What A Difference a Day Makes

April 7, 2007
What a Difference a Day Makes
John 20:19-31;
Psalm 118:14-29; Acts 5:27-32; Revelation 1:4-8

It’s the Sunday after the Sunday when Jesus rose from the death. That had been a busy Sunday. Jesus appeared to Mary in the garden, to two disciples traveling to Emmaus, and to the disciples who had barricaded themselves in a room somewhere in Jerusalem. We have discovered today in John’s account that not everyone was at the post-Easter lock-in last week. Thomas hadn’t made roll call.

We get the impression that Thomas had gone off on his own following Jesus’ crucifixion and hadn’t rejoined the rest of the disciples until sometime after the Sunday evening appearance. Anyway, when the ten told him about Jesus’ resurrection and his appearance in their midst, he didn’t believe them. Try as they might, they couldn’t convince Thomas that Jesus had risen.

Served the disciples right, it did. They hadn’t believed Mary when she came early Sunday morning and told them that Jesus had been raised. They should have believed the word she brought to them, “I have seen the Lord.” Here they were – still behind locked doors because they feared the Jews. If they had believed her word, it apparently hadn’t made any difference in their lives. I can just hear Jesus saying to them, “You of little faith, why do you doubt?”

Brian Stoffregen says that “faith is not really about what we believe, but what difference it makes in our lives that we believe.”(1) John takes that to heart. Of the four gospel writers, he never uses the noun faith, and the only word related to faith is in today’s reading, when Jesus tells Thomas, “Do not doubt but believe.”

Pinchas Lapide is a Jewish New Testament scholar. He is not a Christian; yet he believes that God raised Jesus from the dead. For him, the proof of the physical resurrection lies in the changed lives of the disciples. He writes in The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective:

When this scared, frightened band of the apostles which was just about to throw away everything in order to flee in despair to Galilee; when these peasants, shepherds, and fishermen, who betrayed and denied their master and then failed him miserably, suddenly could be changed overnight into a confident mission society, convinced of salvation and able to work with much more success after Easter than before Easter, then no vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.(2)  

What a difference a day makes. Easter Day. “He is risen!” is the Word that transforms lives as no other word can. And that’s important for John, for whom the entire gospel, from beginning to end, is a Word that presents Jesus as the One who reveals God as the savior for those who believe, and as judge to those who are blind to that revelation. Salvation is determined by the way a person responds to the Word. It has nothing to do with what one may or may not see. Salvation comes through our ears more than through our eyes. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

The Word fills our lives, just as it filled the lives of the disciples and friends. Following the crucifixion their lives were bereft, empty. They were experiencing the empty nest syndrome to the nth degree. They had given their all to be with Jesus, to travel with him, to learn from him, to hang on his every spoken word, even if their understanding was too often dulled and corrupted by images and habits of their culture. In three short years their entire identity had become fully entwined with that of Jesus. They may not have realized it, but it couldn’t be hid. Peter couldn’t sneak his way into the high priest’s household. “You are also one of this man’s disciples, aren’t you?” It was that obvious, Peter’s denial notwithstanding.

The church as we know feels a lot like that empty nest period between Friday afternoon’s crucifixion and Sunday morning’s resurrection. Susan Nienaber wrote earlier this year in the Alban Institute’s Congregations magazine:

There are so many congregations that feel empty and cavernous now and so many older members that remember how it used to be when there was much more life and energy in God’s house. Some of our congregations are still deeply grieving what once was and haven’t been able to adjust even though it may have been decades.(3)

It is as if the church has become deaf and no longer hears the Word – the Word that Mary tried to bring to the disciples that first Easter morning, a Word that finally sank in when Jesus visited their locked hiding place Easter evening. It is as if the church has become deaf and no longer hears the Word – the Word the lately come-to-believing disciples tried to tell Thomas sometime after Sunday evening and which he couldn’t accept until a week later when Jesus appeared again to the still locked-in disciples.

When offered the opportunity to actually do a hands-on examination, Thomas does not doubt, but rather confesses: “My Lord and my God!” Thomas is a confessing disciple, not a doubting one. And while many translations have Jesus saying, “Do not doubt,” that’s not the right word to translate the Greek. The Greek actually says, “Do not be without faith,” “do not be faithless.” The Common English Bible translates the verse as “No more disbelief. Believe!” And Eugene Peterson’s Message has “Don’t be unbelieving. Believe.”

In the twinkling of an eye, in the space of a day, so to speak, Thomas has changed, grown, matured. Henri Bergson has said, “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”(4) To put it a different way, Thomas has grown through the three stages of faith that Episcopal Christian educator John H. Westerhoff III describes. He has experienced faith by having been with Jesus, imitating what Jesus has said and done. And it moved on to an affiliative faith, a group faith, as when Thomas said to the disciples when Lazarus died, “Let us also go [with Jesus to Bethany], that we may die with him.”

When Thomas was confronted with the death of Jesus and then the reports of his resurrection, he entered the adolescent “searching faith,” wondering if he could believe what he had believed and was being asked now to believe.

Then with a single word from Jesus Thomas moves to the faith stage of “owned faith.” “Is this what I believe?” has become “This is what I believe!” “My Lord and my God!”(5)

Does the Word break into the emptiness of our lives? Has the Word moved us from imitative faith through affiliative faith through searching faith to owned faith? Are we different because Jesus was raised, even though our eyes have not seen his nail-scarred hand and pierced side? Are we different because someone spoke the risen Word to us and it changed everything, matured us, and does now constantly recreate us in the forgiven and forgiving God-imbued image that was intended from the beginning?

This table changes us. We spiritually partake of Christ’s body and blood, even though our fingers touch ordinary bread and our lips taste ordinary grape juice. We are changed. We are transformed into Christ’s living – resurrected – body for the world. We become the bread of life. We become vessels of the breathed Spirit to breathe life into an otherwise empty world around us and to fill it with the presence of God, as the waters cover the seas.

What a difference a day makes. Not just any day. The day. Easter Day. With Thomas we can confess, with faith, “My Lord and my God!”

Alleluia! Amen.


(1) Brian Stoffregen, “Gospel Notes for Next Sunday,” 2 Easter C, John 20:19-31 (http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=51bd49db6caae596e13e44534&id=1d9301e804&e=e9babc8d38)
(2) Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002) p. 125.
(3) Susan Nienaber, “Resilient Congregations,” Congregations (Alban Institute), January 2013.
(4) Cited by Nienaber, ibid.
(5) Thanks to Brian Stoffregen, op. cit., for highlighting Westerhoff’s work.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.