Blog Posts
Preaching Thomas and Embodied Solidarity (John 20:19-29)
In the story of post-resurrection appearances in John 20, Thomas seems to ask for proof of Jesus’s resurrection. But was he also asking for something else?
When Jesus made a surprise visit to the disciples, he showed them his hands and side, apparently to convince them that he had risen from the dead. There was much celebration of this joyful reunion that Thomas learned about from other disciples. The Greek word elegon, a past continuous verb, suggests that the disciples kept telling him that they saw Jesus, but Thomas wasn’t ready to believe yet.
He wanted proof that the Jesus who appeared to the disciples was the same Jesus who was crucified. He wanted concrete proof of the risen Jesus.
It must have been hard for Thomas, and others, to believe that Jesus who confronted the Roman empire and challenged its status quo could actually survive and tell the story. It would have been hard to fathom that anyone could beat Rome’s death machine which had effectively eliminated every single challenge to its apparatus of oppression. Understandably, the idea of meeting the risen Jesus seemed unrealistic to Thomas.
For communities ravaged by imperial violence, the idea that justice can prevail seems like an impossible scenario.
However, John 20 suggests that Thomas was not interested solely, or even primarily, in proof that Jesus rose from the dead. If he only wanted proof of resurrection, he would have simply asked to see Jesus and perhaps touch him. But Thomas is asking for much more: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
Why was it especially important for him to see Jesus’s nail marks, feel the holes left by the nails and touch the wound in his side that had been pierced by the Romans?
Apparently, Thomas wants proof of Jesus’s crucifixion and suffering as well. He seems more interested in visible and tangible proof that Jesus who appeared to the disciples was in fact crucified. Later, when Jesus makes another appearance, he invites Thomas to examine his nail marks and put his hand in his side. All this begs the question: Why was it important for Thomas to be convinced that Jesus did in fact die on the cross?
Gerard Sloyan helpfully noted that John’s gospel was likely addressing an early form of Docetism. The word Docetism is derived from Greek word dokein which means “to seem.” Docetics believed that Jesus was a phantom-like figure who did not suffer on the cross but only appeared to do so. Within that context, John likely employed the Thomas figure to address such doubts and highlight the significance of Jesus’s suffering on the cross. Hence, the emphasis on the nails and putting his hand in the side that was pierced.
On a practical level, Thomas and others must have known at least a few figures who led popular movements against the Roman empire, gave powerful speeches about confronting oppressive structures, built an image as champions of justice, but quietly slipped away when they had to put their bodies on the line. Which is why Thomas wants visible and tangible proof that Jesus put his body on the line in the process of confronting the empire.
He wants assurance that Jesus wasn’t just an eloquent teacher and a charismatic leader, but actually had his skin in the game, nails in his flesh and a spear in his side.
When Jesus finally met Thomas, he invited him to touch his wounds and side. The text doesn’t say whether Thomas actually touched them. He likely did not. He did not need to. The scars left by the nails and spear were too big too miss and too scary to touch.
Thomas responds by saying, “My God and My Lord.”
What made Thomas call Jesus God and Lord was not his power but his wounds and scars. It was not the resurrection alone that convinces Thomas of the Lordship of Jesus but the assurance that Jesus did in fact place his body on the cross.
For Thomas, the scars represent Christ’s commitment to challenge the power of the empire, to suffer along with the powerless, and stand in solidarity with them.
In a culture that celebrates the resurrection and its power as key aspects of the Christ event, the story of Thomas highlights the cross and suffering as the hallmarks of the Christ event. Many Christians gloss over Good Friday and move too quickly to Easter Sunday, perhaps due to a discomfort with the motif of Christ suffering. Within such contexts, this text celebrates embodied solidarity that was quintessential to the story of Jesus — God who became flesh, dwelt among us and suffered in the process of confronting forces of evil. Incarnation was about the word becoming flesh and the flesh putting itself on the line alongside the oppressed and allowing itself to be pierced and scarred.
In his book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone observes powerfully that “The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.”
The hope that Cone highlights can only be realized when God’s people carry each other’s crosses in our everyday contexts and stand in solidarity with each other to bring life out of death and hope out of despair.
As we continue to reflect on Easter, meeting the risen Lord should not be solely about celebrating his victory over death but should focus on embracing his wounds and scars that signified God standing in solidarity alongside us. (Jesus’s invitation to Thomas to touch his wounds and put his hand in his side are an invitation for us to be in solidarity with each other and place our bodies on the line for those at the margins.)
The story of Thomas and the gospel of John in general tell us that embodiment matters in the struggle against injustice. They caution us against substituting words for embodied solidarity in the process of challenging the powers of our time. At a time when many Christians these days have invested right words and theologies to causes of justice but have largely not invested much skin in the game, the Thomas story insists on tangible proof that we have placed our bodies on the line in order to transform oppressive structures.
Dr. Raj Nadella
Raj Nadella is the Samuel A. Cartledge Associate Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. His research and teaching interests include postcolonial biblical interpretation, migration and New Testament perspectives on economic justice and their ethical implications for the Church and society. He is the author of Dialogue Not Dogma: Many Voices in the Gospel of Luke (T&T Clark, 2011) and an area editor for Oxford Bibliographies Online: Biblical Studies. He is the co-author of Postcolonialism and the Bible and co-editor of Christianity and the Law of Migration, both forthcoming in 2021. He has written for publications such as the Huffington Post, Christian Century and Working Preacher.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Reflection on Terror in Washington D.C.
The violent attacks on our nation’s Capitol and the mayhem that unfolded are disturbing and shocking on many levels. Still, there is much about those attacks that is eerily familiar, especially the absolute sense of entitlement with which thousands of White insurrectionists stormed the capitol complex and the freedom they enjoyed in doing so.
It appears that the insurrection was driven not just by a sense of blind loyalty to Donald Trump but also by an irrational fear of the changing political landscape in the U.S. that has seen many people of color headed for prominent positions. The insurrection occurred as a Black-Indian woman is about to occupy the nation’s second highest office and the most diverse cabinet in American history is about to be sworn in. It occurred on the day a Black American and Jewish American won historic Senate victories in Georgia. Within this political context, the attack in D.C. was a grotesque display of power by White supremacists aimed at maintaining the status quo at any cost.
Many of the insurrectionists displayed, among other things, American flags and Christian symbols. Perhaps it is significant to note that many of them were also unmasked. The image of unmasked rioters carrying American flags and Christian symbols in support of White Supremacy is a metaphor for the ways the insurrection exposed the unholy alliance between White supremacy and some segments of Christianity. As the attacks on our nation’s Capitol were playing out, The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser tweeted about her teenage son quoting Sinclair Lewis, “When fascism comes to America, it will come cloaked in American flags and bearing crosses." The tweet highlights the ways sections of Christianity have been eagerly jumping into bed with the empire the last few years and enabling it to perpetuate ugly aspects of the empire in pursuit of power. Many self-styled Christian leaders have actively aided White Supremacy by weaponizing religious symbols and contributed to the current crisis.
The eighth century prophet Amos spoke of the divine disgust for people who substitute religious festivals, offerings, and symbols for justice, the quintessential divine attribute. Amos encouraged people to pay more attention to ensuring justice for the marginalized than to religious sacraments. What would Amos say in our context? He would ask Christians to focus more on addressing the idolatry of racism rather than on engaging in seemingly religious rituals. He would ask Christians not to engage in a form of religion that might cause them to be blind or indifferent to structural racism that treats armed White people attempting a coup much more gently than unarmed Black people questioning systemic violence, to paraphrase Jelani Cobb. If visible expressions of religion take precedence over commitment to justice, they run the risk of becoming substitutes for justice or even weaponized in service of injustice.
Few progressive Christians would participate in anything remotely similar to the attacks in D.C. but the prophetic call for the Church is to consistently privilege justice over religious symbols.
It is not enough not to actively contribute to the disease of racism. Any indifference to it or a failure to consistently enervate it invariably makes one complicit in it. My prayer is that faith leaders will have the needed wisdom to realize the seriousness of the Church’s complicity in this disease and sufficient courage to confront it.
Raj Nadella
Raj Nadella is the Samuel A. Cartledge Associate Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. His research and teaching interests include postcolonial biblical interpretation, migration and New Testament perspectives on economic justice and their ethical implications for the Church and society. He is the author of Dialogue Not Dogma: Many Voices in the Gospel of Luke (T&T Clark, 2011) and an area editor for Oxford Bibliographies Online: Biblical Studies. He is the co-author of Postcolonialism and the Bible and co-editor of Christianity and the Law of Migration, both forthcoming in 2021. He has written for publications such as the Huffington Post, Christian Century and Working Preacher.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
The Sower and the Seed and Black Lives Matter
The Sower and the Seed (Matthew 13) is a familiar parable that is most often interpreted with a focus on the sower (he is too generous and even profligate in sowing everywhere) or on the soil (some soil is more receptive to the word than other). The parable highlights the disparate locations where seeds fall and juxtaposes the final fate of various seeds. While most seeds perished because they fell along the roadside, on rocky places, or among thorns, a few that fell on good soil flourished.
Parables by nature have many different meanings and occasionally call for readings different even from allegories that accompany them. A key aspect of this parable is the arbitrary manner in which the sower scatters seeds resulting in their contrasting fates. Where they fall and each environment—birds, scorching sun, and choking thorns—determine whether they perish or flourish. Seeds that fall on the path, or on the rocks, or among thorns have the odds stacked against them from the outset. None of the seeds in the parable have much, if any, agency. No doubt people should be good seeds, but can we really attribute failures or successes to seeds themselves if they have little agency in their destiny?
The parable takes on a new meaning when read in the context of growing economic disparities and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Many individuals and communities cannot grow, pursue their dreams, or realize their full potential as humans because they are excluded from systems (fall by the wayside), lack access to sufficient resources (fall on rocky soil) or are stifled by oppressive structures (choked by thorns). It sheds light on the role social determinants such as race, rather than hard work, ethos, and commitment, play in one’s flourishing or perishing.
In Matthew 13:7, Jesus describes seeds that were choked by thorns. The Greek word for choking—πνίγω—refers to strangling, throttling and suffocating. When read in the context of Black Lives Matter movement and the brutal killing of many African Americans like George Floyd by chokehold, it brings to memory a disturbing phrase we have been hearing too often—"I can’t breathe.” The fate of seeds that were choked by thorns parallels the plight of individuals whose lives and aspirations are crushed by thorns in the form of police brutality and dehumanizing economic structures.
But the parable in Matthew also highlights seed that fell on good soil and produced a crop—a hundred, sixty, or thirty times. Read in current political and economic contexts, it exposes the American Dream that enables some to flourish on account of their social location but turns into a nightmare for others as they are pushed to the margins and suffocated. In some cases, the few thrive precisely by pushing others to the margins, scorching them and strangling them—figuratively and literally. Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel, The Parable of the Sower, set in a context of climate catastrophe, growing economic disparities and police brutality in 2020 aptly captures some of these disturbing social realities.
In a culture that celebrates seeds that fall on good soil and calls them blessed but blames less fortunate individuals for their own economic and political misfortune, it is hard to expose the extent by which social determinants impact one’s success or failure. It is even harder to reduce their ability to choke individuals and remove impediments to growth of the marginalized.
But that is precisely what lies at the center of Jesus’ mission in the Gospel of Matthew.
Within the literary context of this parable (Matthew 12), Jesus heals many and empowers them to realize their full potential. Prominent among them is a man with a withered hand that Jesus restores to its fullness. The Greek word for withered hand—ξηράν—is semantically connected to the Greek word for withered seeds in the parable. Such a close link illuminates the plight of the seeds that are cast on rocky soil and scorched by the sun when they attempt to grow.
The blessed in Matthew are not those who are fortunate enough to fall on good soil, benefit from favorable structures, and flourish. In the Beatitudes (5:3-11), Jesus proclaims blessed are the ones who mourn, the meek, the marginalized, and the persecuted.
The blessed in Matthew are precisely those who fall by the wayside, on rocky soil, and are grasping for life.
In most Beatitudes, the agency in the second half is in the passive voice (they will be comforted, they will be fed, they will be shown mercy, etc). The passive voice leaves the agency open-ended and calls for human agency—the church and community—in addition to divine agency.
Accordingly, it is the church’s job to advocate for the interests of those who are scattered by the wayside and move them to fertile soil. The community has an obligation to safeguard the interests of the seed that fall on rocky soil and are scorched by the oppressive sun. The Church is invited to participate in and with the Spirit as it breathes over the breathless and challenges imperial forces that seek to choke individuals and entire communities.
Blessed are those who are cast by the wayside for they will no longer be excluded by structures.
Blessed are those who fall on rocky soil for they will be moved to good soil.
Blessed are those who fall among thorns for the Spirit, the ultimate breath, will let not thorns throttle them.
Dr. Raj Nadella
Raj Nadella is the Samuel A. Cartledge Associate Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. His research and teaching interests include postcolonial biblical interpretation, migration and New Testament perspectives on economic justice and their ethical implications for the Church and society. He is the author of Dialogue Not Dogma: Many Voices in the Gospel of Luke (T&T Clark, 2011) and an area editor for Oxford Bibliographies Online: Biblical Studies. He is the co-author of Postcolonialism and the Bible and co-editor of Christianity and the Law of Migration, both forthcoming in 2021. He has written for publications such as the Huffington Post, Christian Century and Working Preacher.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.