“Peace be with you.” These are the words in the gospel of John that Jesus utters when he returns for the first time to show the assembled apostles his wounds. Simple words, four short words, none too terribly complex, yet their order and use in the sentence is hardly something we might actually say in everyday, ordinary English. When is the last time you uttered the phrase “Peace be with you?” The phrase is not a common one, even if the words that the phrase contains are common enough. The combination of words is at best a liturgical set piece, used as a greeting in Catholic and Episcopal and in some other churches, even in a few Unitarian and Universalist congregations, where the “peace” is passed during the celebration of the Eucharist, as if “peace” were a hot potato that you could hold in your hand for a few short seconds, and then toss off to someone else. It is a formalized greeting in a formal setting, although the “be” in the sentence might seem a bit out of place; this is the “be” in the command form, though it is unclear what we are commanding of peace, and whence we are commanding peace to come so that it will be with you, as opposed to with someone else or in some other place. The phrase is not descriptive; we do not tell co-parishioners “peace is with you,” as if to describe the operative fact that peace is all around. Instead, it expresses a desire of what we might wish to have happen, as if the words that we speak were to cause some talismanic effect and have “peace” appear in our midst, from a backdrop of the actual world of war and turmoil and injustice. Upon reflection, we might recognize the phrase as being both a greeting and some form of prayer.
As stilted as the phrase may sound (or maybe as “groovy” as the phrase might sound, as in Peace, my brother), the use of “peace” in greetings is common in the languages of the Middle East. In Hebrew, shalom, the word for peace in that language, is commonly used for both “hello” and “good-bye.” In Arabic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew and by extension related to the language that Jesus spoke, to this day the most common greeting is “As-salaam alaykum,” or “Peace be with you,” the very phrase that Jesus speaks to the apostles assembled when he returns to show them his wounds. The automatic response is “Wa alaykum as-salaam;” that is, “And peace be with you.” Thus in the “real” world, the giving of the peace is a two-way street; greeters in the Semitic languages every day are constantly giving and receiving shalom or salaam from one another, and passing it along, just as church-goers in the Anglo-Saxon world “pass the peace” to their fellow congregants. Yet, strangely, in this gospel story, the peace is passed only one way. Jesus says “Peace be with you.” He greets the assembled apostles, with the exception of Saint Thomas, to show them his wounds, to bring them peace, and yet no “peace” is returned the other way, or at least none is recorded. The lapse in responding is astounding, extraordinary; would not the apostles’ message back to Jesus have made it into the text, particularly if its absence from the event would seem so unusual to those at the time? Image having Jesus stop by and saying “hello” and having no one say “hello” in return. The silence is deafening.
There is, eventually, a response which makes it back to Jesus, but that response does not come from the apostles assembled the first time Jesus makes his appearance. It comes from Saint Thomas; his response to Jesus roars out of the silence once Jesus has left. Thomas, as you may know, is typically seen as a doubter, because he allegedly doubts the story told by the other apostles, and he wants to see things himself. Or so we have been told through the ages. Given the rationalist tendencies in our Unitarian and Universalist traditions, and particularly those uber-rationalist Unitarians, we might be quick to crown Thomas our own patron saint. The problem is that I doubt the doubting, perhaps making me the perfect Unitarian Universalist of all time. I would like to stand here and proclaim the gospel of doubt according to Saint Thomas, but I simply cannot do that. Let me explain why I am the Doubter of the Doubter.
What was the response of Thomas to the first visit of Jesus to the assembly of apostles? Leaving aside the question of his beliefs for a moment, any “peace” brought by the visit of Jesus and the showing of his wounds was not passed onto Thomas by the other apostles. Community broke down. Thomas may have been someone fully committed to God, and fully committed to spreading the gospel of Christ, but all the apostles, including Mary of Magdala, the apostle to the apostles, were people on the outskirts of the law. They have been told not to teach in the name of Jesus. They were a frightened bunch. They were scared. Peace, and a little courage, were precisely what they needed. Thomas was not around when Jesus first returned. Obviously, Thomas was more than a little put out by that. Saint Thomas cries out at being left out of the group. It borders on hysterical. It’s a sad display of histrionics. But the truth is the other apostles are almost taunting Thomas. They say “We have seen Jesus,” when they know that Saint Thomas had been elsewhere when Jesus appeared.
Saint John, in his gospel, tells us that Thomas says that Thomas will not believe "unless he sees the mark of the nails in Jesus' hands." This is not so much a statement of doubt as it is the crying out of a frightened man, a frustrated man, whose legal status with the Pharisees is still unclear. When Thomas issues forth from his soul precisely this message of frustation to the heavens, it is is the first response we get in the text to “Peace be with you.” Saint Thomas is not at peace, because he has been told of the return of Jesus; Thomas has been one of his band since the earliest days; Thomas has been in hiding and frightened along with the rest, and yet Saint Thomas has not borne witness to the sorrows, to the wounds of Jesus. And in his sorrow and in his anger, from the deepest part of his truest self, Thomas howls in anguish and makes known his hurt at being left out. Thomas is the kid who misses the state fair, the one who gets left home when everyone else gets to go the movies; he’s the designated driver on miracle night.
Tellingly the gospel of Saint John does not say precisely what it is Saint Thomas will not believe if he does not see the marks of the nails in Jesus' hands. Many things suggest themselves—the mere fact that Jesus may have returned to the apostles to show them his wounds, that Jesus may have risen from the dead, that Jesus might be the child of God, that Jesus could be God himself, that Jesus was in fact the true Messiah, that Jesus' teachings were as it turns out true. The text of gospel is surprisingly ambiguous on this rather fundamental point, remembering that the creeds of the institutional church were written centuries later, saying merely that blessed are those who believe without seeing, that through believing alone they may have life in Jesus' name.
Yet if one were to read the story in reverse, what Thomas sees and what Saint John would have us believe as a result hardly match up. The story ends with our collectively being blessed, presumably, because we believe, without seeing, that we might have life in the name of Jesus. I take this to mean something like believing that life has meaning. If I were to ask for a sign either that life had meaning, or even that I had life in the name of Jesus, I’m not sure that I would be convinced of either of those things, or even otherwise comforted in general, if Jesus were to appear in front of me so that I could place my hands in the wounds on his sides. There is something of a disconnect at least for me between those two things. I must tell you that I am not sure precisely what I would have to “see” in order to believe that life had meaning in general, or that my life had meaning in specific. In fact, the whole idea that “seeing” alone is the way the one comes to believe does seem truly wrong-headed. In that sense, of course, Saint John is right when he says we are “blessed” if we believe without seeing.
Seeing and believing have an unlikely correlation at best in any context, let alone in matters of such transcendent significance as faith; I can only think back to the esteemed leaders of our own nation, holding up not just photographs but actual tubes of metal, confidently testifying before world bodies that yes indeed these are the sorts of items used in nuclear weapons production. There were, as I remember it, also slides showing mobile chemical weapons facilities to the rapt attention of the world as the reasons were argued in favor of military undertakings that our government thought were to the good of our nation and indeed the world at large. As I understand it, the gentleman holding up that metal tube, and showing those photographs, has since said the United States was mistaken in making the various representations that it did make at that event. Apparently many, including the presenter himself, were deluded into believing things on the strength of the visual presentation that were in fact not true. Seeing it seems should not always be confused with believing, either in the sacred or the secular world.
Now when Jesus comes back a second time for the sake of Saint Thomas, the entire gospel narrative gets a good deal murkier; John records simply that Thomas reached up to the wound in Jesus' side, and that “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book.” It's sort of like the gospel according to Seinfeld. Jesus comes back, Thomas sees his wound, yadda-yadda-yadda. Hardly the kind of detail one would expect to find recorded around the central Christian miracle, as if Saint John needed to spend more time on, say, the loaves and fishes story or something.
So what I’m left is that all Thomas would really fail to believe is that he was part of the group, part of the beloved community, part of the kingdom of God, unless Jesus showed him the marks of the nails personally. Maybe the text of gospel is dead on when John says Thomas doubted that Thomas would have "life in the name of Jesus." Perhaps it is as simple as that. Saint Thomas felt abandoned by Jesus when Jesus rose from the dead and showed his wounds to everyone but him. In issuing forth his feelings about being left out, as histrionic as they might have been, these were heard, and Jesus came back. Thomas was returned to fold again; he was back amongst the apostles, amongst the community of the faithful.
Of course it is in that crying out in grief, that moment of saying "I will not believe" that moved him closer to reconciliation with the Divine, and indeed with the community that he seemed to think had abandoned him. In the anguish of Saint Thomas there came release, just as when Jesus on the cross cried out "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The release comes not in having our prayers answered, in the sense of having our wishes fulfilled, the release comes in having the prayers issued forth from us in the first place. We draw ourselves closer to God, the God which is not so much the all-powerful God in heaven who dispenses gifts like some celestial Santa Claus, but the God which is the still, small voice within, to whom we turn in the moments of our most sincere and most heart-felt prayers. This, ultimately, is the purpose of prayer, as the mystics of every tradition know only too well. Knowing ourselves deeply and fully is the only way to know God. Prayer is a negotiation with the soul, to paraphrase former United Nations President Dag Hammarskjold, and thus with our truest deepest selves. Prayer opens to path to what matters to us most, what matters to us ultimately and finally. Know your own soul in the most deep and profound way you might, cry out its longings and sorrows in the darkest inky night and beneath the bright light of spring, and from this prayerful conversation your knowledge of God will come. The mystics of every tradition say more or less the same.
The Sufis are a Muslim mystical tradition who define knowing the self as equivalent to knowing God, and call prayer a sort of dance that the believer undertakes with the ultimate reality. It is in moments of despair when we turn to God, because when we have no one or nothing else to turn to, this kind of self-knowledge, and hence this knowledge of God, unfolds. Obviously such knowledge is deeply personal, such that Sufis were and are strident in their belief that spiritual freedom is fundamental to such a relationship with God. This is despite (or perhaps because of) their love and understanding of the Quran, and despite their reputation everywhere in the Islamic world as good and devout Muslims. Our readings today come from Jalaluddin Rumi, who was born in what is now Afghanistan, and who died in what is now Turkey; he wrote in Persian. Rumi founded a Sufi order known in the west as the Whirling Dervishes. The dance was born of Rumi’s sorrow at the loss of his companion, his beloved Shams-i-Tabriz to whom many of his poems were written. The dance made visible the conversation that he undertook with the God of his soul. His father was also a Sufi mystic, and Rumi was enamored of his father’s poetry, which he carried around with him in what was known as “The Drowned Book.” His father Bahauddin wrote:
Grief is better than happiness
Because in grief a person draws close to God
Your wings open
A tent is set up in the desert where God can visit you
Wealth that arrives in grief is what we spend in joy
The soul is greater than anything lost
God comes in through our pleasures and through our suffering
God enters a dry seed and makes a fresh living plant.
Watch the sky moving, and see how every motion in creation connects with the Creator
Stars, these natural impulses, our very selves.
“Grief is better than happiness” might seem the otherworldly nonsense of mystics from an alien civilization, but they remind me more than anything else of our own American Puritan poet, Emily Dickinson. Dickinson, who attended to the same New England Congregational churches in her youth from which Unitarianism sprang, was quick to write her neighbors who had suffered some lose, who had lost a home in a fire, and congratulate them. In their tragedy, she thought, the soul would live through a pure moment, a moment of enlightening purification. Rumi does not precisely make the claim that “grief” is better than happiness, but in our responsive reading, he reminds us that God is the source of all that is: a sudden, terrible screaming, a knock on a stranger’s door, a silence when no one is there. All comes from God, a God of presence and a God of absence. All of us who pray and hear silence in return, we all know that God is a God who comforts us by God’s presence, and we know too of God’s heartbreaking absence from our world. This is the God who is beyond doubt and beyond belief. There is no god but God, in the words of the Islamic Shahadah; That is, there is no ultimate reality but God, or what ultimately concerns our souls is what we call God.
So too was the knowledge that Saint Thomas had of God deep and profound, so too did Thomas know that the divine presence was simultaneously (and irrationally) present and absent. Saint Thomas too wrote a gospel, but his gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, was one the early church seemingly determined to be a bit too esoteric to include amongst the four official versions of the Jesus stories. Thomas' take on the life and ministry of Jesus focuses more on the hidden mysteries of the Divine and sees Jesus as source of mystical wisdom, rather than merely a defined path to salvation. Thomas preached the word in Persia and India; there have been communities of Christians in southern India since the time he visited there; Hindus in the same region have incorporated Christ into the pantheon of the incarnations of the Lord Vishnu. Often Christ is portrayed in Hindu temples by representations of Saint Thomas himself, which is particularly ironic given that Thomas is called by the Gnostics the “twin brother” of Jesus, in at least the allegorical sense. Surely Thomas’ unique vision of God and the beloved community of apostles, and his knowledge of self and of God that he gained from crying out in his grief, Saint Thomas took with him everywhere. Of this have no doubt.
Shalom alechem. As-salaam alaykum. Peace be with you.
Readings:
John 20:19-31
“The Man Whose Calling 'Allah' Was Equivalent
to God's Answering Him 'Here I am'”
from The Masnavi, Book III, Story 1, by Jalaluddin Rumi