Friday, April 21, 2017
II Easter - April 23, 2017
II Easter
April 23, 2017
Holy Trinity & St.
Anskar
To you darkness and light
are both alike.
+In the Name of God,
the Holy and Undivided Trinity
The delightful Sufi stories of the Incredible Mullah
Nasruddin include one in which the holy man is crawling around under a
streetlight in the middle of the night. A friend passing by asks him what he’s
doing, and Nasruddin tells him that he is looking for a key that he has lost.
“Where do you think you lost
it?” Asks the friend.
Nasruddin replies that he is
sure that he lost it “somewhere over there,” pointing off into the darkness.
The puzzled friend naturally
asks the mullah why he is searching under the streetlight if the lost key is
somewhere else?
Nasruddin explains that it’s
dark over there and the only way one can find anything is to search where one
can see — in the light!
As usual with these stories,
behind the joke there is a profound truth. I think it has something to do with
today’s famous story about Doubting Thomas.
Poor Thomas — the twin, the
double — had a double-mind. His finger
is the finger we refer to when we speak of the “finger of the doubt.” Because
he wanted to verify the Resurrection by touching Jesus’ wounds. He was like
Nasruddin, looking for the lost key in the light. One part of Thomas’s double
mind insisted on sensory verification. “I will not believe unless…” But his
doubt was not the opposite of faith. For faith is not just an opinion about reality; it is also fidelity, and Thomas was the most
faithful of the apostles, in that sense: he was the one who admonished the
other apostles to go up to Jerusalem with Jesus and die with Him. And it was
Thomas who made the orthodox confession we heard today, addressing Jesus as “my
Lord and my God.”
So Thomas is a double-minded
person. His will was true — and fidelity, is a matter of will, not of the
understanding. But Thomas’s understanding, requires verification. Empirical verification. He was looking
for the key in the light, like Nasruddin. In that way, Thomas represents all of
us, illustrating the double meaning of belief: it can mean either opinion or
trust. In the first sense, belief has to do with understanding — what we think is true. In the other sense belief means
trust in someone or something. As
Thomas shows, it is possible to have faith in one sense and not in the other.
It is possible to be faithful to someone, while at the same time not believing
everything that is said about that person, however glorious, without
verification. The Resurrection is too
good to be true. It is probably not an accident that we remember “Doubting
Thomas” on the very next Sunday after Easter.
John says that he has
relayed this story about Thomas so that we “may come to believe that Jesus is
the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing [we] may have life in
His Name.” The NAME is not a magic word – I take it to mean reputation or the pubic narrative about
someone. So in that sense, Life in His
Name begins in faith. Not
believing that it is true, but trusting the Name – the narrative – to be a
genuine path to life, in spite of our own double-mind,
our own doubt. To live in the Name of
Jesus, is to hold in our consciousness the stories about Jesus, to accept them
insofar as we can, and that faithfully. Our fidelity in remembering these
stories and holding them in our consciousness more and more, has the effect —
over time — of nurturing the conviction that they are true. So that faith in
the sense of fidelity brings about faith in the sense of belief.
Notice that although Thomas
said that he would not believe unless he physically touched the Risen Lord, we
are not told that he did so, even though the Lord invited him to. Instead, he immediately
addressed the Lord as God. He kept his “finger of doubt” to himself. Somehow,
his experience of the Risen Lord so transcended the doubting part of his double
mind, that it was no longer relevant to his consciousness. He had found the
lost key in the darkness, that is in the hidden Mystery of reality vaster that
the little spot of light under the streetlight.
The Resurrection is beyond
our comprehension. It is far greater than anything we can say about it, and any
description will be inadequate. Maybe that is the significance of the detail
that the room in which the Risen Lord appeared was locked. Jesus is really
there, but He opens to our consciousness astounding new dimensions of reality,
so that Thomas’s previous insistence upon verification becomes oddly
unimportant to him.
Divine Reality is hidden
from us: God is invisible and silent. As long as we insist on empirical
evidence, we are like the Incredible Mullah Nasruddin, searching futilely for
the lost key to everything in the light of ordinary understanding. But the Key
cannot be found there. Ordinary understanding is no help. Divine Reality is to
be found in the darkness, that is to say, beyond our ordinary understanding, in
the Cloud of Unknowing, as the great,
anonymous, English mystic called it, beyond our ability to verify, where the
empirical finger of doubt is irrelevant
and useless.
Divine Reality — like the Resurrection
— is beyond all of our categories, our ordinary ways of understanding reality.
God is not to be found there: to God, darkness and light are both alike.
Alleluia!
Christ
is risen from the dead,
Trampling
down death by death,
And giving
life to all in the tombs.
Alleluia!
