact nature of the Emperor's
motivations (I know it comes as a shock that scholars might not agree
completely!) … though scholars disagree on the exact nature of this,
Constantine was a pious man who desired a unified Christianity… and it was no
small coincidence that a unified Christian faith was good for a unified Empire.
So Constantine called together the major
Christian theologians/voices to Nicea… and a central creed was hammered out. It
was 325 C.E.
Do you know the Nicene Creed? Born out of
this controversy on central matters of faith… I dare say here at UPUCC some of
you know it by heart and some of you may not remember ever having heard it, but
even those who haven’t heard it recognize some of the phrases:
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
There’s more, of course, about….
-the Virgin
Mary,
-the
resurrection of Jesus
-the coming
judgment
The year 325. The Council of Nicea… right
belief prescribed …and a canon was established. Pagels makes the interesting
point that the word ‘canon’ is a carpenter’s term for a plumb line. Do you know
what a plumb line is? … a weight attached to a string that you can hang and
allow gravity to show you exactly what is straight and what is not… what is
‘out of plumb.’ As of the 4th century, 300 or so years after Jesus’ life,
Christianity had a plumb line, a ‘canon’ to keep it straight.
27 books from all those existing that
interpreted the faith made the cut. We call it… the New Testament.
What happened to the others? There was a
fourth century book burning.
Orthodoxy took giant leaps forward.
…and just to give this creed and canon some teeth,
Constantine rewarded the orthodox (Which is to say, those who agreed with the
new creed and canon.) and punished heretics. Christians had been long punished
by the Empire… now Constantine ordered that property earlier seized be returned
and that some of the leaders of these communities not be taxed! Church and
State issues have been muddled ever since.
… but the properties were returned and
tax exemption extended only those who believed truly. Only those who
believed we can know God through Jesus the Christ and not in any way through our
own experience of God.
Likewise, those who were far outside true belief, Jews, were severely
punished. How? In one example, Jews were forbidden by
..and the minority opinions were
destroyed, or hidden for safekeeping.
16 or 1700 years ago, somewhere in
The end result of this movement is that
the Gospel of John became central, defining, orthodox…and those understandings
of Jesus that strayed from it were labeled heresy.
Pagels, struggling with two primary ways
she had experienced the Church today, the church of her childhood centered on belief and the church she was drawn to
as an adult centered on Divine love,
…Pagels posed the question: …when and how being a Christian became virtually
synonymous with accepting a certain set of beliefs.? (p. 5)
…and her answer “…since the 4th century,
most churches have required those who would join … to profess a complex set of
beliefs about God and Jesus- beliefs formulated by 4th century bishops into the
ancient Christian Creeds.” (p.27)
“Some, of course,”
explains Pagels, “have no difficulty [professing such creeds]. Many others, … have
had to reflect on what the creeds mean, as well as on what we believe (What
does it mean to say that Jesus is “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of
the Father”?) I can appreciate,” says Pagels, “how Constantine, the first
Christian emperor, became convinced that making- and enforcing- such creeds
helped to unify and standardize rival groups and leaders during the turmoil of
the fourth century. Yet how do such demands for belief look today, in light of
what we now know about the origins of the Christian Movement?”
I think it means that we know God is
still speaking. I think it means that we recognize that the accounts of
exclusivity should not totally exclude other interpretations. I think it means
that we bring all of our own personal experience and humanity in approaching
the divine until we plumb the depths of our humanities connection to the Divine… the candlelight image of
God within our being that recognizes the blazing image of God in Jesus.
What does all this mean for us? I think
it means that some of us, on this long journey, need to go back to school and
study old, dead people… full of the life of faith.
I hope it means we’ll continue on this journey together.
Amen.
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