Time with Friends

As many of you know, I took a few days at the tail end of my time in Prague to visit London. One of the things I remember most about that trip is how refreshing it was to hear and see English everywhere. After six months in the Czech Republic, I was fairly comfortable with the Czech signs and the basic Czech phrases (especially the one for, "I don't speak Czech."), so I was astonished that the pleasure of the English language was powerful enough to be almost physical.

This weekend, I experienced something similar: I spent a long weekend at a literature conference in California. Before I went, I was looking forward to giving my talk and sharing some of my own poetry. I hoped to see the Pacific Ocean. Yet I was only mildly interested in the conference itself: In graduate school, I attended two conferences (one on rhetoric and literature, another on Willa Cather) and while I enjoyed both, neither stands out.

My conference in California was outstanding. Yes, I stood at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, and yes, I read my own poetry to an audience of perhaps fifteen people. Yet the conference itself was equally a treat. There, I talked about narrative structure, the horror genre as a vehicle for religious themes, Lady Julian of Norwich and phenomenology, and T.S. Eliot. I picked up tips on using literature circles in class, and I brainstormed about how to fold service learning projects into the notoriously messy English Composition class that I teach. At the end of the conference, several other (very sporting) participants and I headed off to a nearby trail for a hike and trooped through the Southern California sun heatedly debating the narrative potential of video games and the differences between English and French romance novels.

Confession: I kinda want to go back for a PhD now. Oops.

(For those of you who don't keep up with humanities higher education, the job market for PhDs in literature is terrible these days.)

Here's what I think made the weekend such a treat, especially compared to conferences I attended in graduate school: I am trained and love to analyze literature as a scholar, but I rarely hold scholarly, in-depth conversations about literature anymore. In graduate school, I had such conversations all the time. I was guaranteed an interesting, thought-provoking discussion about literature whenever I showed up to my class on DeLillo and the postmodern American novel or to my seminar on literary theory. Now, the closest I get is teaching Four Quartets to my mother so that she can teach it to her high school literature class.

I am reminded of a passage in The Last Battle. Towards the beginning of the novel, nearly all the characters - Edward, Lucy, Peter, Jill, Eustace and the Professor - meet to "have a good jaw about Narnia (for of course there's no one else we can ever talk to about things like that)". What made my weekend in California such a treat was the chance to "have a good jaw" about T.S. Eliot and Julian of Norwich and all the rest.

When I was a child, I used to wonder how in the world the early Christians could bear to be together so much. They seemed to gather all the time, for great lengths of time. You remember the young man who fell out the window during the middle of Paul's sermon? I always had complete sympathy for him, thinking to myself, "How I would hate to be stuck in a church service that long!" Or Paul will instruct the elders of a church to read the epistle to the rest of the church, and I would imagine sitting through a reading of all fifteen chapters of I Corinthians and think to myself, "How boring!"

Of course, my problem was not that I was disinterested in faith; I was simply saturated with it. I was homeschooled. I had Christian parents. I read the Bible daily and I prayed daily. Sunday mornings were simply an extension of my ordinary week, but with me stuck in a hard pew and growing hungrier by the minute.

Now, I am better able to appreciate why the early Christians met so often and for such long times. The fact that no one else in my world reads literature like a scholar does not, of course, compare to the fact that no one else in the world of the early Christians cared two cents about Jesus.

Yet all the same, I know now that what compelled them to meet until they could not stay awake any longer was the almost physical pleasure in having a good jaw about Jesus Christ. From dawn to dusk, they were surrounded by members of the Roman Empire: people who worshipped Anubis and Isis, Jupiter and Minerva; people who regularly engaged in temple prostitution or who spent their wealth acquiring wines and spices from the far corners of the universe. No wonder they stayed up till all hours listening to Paul whenever he came to town.

To turn again to Lewis (this time, his nonfiction), I am reminded of his analysis of friendship: "born", he writes, "at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'" Especially since we are not created to live alone, the discovery of like-minded people - whether they share the same language, the same scholarly interests, or deepest of all, the same faith - is good. 

Incidentally, in writing this post I caught myself slipping into a kind of utilitarianism. I spent perhaps thirty minutes with visions and revisions of what I should write about why friendship was good. I had very practical reasons: It encourages us. It keeps our interests going. It keeps faith from dying out. This is true, but I think we forget that friendship - that being with other people - is created to be an intrinsic good for us. God has designed us to spend time with people who share our language and our interests and our faith, and when we take delight in that, we take delight in a goodness that He created for us.

Yet it is this goodness that should send us away from our friends and back into the world again. Here, I can write more concretely. If I never stopped talking about T.S. Eliot, none of my students would read him. Too much time with literature scholars, and I am no longer able to talk intelligibly to non-majors (Just ask my senior English class in Prague, whom I overwhelmed with twelve pages of Milton.)

If we believers never left the church, no one would be converted. Perhaps expectedly, the church emphasizes the need for more church. Go every week, our pastor tells us. Join a weekly Bible study! Meet up with Christians for prayer before work and lunch during work. This is true and good advice, yet it is just as important that we eventually leave church and talk to other people.

As individuals with a wide range of interests and faiths, we are not meant to indulge those alone. What we are meant for is to indulge them in community, to drink deeply of the pleasures of friendships, and then to pass the cup around for those who have not yet tasted them.

Coming up: I plan to post about faith sometime before the end of the month. Keep your eyes peeled!

Poem: Several of you (meaning, my parents!) have asked about my poems. I have a separate post with all three poems here.

Three Poems

Here are the three poems that I read at the conference in California, May 2013:

Resurrection
All this has happened before. All this will happen again. ~ Battlestar Galactica

What’s dead (you say) is dead. What’s

Lost will not return again.

Yet Spring is the death of winter;

Winter, the death of spring.

Thunder ushers in autumnal rain

To harvest the last of vermilion summer fruits.

Cherries fade beneath the snow, then rise –

New-made – in tender shoots.

Stubble fields ripen, then whiten

In the first light snow. That prime

Crop then plants a richer one: Winter

Wheat, white in its proper time.

In the waning dusk, a fat florid

Bird ruffles his feathers – southward flies

Till his brown-backed twin sail north

On a warm breeze and bright skies.

Aged trees shake from trembling

Boughs dead and ragged brown leaves.

Yet from this death is born abundant life – first

New buds – then blossoms, for the bees.

What’s dead is never dead. What

Lost always returns again.

As spring cedes place to winter,

Winter gives birth to spring.

*This poem was published in the Gallery, a yearly collection of poetry and prose from local writers.

Pentecost

Abruptly the vertigo of lightning

And shrieking thunder ceases. You hear the

Quiet. The world fades from black and white to

Full colour: the dripping emerald trees, the

Rain-streaked red truck, your pale, frightened face.

In that pregnant stillness you marvel at

The certainty of the wet, black wood of

The pear trees. Naked they stand beside their

Bright white blossoms, scattered across the grass.

Beneath the eastward-sailing clouds rises

The flame of sunset. In that fiery sky

You find renewed the conviction of

Peace.

*This poem was published on Ancient Paths, a literary journal that is exclusively on Facebook.

Kyrie Eleison

While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim,
Tell no more of enchanted days.

~ Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Winter sunrise is a sordid affair –

Less dawning light than lessening of

Darkness, to reveal all our secret

Sins.

At night, graceful shadows conceal my sins

Among their vague grey lines. Yet at dawn dim

Light seeps through dusty blinds and betrays the

Telling scene: On the bedside desk are piled

Balled-up ledgers, a calculator, an

Empty whiskey glass, a hard, half-eaten

Roll. With cracked, bleeding hands I push back

Unkempt covers to admit crypt-cold air –

Oh, satisfy us with your mercy – and

Fill last night’s tumbler with stale tap water.

Beside the sink is a withered basil

Plant and a plastic ring of ivory pills,

Edges printed with the days of the week.

Oh, teach us to number our days aright.

With ritual precision I take the

Pill, I taste its sour flavour, I raise

The overflowing glass and gulp it down.

In a sudden hush the tattered peace flag

Taps against the wall, each tap keeping

Time with the sacramental rhythm of

The heating vents. Amid this bitter

Ceremony I thirst for the sudden

Fire of summer mornings, which shall not seep

Between my blinds but set my sins ablaze.

Lift thou up the light of thy countenance –

Summer sunrise shall be holy –

Not lessening of darkness but light that

Shines in darkness, and in that light is found

The life of men.

*This poem has not been published. Nevertheless, it is my favourite of the three.

Rest

Today, I turned in grades for all my classes. The semester is, as far as my teaching responsibilities go, over.

It's an oddly quiet feeling. Like when I leave home after the holidays, I've gotten used to some hustle and bustle and having that suddenly vanish from my life leaves me at loose ends. According to Microsoft Word, this semester I've spent 115 hours planning lessons for writing and literature class (This doesn't include the time I've spent planning for Lewis or the Writing Seminar that I teach.) I've spent an additional 90 hours in the classroom during the semester, and I've spent far more hours than I care to remember grading. And now it's all finished.

Tonight I will go home, and there will be nothing to grade, nothing to plan for, nothing to correct for the next day. I could watch a full-length movie, not just a 50-minute TV show (I'm still working through Stargate and Battlestar Galactia, alternately.) I could read a book all evening. I could surf the Internet for three hours and not feel guilty (Okay, I probably would feel guilty about that.).

In a way, I have that feeling when you leave on vacation and there's something you forget. Surely there's one more paper waiting for me to grade? One more student to email?

But there's not. It's very unsettling.

I once heard (from whom, I cannot remember) that one way to trust God was to sleep. When we sleep, we put aside our own troubles and worries long enough to rest, and because we put them aside, we acknowledge that our own efforts are, in the end, not enough. For a little while, we leave our efforts in God's hands, and when we pick them back up again in the morning, it is only because God has and will continue to sustain us.

The interesting part about this observation is that sleep is forced, and therefore to some degree, our dependence on God is also forced. Yes, I know that sleep can be put off, sometimes for several days (I work with college students, and so people putting off sleep is a fact of daily experience.) Eventually, however, the body rebels; everyone sleeps.

I also know Tertullian's argument: Because true faith must be chosen, not forced, it follows that the trust in God as a way of practicing that faith must also be chosen, not forced. Yet C.S. Lewis believed that the world was so made that we, by the fact of existing in it, would be drawn to God: We could resist, but it is easier not to. We could refuse to trust God, we could keep matters gathered in our own hands, but it is easier just to leave them in God's and go to bed.

In many ways, the end of the school year's work load brings me to much the same place as the end of the day does, with the need to (however briefly) surrender what I think I control and trust God.

Partly, this is because I do have outstanding responsibilities; I am simply choosing not to do them today. Today, there is no need to rush through some personal financial tasks. There is no need to figure out what books I need to read for a professional development event towards the end of June, nor is there a need to purchase them on Amazon today. There is no need to deep clean my office today. There is no need to deep clean my house today (Mom, I'm glad you aren't visiting me this spring.) All that will come, but since I finished my grading, it's good to take a break.

Partly, this is because I have a forced gap before I can do substantial teaching work again. Already I have several ways that I would like to change my writing class, but it won't start again for three months. Already I have some plans for the tutoring center, but that won't kick off for three months, either. I have made mistakes and learned from them and I want to put what I have learned into practice, but I have to wait, just as certainly as I have to wait when it's late in the evening and I still have a six-inch stack of papers to grade but can't (The later at night, the meaner I grade.)

Just like sleep forces us to trust God, my schedule has brought me to the place where I have a sharper need than usual to lay my work aside, even if it's just for a few hours, and leave things in God's hands. Tomorrow I'll take my responsibilities back, and I'll probably even worry about them again. For tonight, though, they can stay there.

As I near the end of this post, it occurs to me that this one sounds rather more navel-gazing than normal for me, as though I jumped on my blog and shout, "Let me tell you all about ME!" I could, I suppose, make a more personal application to you: Do this. Don't do that. Take a rest. Stop working.

I could do that.

But I won't, because I think it's contradictory to end a post about rest with a specific command to do something (even if that something is more resting.)

No, the point of this post is an observation, not a command: Into our world are built forced pauses, times that we have to let go of our responsibilities and leave them in God's hands. This is a truth both terrifying and restful.

Perhaps thankfully, most pauses are fairly short. Mine won't last more than about twelve hours. Eventually, our human love of feeling in control and active gets to reassert itself. Yet the fact remains that God whispers to us in the rhythms of life, reminding us that as we work, He works too, that sometimes He works most of all when we don't.

George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis' inspiration, once wrote that Every day begins with sleep. It's an unusual saying, since most of us tend to think that the day ends with sleep and begins with the blaring of an alarm clock. Perhaps, however, if to sleep is to trust God, then to say the day begins with sleep is simply to say that all our efforts are, in the beginning, God's work. Whatever we accomplish in the course of the day, the foundation was laid by God. Ultimately, this is what the pauses in life remind us of: that even when we stop working, God is still there, at the beginning and end of all things.

Unlearning Thankfulness

Tonight, I am shirking my responsibilities. Tonight, I am writing a blog post instead of planning that 90-minute C.S. Lewis lesson plan that I have to teach at the end of the week. I'm not reading the church fathers.

Yep. I'll regret this later. But for now, I have something to ponder.

Tonight I stumbled on "Are We Calling This a Win-Win?", a post from Jamie the Very Worst Missionary on the dangers of "poverty tourism". Jamie spent a number of years as a missionary in Costa Rica. In this post, she suggests - sarcastically, with humour - that short-term missions designed to make white American kids thankful are a waste of time.

I get her point. I agree. Last year, I taught a unit on diversity in my English Composition class. With this unit, my goal is to convince students that social privilege is a thing and that, as Christians, whether we are rich or poor, our responsibility is to love and support those who struggle in life. Unfortunately, a few students always walk away from this unit believing that the main lesson is simply that we need to be thankful for what we have and give some extra money to those who slept in the day that God passed out dollar bills. While no student has ever articulated this, the assumption is that we are somehow more blessed than those who are in poverty. I thank thee, God, that I am not like other men. 

I don't want to condemn generosity, of course. Yet if the only lesson that we take from hearing about the trials and suffering of other people is that our life is pretty comfortable and so we should give to those who are uncomfortable, we've missed the boat. Thankfulness and generosity that celebrates our social and financial status over the status of those around us is not particularly Christlike.

That doesn't mean, of course, that we shouldn't ever learn about those who are in worse straits than us. Obviously, I teach a unit on diversity, which includes poverty. There is value here for American Christians, just not where we usually find it.

A humour website called "White Whine" (Caution: Strong language and some really insensitive people) catalogs status updates of privileged people who think the world is coming to an end for the silliest reasons. They're upset because the barista got their soy latte wrong, because their parents are making them drive the Audi instead of the BMW, because the weather is too cold to go boating, because they wanted the black iPad instead of the white iPad that their parents bought them. (No joke. I've seen these examples or similar ones on White Whine.) These people desperately need a reality check. The world will not come to an end because you have a black iPod.

Yet we too think our world is coming to an end, often for much more legitimate reasons: a lost job, n unexpected illness, breakup, a paycheck that doesn't stretch as far as it used to. For us, as for the White Whiners, there is value in learning about the sufferings of other people. That value doesn't have much to do with thankfulness. Okay, the White Whiners need to be thankful. Yet that's not what most of us need to learn.

For those who are going through real heartache, thankfulness doesn't cut it, at least not in the middle of the trial. Yes, losing a job in America is better than being continually hungry and seeing your children hungry in Africa. That doesn't make losing your job any less scary and frustrating. Yes, going through a breakup in America is better than contracting AIDS in Africa. That doesn't make the breakup hurt any less.

The value of learning about other people with other heartaches is twofold.

First, it keeps us from becoming myopic. Whatever our heartache is, it consumes a lot of emotional energy; we spend so much time and thought trying not to fall apart in the middle of a workday that we forget that other people too are going through their own private Hells. Then we learn about someone who lost their husband, someone who was diagnosed with an incurable disease, someone who had to say goodbye to a life dream. Perhaps we know this person in real life. Perhaps we only hear about them on the Internet. Either way, we are more alert to the suffering that is going on around us, and we are better able to respond to it. That we ourselves are suffering, even if only in some small way, makes us better comforters and better ministers than if we did not suffer at all. It is intolerable to have those with very little trouble pat you on the shoulder and say, "There, there. It will be all right" - because, of course, it may not be all right. It isn't all right now. Yet we who go through trials are the best comforters, and learning about other people's difficulties gives us an opportunity to comfort.

Second, and more personally, the value of learning about other people's heartache is learning that we are survivors. People have suffered since the world's beginning and somehow - inexplicably, unbelievably - survived. When a loved one dies, part of them dies too. When they lose an eye or a hand or a leg, part of who they are dies. When they lose a life dream, part of who they are dies. But life itself continues. Sometimes, the one who experienced pain will go on to better things, sometimes not. Either way, for those of us who are faced with greater troubles than owning a white iPad instead of a black one, it is good to know that there is life after the actual tragic event. My point here isn't really that we should be content with our troublesome life, simply because other people are content. As one of the comments on Jamie's blog post points out, many people who are in poverty aren't content, any more than the White Whiners are. Contentment is not the issue; that's a virtue that we cannot learn by visiting Africa. It is a virtue for which we need to look to God. Yet regardless of whether we are content in life, we can be comforted that there is in fact some kind of life waiting for us, something that does not involve the current trials and tribulations.

In the end, we need to stop assigning a virtue to our trials and difficulties; we need to stop pretending that we become more virtuous simply by looking on when other people struggle. Whatever our struggles, it is good to remember to reach out to those who are also struggling; it is good to remember that, no matter how dark the present, joy comes - miraculously - in the morning.

The Problem of Pain

Do you ever feel that God cannot be trusted?

April, T.S. Eliot writes, in the cruelest month, but all days are cruel. There are bombings in Boston and in Tel Aviv. My uncle, or my co-worker’s friend, has cancer. I am midway through an unexpected financial crisis that may not end at all well.

Yes, I know my Bible. I know that the Bible assures me that even in the darkest times God can be trusted.  He is, the Psalmist writes, “the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” No matter what happens to us on this earth, no matter how bad it gets, God will still be there.

Unfortunately, this rings surprisingly hollow in the middle of tragedy.

Did you have your legs blown off in an explosion? Sorry, but it’s a good thing that God is your portion and not your legs.

Are you falsely accused of a crime? That’s really too bad. Good thing that it’s God and not your reputation which is the strength of your heart.

Are you poor? Struggling? Desperately lonely? No matter. You don’t have anything on this earth besides God anyway.

Shrug it off, advice says. Deal with it. God is waiting for you in Heaven.

The thing is, the teaching that God is our heavenly portion only goes so far. I know my Bible, and I know that he also promises that “no disaster will come near” you. He is the Good Shepherd, and he tells us that he will lead us among green pastures and quiet streams – places of rest, not of flurry.

This doesn’t happen. At all.

No matter how much we tell ourselves that God is our portion, that we will enjoy being with Him in Heaven, sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes it feels like God hurts us deeply.

Would an earthly father let his children be crushed if he could stop it? Yes, earthly fathers let their children deal with relatively minor problems all the time, but I’m not talking about a little peer pressure in high school here.  People die in violence every day. People’s whole lives are ruined every day. A good father would stop that if at all possible.

Yet God doesn’t. God lets us live through it.

Why do we trust Him? Is He even trustworthy? How can we trust a God that sent His own chosen people through the Holocaust?

I have no answer. Is there any answer?

Yet In her novel The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell, a convert to Judaism, writes this:

There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists."

So God just leaves?

No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering."

Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it."

But the sparrow still falls.

Yes, the sparrow still falls. We still fall. Tragedy happens, and it is inescapable.

Perhaps there never will be an answer. Yes, the sparrow falls. God did not push him, but God did not stop him falling either. God will never stop tragedy from entering our lives. He won’t. He never has.

The only thing that we can do in such circumstances is what God does: We can weep.

Enough with the preaching that God will protect us. Enough with the preaching that God will  comfort us in the middle of tragedy.  I am in the middle of tragedy, and there is little comfort.

All we can do is what we know – we know, whether from Judaic tradition or our own Scripture – that God does: weep.

Sometimes there is nothing to do but cry.

God cries.

Let us weep with those who weep, and let us ask no questions for there are no answers. 

Teaching Boys (and Girls): Don't Be Distracting

Here's what I learned last week: Your classroom management is supposed to help students pay attention. If you distract the students even more, you're not doing it right. I figured this out myself.

Several weeks ago, I turned around to find that one of my students had plastered a silver gum wrapper on his teeth. This is apparently a fad akin to planking among the teen generation. I have no problem with my students looking as dorky as they please in class. I do have a problem when they distract each other, so I halted the lecture and said, "Jake, take the gum wrapper off your teeth."

Later, I shared my frustrations over the incident with my dad. "I just don't know what I'm going to do with this class," I said. "I swear, some days I feel like I'm teaching middle school."

Dad taught high school science for a number of years. He has a fair share of experience dealing with unruly classes. "Don't yell at them," he suggested. "Don't say, 'Stop chewing gum.' Get their attention back some way." His suggestion? "Hang a spoon on the end of their nose. When you have their attention back, you can go on with the lesson."

Huh.

At home, I tried hanging a spoon from the end of my nose. Apparently I don't have a big enough nose. Cyrano de Bergerac I am not.

In fact, I find my attention-getting tricks to be pretty limited. I can't do magic tricks. I can't make funny faces. I can't tell jokes (Actually, that's not entirely true. I can tell jokes, just not ones that my students find funny. I never feel so old as when I tell a joke.)

There is one thing that I can do: I can do accents. I can drop my voice down till it's low and gravely like a man's. I can do a passable Southern accent. I can also do a German accent, and I could probably pull of a stereotypical Asian one.

So the next week, I pulled out the accent trick. My class succumbed to an inexplicable giggle fit, and I dropped my voice low like a man's. They all snapped to attention in surprise, giggled nervously, and we continued the lesson.

Yes! I thought. This really works. 

Sometimes.

On Thursday, one of my students got bubble gum on her face. Instantly, my students were like the dog in Up: Squirrel! Bubble gum! I'd lost their attention. Again.

So I put on blue felt cowboy hat from one of my students, pulled out the Southern accent, and started talking. I got their attention.

I got a lot, lot more. They stopped giggling, and they started laughing out loud, as in can't-breathe, leaning-over-the-desk, crying laughter.

They asked for another accent - this time, a Russian one.

They told me I was the only teacher to make the students laugh so hard.

Oops. Pretty sure I did not want that distinction.

In five minutes or so, we resumed the lesson on outlining. At the end, we reviewed what we'd learned, and they patiently repeated back to me the three things that go into an outline and the four characteristics of a good quotation. They repeated to me that the writing process is more about a circle than a straight line. So I suppose that despite my accents, they did learn something.

All's well that end's well.

Next time, I'm just going to learn how to hang a spoon from my nose.

Doubting Thomas

Among all the disciples, I identify most closely with Thomas.

Poor Thomas. His reputation was sealed the moment that Jesus appeared to the other disciples, and he wasn't there to see it. Tradition holds that Thomas later traveled as far as India in order to share his faith with people, but we will always know him as "Doubting Thomas", a byword to urge evangelicals reach higher levels of trust. Yet despite this rather selective use of Thomas's history, I do not find his story to be one of condemnation for those who doubt. I find his story to be one of grace and encouragement, a reminder that Jesus Christ Incarnate is always with us and is always compassionate.

When we read the story of Doubting Thomas, we tend to start with what is (to us) the subject: Thomas's doubt. Thomas's doubt, however, is not as extraordinary as we sometimes believe. Yes, Thomas had traveled with Jesus for three years and had seen men raised from the dead before. Yet in this case, the person who was doing the raising from the dead was Himself dead. Who was there now to raise Jesus from the dead? Is it any surprise that Thomas doubted? Even the words with which Thomas voices his objection suggest how understandable his doubts were:

Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.

That Thomas asks to "place my finger into the mark of the nails" and "place my hand into his side" recalls the extensive physical torments of the crucifixion. When Jesus raised people from the dead, they were usually physically intact. Jairus's daughter daughter died from an illness. The widow's dead son was being carried out of the city in one piece by a crowd. Yet crucifixion did not leave the body intact. To ask after the wounds of Christ as Thomas does is to remind the reader that there is no coming back from this death. We are told that Jairus's daughter looked like she had fallen asleep. Jesus looked like nothing human after the crucifixion. Much as we like to read Thomas's story as if we could somehow have expressed a stronger faith than he, the story does not allow such self-congratulation. Indeed, the horrors of crucifixion render Thomas's doubts relatively reasonable. 

Yet, as with most biblical stories, the real subject of the story is not Thomas but Jesus. It is his words, not Thomas's, that are most important. Importantly, the words of Christ are words of encouragement and grace. The narrator John, having told us of Thomas's doubt, then tells us this:

Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve but believe." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

Incidentally, even the greeting that Jesus uses signals that this encounter is one of blessing. Peace be with you was of course a traditional greeting in Roman Israel, but its frequent use makes it all the more remarkable here. John could have left these words out. He could have glossed over them like this, "Jesus greeted the disciples". Thus, that John, writing in the Spirit, includes the full greeting reinforces to the reader what Jesus's purpose is here: His purpose is not to vent frustration with Thomas's doubt but to bring peace and rest to His disciple's troubled soul.

Perhaps what is most striking in this passage is how accommodating Jesus is. Thomas has asked to touch the nail marks on Jesus's hands and to put his hand in Jesus's side, and Jesus tells Thomas to "put your finger here" in the nail marks and to "put out your hand and place it in My side." The parallelism speaks to Jesus's great patience. There is nothing that He withholds from his disciple Thomas. Sometimes, we expect Thomas to reach heights of faith for which the disciple was not ready. We believe in Jesus without touching Him, and we expect Thomas to do the same. Yet Jesus had no such expectation. He allowed Thomas to touch the wounds of the crucifixion. In doing so, he shows us what grace is: The whole point of grace is that Jesus helps us when we are most helpless. We who live two thousand years after the time of Christ do not receive the exact help that Thomas does, but make no mistake: We will receive help. Jesus is glad to give whatever help we need.

Even Jesus's words speak to his grace for us. I think we read His command, "Do not disbelieve" as condemnation of Thomas's doubt, as if Jesus gets up in Thomas's face a bit. Certainly Jesus could get in people's faces; think of the money-changes in the temple or the Pharisees. Yet I don't think that's what Jesus is doing here. Only the NIV translation, which renders this line "Stop doubting!", sounds harsh. All the other versions render Jesus's words more gently, in some variant of the ESV translation above: "Do not disbelieve". What Jesus is doing is not so much criticizing Thomas but inviting him out of his own self-imposed darkness into the light of grace and faith. To get the idea, imagine advice about more ordinary matters, perhaps from a parent to a child: "Do not worry about the bully. Mom and Dad love you." I am not saying that our sins are never condemned. They are, of course; Jesus is just as well as merciful. Yet we must not imagine that Jesus is impatient with our faults and go to him out of fear or, worse still, try to make ourselves into an independently virtuous person. This will not work. Jesus is saddened by our sins but is infinitely patient with us. His words to Thomas remind us of His mercy: The invitation is not to come and be judged but to come and rest our troubled soul in Him.

Thus, Thomas's story is not really about condemning unbelief or doubt. It is not an encouragement to work really hard at becoming more faithful (as if we could do that without grace!) It is a beautiful reminder that Christ invites us to rest our troubled soul in Him, that He heals all wounds and darkness.

Such an invitation, of course, does not mean the wounds and darkness will not come. Eight whole days elapsed between when Thomas first expressed his doubt and when Jesus appeared to him. To someone who is troubled or worried, eight days can feel like a very long time. Job suffered for weeks before God eased his pains, and even Jesus was forty days and forty nights in the desert before the angels came and ministered to him.

Yet the invitation remains: Jesus Christ Incarnate waits to ease all our burdens and anxieties and to bless us with His presence. Ultimately, this is what Easter is about. People sometimes point out that Easter is only a Christian variation on a pagan celebration of spring. So what? What the pagans celebrated when Spring returned was a forerunner, a preparation, for the reality that we celebrate on Easter weekend: the Incarnate Christ, who calls us out of Winter and reminds us that Spring is coming.

For what it's worth, I do not find this story compelling because I have managed to lay my burdens down but precisely because I haven't. I am better than Thomas at looking at what I consider realities, at harping on all the problems, at fretting over my worries for a long period of time. Yet we believers, as much as unbelievers, need the reminder that Jesus gives us rest. Thomas had walked with Christ for three years. He was there when Peter proclaimed Jesus the Son of God. He was there when Jesus predicted His own death. He was there for the Triumphal Entry. He knew who Jesus was. Yet he, one of the Twelve, is nevertheless again welcomed to rest in Christ. We too, even though we are believers, even though we are champs at worrying, are also welcomed to rest in Christ.

Easter is an opportunity for that reminder.