Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and
from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text: (John
20:19-31)
Thomas
answered Jesus, “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.”
Prayer: May
the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your
sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
At the end of our Gospel reading today, we have one of the
most profound statements in the whole of the New Testament. After Thomas has
been heckling the other apostles and saying, “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,” then Jesus shows up a week after his
resurrection and says 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.”
And Thomas says to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!”
My God, did you say, Thomas? My God – sorry did I hear you
right, Thomas?
We read in the Ten Commandments: “You shall have no other
gods”. Also we read in Deuteronomy, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one
Lord.” Hannah says in her song in 1 Samuel: “There is none holy like the Lord:
for there is none besides you.”
And now, Thomas says to Jesus that he is his Lord and his God.
In the beginning of John’s gospel, Jesus is called the only God, who is in the bosom of the
Father—the only God. Also, Martin
Luther writes in his famous hymn, “A mighty fortress is our God” – “With might
of ours can naught be done / Soon were our fall effected / But for us fights
the valiant one / Whom God himself elected / Ask ye, Who is this? / Christ
Jesus it is / of Sabaoth Lord / And there’s none other God / He holds the field
for ever.”
And there’s no other god?
What about the Father? What about the Holy Spirit?
But you see, there’s only one God. We confess that there
is one God, but three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. God the
Son, Jesus Christ, died for you and shed His blood for you on the cross for the
forgiveness of sins. But the Father did not die for you, and the Holy Spirit
didn’t die for you. The Father and the Holy Spirit did not take on flesh and
were not born of the Virgin Mary. Only God the Son, Jesus Christ, did. Only the
Son is true God and true man. Jesus Christ died for you and shed His blood for
you.
But where do you think Thomas was looking when he was
speaking these words, “My Lord and God?” Was he looking straight ahead at Jesus
or was he looking up to the sky? The Jehovah’s Witnesses—who trap ignorant
Christians with their lies—don’t believe that Jesus is true God. They believe
that he is less than God. They believe that when Thomas said these words he
wasn’t looking straight ahead, but he was looking up at the sky. This is
rubbish, and we shouldn’t be afraid to call it such.
Of course, though, they would accuse Christians of
breaking the first commandment. “You shall have no other gods”. They say, “So
you shouldn’t go around worshipping Jesus as well as God.” And Islam teaches
the same thing. They say, “There is no God but Allah. So you shouldn’t worship
Jesus as well.”
So we need to go back to our text for today and ask the
question, “Who was Thomas talking to? Was he looking up, or was he looking at
Jesus?”
The text says: Thomas
answered him, “My Lord and my God!”
In fact, in Greek, it says: And Thomas answered and said
to him. There is no doubt that Thomas is talking to Jesus. Jesus told him to
put his finger in his hands, and Thomas answered him. There is no doubt that
Thomas was calling Jesus his God.
It is Jesus Christ who is his God. Now, Jesus is a true
man: he has a true human body, with flesh and bones and blood. His hands and
his feet were nailed through. His side was pierced with a spear. And this is
the same Jesus: he still has these wounds to show to the apostles and to
Thomas. In fact, to show them that he is the same person as the man they saw
naked and bleeding on Good Friday, he we read that he showed them his hands and his side.
And Thomas also doesn’t want a different Jesus. If his
friends are telling him they have seen Jesus, Thomas will not be satisfied with
a ghost, a dream or some figment of their imagination. Thomas will not be
satisfied with the apostles telling him, “Jesus’ spirit lives on”, “Jesus lives
in my heart now,” or “there’s a little piece of Jesus that carries on in each
of us.” I’m not standing for that sort of hocus-pocus, says Thomas. Either you
saw Jesus, or you saw nothing. Either you saw Jesus, or you’re lying. Either I
put my finger in his hands and my hand in his side or you’re all fools and
tricksters. Either Jesus is risen from the dead or else the whole thing’s a
joke.
As St Paul says, If
Christ had not been raised, then my preaching is in vain and so is your faith.
As long as our faithless sinful world and a world full of
unfaithful churches goes on ignoring Thomas’s words here, there is no church,
there is no Christianity, and there is no hope. The Jehovah’s Witnesses do not
have Jesus—they have a clown. When Muslims talk about Jesus, they are not talking
about Jesus, they are talking about a clown. And every fool who gets up in
pulpit anywhere in the world telling his parishioners that Jesus lives on in
spirit instead of telling people he is risen from the dead is talking about a
clown Jesus, and they are not preaching the real Jesus. These preachers of
doing nothing but stealing the offerings of God and padding their own mouths
and bellies with it, and using God’s own church to seek worldly causes. They
are not preaching the comfort of the living Jesus, but they are giving you
Satan manifesting himself as an angel of light in Jesus’ place. As Satan said
to Jesus, “All this I will give you if bow down and worship me.” They are
setting up an abomination in God’s own temple—a golden calf of their own imaginations—and
they are falling down and worshipping it.
This cannot be said strongly enough, and this point cannot
be made sharply enough. If you do not believe that Jesus is your Lord and your
God, then you are simply not a Christian. If you don’t believe with Thomas that
Jesus Christ is your Lord and your God, then there is no hope for you, there is
no forgiveness for you, there is no eternal life for you, but you are still in
your sins, and the only thing for you is weeping and gnashing of teeth. You are
not worshipping the true God in spirit and in truth.
But you see, the Church belongs to Jesus Christ himself
and he will not allow the light burning in his sanctuary to go out. You see,
even though Jesus is a true human being, with real flesh, real blood, real
wounds, he is also able to breathe out the Holy Spirit. He sends out the
apostles just as his Father send him. Even though Thomas didn’t think he was
saying his words in the presence of Jesus, Jesus comes to him and repeats his
words back to him. “I heard you,” Jesus says. “Put your finger in my hands,
just as I heard you say.” He is able to pass through into a locked room with
his human body, because he is truly God.
Jesus is true man and true God. As Luther says in the
Small Catechism: I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father
from eternity, and true man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord, who has
redeemed me, a lost and condemned person.
And these two natures of Christ, his humanity and his
divinity, are always inseparably united. You can’t have a divine Christ without
him being the human Christ. You can’t have a human Christ without him also
being the divine Christ. When Jesus touches a person with his human hand, it is
God himself who touches them. It is the hand of God. When women come and kiss
Jesus feet, it is God’s own feet that that the kiss and pour their ointment
over.
They are God’s own feet, because Jesus is true God and
true man, and his divinity is inseparably united to his humanity all the time.
So when Jesus says, “I am with you always until the end of
the age”, he doesn’t just mean in spirit, but he means that he in his humanity
and divinity will be with you always. He will united you through his Holy
Spirit to his own flesh, through holy baptism, just like a branch is united to
a vine.
The early church often used to describe this union of
Christ’s divinity and humanity like a piece of iron that a blacksmith takes and
puts in the fire so that it becomes red. The iron is glowing red hot, so that
you can’t separate the iron from the fire. If the glowing iron touches
something, it makes a print and it burns at the same time. If you touched it,
you would be burnt by the iron, because you would have truly been touching
fire. So also in the same way, Jesus human nature is like the iron and his
divine nature is like the fire. They are always together. And so, even though
Thomas asks to see the holes in Jesus’ own human hands, he also rightly calls
him, “My Lord and my God!”
You see, without Jesus as your God, you wouldn’t even have
God the Father. Jesus’ human blood is united to his divinity too so that St
Paul in Acts 20 even calls it God’s blood. Jesus’ blood is not the blood of God
because he brought blood from him from heaven. The only blood Jesus has is that
which he took from the body of his mother Mary. But it is called God’s blood
because that blood is united to Jesus’ divinity in such a way that it is
inflamed with divine power, and whatever it touches is touched by God.
And so this is the blood that is presented to God the
Father as the perfect atonement sacrifice for sin. This is the blood that you
call down upon you to protect you every time you sin or are in trouble. And
because it united to Christ’s divinity, it is able to come and splash over you
and cover you and make you clean. Because Jesus is human he actually has
blood—but because Jesus is true God that same blood is called precious and
holy. St Peter says: You were ransomed…
not with silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ.
So if Jesus were not your God, then you wouldn’t even have
God the Father, because he would not be a friendly father to you without this
blood of Jesus. He would not be a father for you, if you weren’t able to call
on him together with Jesus and say “Our Father in heaven”. Don’t you know that
even when we are alone we don’t change the Lord’s Prayer to “my Father” because
even when we are in our own rooms by ourselves, we are always praying together
with Jesus our Lord and our God, to his Father and our Father, to his God and
our God, since he is with us always to the end of the age? Without Jesus as our
God, we would have no Father, because our Father is only our Father together with Jesus.
And without Jesus as our God we wouldn’t even have the
Holy Spirit. See in our Gospel reading today that Jesus breathes out the Holy
Spirit upon his disciples and sends them out to forgive the sins of those who
repent. Jesus wants to use the apostles (and then all their successors, the
pastors of the church) to preach and speak and pronounce the forgiveness of
sins in such a way that we believe that when the pastor speaks these words of
Jesus in accordance with his command, that this is actually Jesus himself who
is speaking. In fact, the whole liturgy is not the words of a pastor—they are
the words of Jesus. It is Jesus who comes to us and says, “I forgive you”. It
is Jesus who comes to us and says, “The Lord be with you.” It is Jesus who
says, “The peace of the Lord be with you always.” It is Jesus who says, “This
is my body given for you”, and “The Lord bless you and keep you.” And all this
comes about because he himself breathes the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, and
until he returns again in glory, Jesus wants to fill the holy ministry of his
church with his Holy Spirit. So the ministry which the apostles carry out, and
which the pastors of the church still today carry out, is a ministry of
speaking God’s Word, and because pastors speak the word of God, and insofar as
they speak the Word of God, their ministry is a ministry of the Holy Spirit,
because it is the ministry of the words of Jesus himself.
And so, Thomas is right. Jesus really is our Lord and our
God!
And he comes to pray with us today, just as he does at the
right hand of the Father every day. And he comes to feed us with his own body
and blood today, just as he does in every divine service where Christians are
gathered together. Jesus gives us access to the Father, and he breathes upon us
His Holy Spirit. And all this is possible because the words of Thomas are true:
You Jesus are my Lord and my God!
Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, let us never forget who you are: our
Lord and our God. And let me not treat you simply as Lord or God, but may you
be to me my Lord and my God. Amen.
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