The Lessons Appointed for Use on the
First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday Year B RCL
Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29 or Canticle 2 or 13
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17 click here for texts
The feast of the Holy Trinity, hum! After last Sunday craziness at the feast of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, this looks from a preaching standing point like a funeral.
At Redeemer, we had outdoor mass with baptisms, two brothers, 6 and 10, were baptized with water abundant enough to drown anyone. Music was upbeat and at the end of the mass we ended up with a roll call of all the countries represented at Redeemer, twenty three of them, and people jump and shout for each one of them, when we call United States everyone went crazy which makes me think that immigrants love this country in spite of its shortcomings. Followed by BBQ, Dance group presentation, bouncy for children with plenty energy to free United States from Arab oil. Culminating with a water balloon fight. I heard that the neighbors were actually happy with the madness at Redeemer, I guess is the summer itch we all feel, to which we give embodiment of some sort. The text that describes the first Pentecost in Jerusalem tells us that people thought they apostles were drunk swaying under the powerful wind and fire of the Spirit.
Then we have the feast of the Holy Trinity, the sobering theological feast of all the three persons of the Godhead. I say theological, because if the gregarious feast of Pentecost is all about experience and communication, the feasts of the Holy Trinity is mostly an intellectual reflection of the Church on Jesus’s frequent mentioning the Father and the Spirit and their relationship. The Trinity was theological leap of faith for a church coming from the strict Jewish monotheism. To this day the Jewish creed says: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad.."Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God! The LORD is One!"
Jesus never sought to clarify that relationship in theological terms, he basically refer to it in terms of relationships, for us was sufficient to know that each of them three divine persons are united in a way that can only be understood if we are to examine the ontological, the foundational relationship of a pregnant woman to her not yet born child - Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. John 14:10 The Father living in me, only a mother can understand that. Which means that only women can understand, from that knowledge that is not of the head, but of the entrails, the spleen, what Jesus meant. Trinitarian theology then was initially the response of men to this words, where they sought to comprehend up here what they could not understand down here, in the entrails.
That does not means that all of the Trinitarian theology and understanding is wrong, but rather that the reflection is not and will never be complete. That theology, by definition is the faulty reflection in a muddle mirror. Paul writing to the troublesome church in Corinth says to those who claim to know much of the this New Way the following: Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.1 Corinthians 13:12, now is now, and then is yet to come, when can see God not as reflection, then is when we will be able to bathed our souls into the eyes of the Holy One, being loved and loving in return, perfectly, the same way the each person of the Holy Trinity loves each other.
We hear often that the Church in the Third World is growing numerically, while is in great deal of trouble in our part of the world, otherwise look at around you and see how many empty seats we have. The mega churches grow mostly at the expense of what is called the historical communities like ours. Mega-churches are the result of American-inspired entrepreneurial spirit and plus another host of conditions that fueled their astronomical growth. Small communities have more difficulties responding to the ever changing environment where they are set in. The historical churches loaded with a heavy tradition component, suffer among other things the fact that they are already composed of small communities, a group of loyal supporters that have become their stockholders of things as they are and in the best of cases resistant to change.
But I suspect that the fundamental reason, the core issue why the Third World churches grow is because they posses so little in terms of material wealth that they know very well that they radically depend on God. They do not have the delusions of power we suffer of in the affluent Northern countries. Part of the American mythology is that you can be what ever you put your mind to. Although this does wonders for “a pulling by the bootstraps attitude”, which is of great deal of help among the urban poor the ultimate truth is that this is also a mirage.
It is not Holy Scripture, but a German social theorist writing for a German newspaper in Yorkville, New York who said : "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." I am referring to Karl Marx. The point it is that although attitude is half of the solution, the other half is an interplay of our historical conditions that have created the urban poor in the first place and even chance and opportunity. Poverty is a cycle that can only be broken with the help of God.
I got this story from Babara Crafton, an episcopal priest now residing in Florence, Italy: a woman very successful in her career, a woman who “have arrived” if you will, after finding that all she had, money, car, house, a handsome intelligent husband, beautiful children, it did not give her happiness. Some hole in her heart could not be filled with things or people, she wanted to understand the meaning of life, why are we here? Where are we going? What is the whole point of living?. She took a year off work and went on a spiritual quest that took over the continents and islands and all sorts of books, she organized as she was, she devoured the knowledge provided to her, catalogue it and put it in well aligned mental shelves up here, while the bottom understanding, the one that comes from down here, still was hungry, telling her that she had really not arrived. Somebody mentioned to her about a wise man living in a cave at the foot of the Himalayas and of she went. Knocking at his door, knuckles almost white of the freezing cold, the wise ment answered and invite the questioner woman to come in, she says to the old wise man - I do not want to come in, I just want to know the meaning of life, I have come from afar and that is all that I want from you. The old man insisted in inviting her for tea, until he finally says -unless you come in for tea I wont tell you the meaning of life- The woman reluctancy enters the small hut inside this cave up in the freezing Himalayas and sits down for a cup of tea. The old man begins pouring the tea in an old colorless cracked mug and keeps pouring even after the cup is full and begins to burn the woman’s hand. The woman shrieks and start insulting the man: you old fool, you do not what you are doing, you know nothing! To what the old man says to her: correct, I know nothing and neither you! Your cup is so full that nothing more can fit, come back when your cup is empty and you will find the meaning of life.
I had been in New York for about two or three years,
parenthetically I came from Toronto , one of the most clean cities in the
world, and I had to confessed that I was horrified when I rode in the subway
for the first time, I thought “what have we done?”. The place, saving the
era, could had inspired Dante as good description of hell.
I had just finished a wedding; it was of all places on a
Circle Line Boat, those that go around Manhattan. The wedding was over, I was
dancing with an elderly female rabbi who co-officiated with me. I am leaning
against the railing a bit, watching the black waters passing, forming ripples
as the boat progresses through the East River at particular time we were
passing Astoria Park and I said to myself -I live here, this is my home-.
Perhaps for the first time the idea that I “live here” had entered my
emotional system, I knew I was not from “here” but somehow my roots have
started to grow in this part of God’s world.
Then one the guest, joins me at the railing and we start a
conversation and she tells me she is from Ohio and other usual inane comments
that people say to a minister after a service, and in passing she says “I
like to come to New York for a visit, it is a wonderful city, so full of life
but I could not live here” to which I responded like a true New Yorker, “nobody
is asking you to”.
There is no greater truism that New York is a city of
immigrants, whether you come from Turkey as Azra and John does, or from New
Jersey as Chris Acker does. We all, with different degrees of alienation, we
all have experienced and continue experiencing the city.
As adaptation is a survival skill, we also slowly, in my
personal case stop looking so much at the candy wrappers, the used starbucks
coffee cup, the innumerable and almost impregnable dark spots from chewing gum,
the litter like a Persian carpet on which we walk day in and day out, and start
to see the beauty of the people walking on those streets, incidentally often
the same people who turns our city into a dump.
So it goes my uneasiness with the statement, “I live here”
and “I am not from here”. You can become eventually enamored with the place
where you live, but especially more clearly, for immigrants from faraway lands,
we never seem to be completely at home. So you find the street littered as well
with signs in every language conceivable, creating sometimes completely
fantastic hybrids, like the Japanese shushi shop called “Suchitepec”, obviously
run by Mexicans, or the Chinese owned and run taco shop on 30th
avenue, which sells by the way one of the worst I ever had.
6”I have made your name known to those whom you
gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have
kept your word. 7Now they know that everything you have given me is from you;
8for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received
them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you
sent me. 9I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world,
but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 10All mine are
yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.
11And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am
coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me,
so that they may be one, as we are one. 12While I was with them, I protected
them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them
was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be
fulfilled. 13But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world
so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. 14I have given them
your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the
world, just as I do not belong to the world. 15I am not asking you to take them
out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. 16They do
not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.
17Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. 18As you have sent me into
the world, so I have sent them into the world. 19And for their sakes I sanctify
myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.
The Lessons Appointed for Use on the Fourth Sunday of Easter
Year B RCL
Acts 4:5-12
Psalm 23
1 John 3:16-24
John 10:11-18
Pat Tillman was a professional football player who in May 2002, eight months after the September 11, 2001, attacks and after completing the fifteen remaining games of the 2001 season which followed the attacks (at a salary of $512,000 per year),[3] Tillman turned down a contract offer of $3.6 million over three years from the Cardinals to enlist in the U.S. Army.
Tillman participated in the initial invasion of Iraq and was eventually redeployed to Afghanistan where he eventually died by friendly fire on April 22, 2004 at age 27. Pat Tillman death and the Pentagon initial cover up and manipulation of it is available on the internet and the controversy surrounding it has not yet ceased.
Pat enlisted after the September 11th attacks and he did initially as a patriotic duty, to protect America, he later grew disillusioned with the war and questioned its legitimacy. He had arranged a meeting with Noam Chomski upon his return to the US, meeting that never took place.
Attempts made by the religious right or other groups to capitalize on his death had been foiled by his family and a foundation has been set up to honor his memory. To say that Corporal Tillman selfless sacrifice honors him is a truism while brings shame to the Army who tried to cover up the circumstances of his death.
I have told you the story of Pat Tillman to put a contemporary face to the Good Shepherd. It is fascinating how some cultural myths are resilient and open to re-formulate themselves that they still have currency in our day. I referring to the cultural myth of the “Noble Death”.
Jerome H. Neyrey in the "The 'Noble' Shepherd in John 10: Cultural and Rhetorical Background"
lists Aristotle’s criteria for a noble death. He says among other things that the death have to benefit others, not for the purpose of seeking self-interest -The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep -, it produces honor and it was undertaken voluntary I lay it down of my own accord.
As the early church came into existence, it did within a pre-existing cultural pattern inspired originally by Greece and imposed by Rome and peppered by the influences of the many cultures that were under Imperial control. Therefore we are to re-read the Good Shepherd story under the prism of the noble death, it may explain the recurrence of “lay down life” motif that appears five times within six verses. Reading the passage that way puts aside Victorian sentimentalism that have contemporarily turned the Good Shepherd into a sweet guy carrying a very clean white sheep of Sunday School memory. It puts the passage within the boundaries of the Passion and the Cross, and therefore within the historical reference to conflict and trauma in first century Palestine. Like Pat Tillman, Jesus was killed by his own people.
It is not that the Pat Tillman and the image of the Good Shepherd coincide or need to coincide, but that the motif of the Noble Death, popular in the Mediterranean basin and still pervasive in our time provides common link. It is the fact that this motif is also the central point of reference of the story. Jesus lay down his life for his sheep while confronts the evil of this world, that eventually kills him, and by killing him -the innocent- brings shame upon itself. So the Noble death is a form of ultimate victory. Pat Tillman’s memory will last longer that the Pentagon bureaucrats and right wingers who wanted to manipulate his selfless deed. We are the testimony of the force of ultimate vitory of Jesus, while we sit here Sunday after Sunday to hear more about Him.
Let’s examine the image of the Good Shepherd. Shepherd it is an ambiguous image. On one side, David is the archetypical shepherd and God is referred to as Shepherd of Israel very often, for instance during Jacob blessing of his children who stand as prototypes of the twelve tribes, when he blesses Joseph he makes an oblique reference to God as a Shepherd. Psalm 80 and 23 also contain similar references. In the prophetic tradition, we find the leaders of Israel criticized as unfaithful shepherds that scatter the people and God as the faithful shepherd that gathers them up.
On another, actual first century Palestine shepherds were considered by some as a subclass, one that lives in the murky bottom of society and although noticeable it is willfully ignored. Shepherds aroused suspicion, since they were often perceived as rough, unscrupulous characters, who pastured their animals on other people's land and pilfered wool, milk, and kids from the flock. Shepherds spent considerable time with the sheep alone and were open to charges of sexual deviance.
"I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. Today is Sunday of the Good Shepherd, always the fourth Sunday of Easter. The Good Shepherd is probably the earliest image of Jesus in existence, before the crucifix or perhaps even before the fish. Why is the first is open to debate, but certainly as Fred Craddock said: The community that produced the Gospel of John was comforted by this gentle, protective image of Jesus when they felt ostracized and persecuted, turned out and abandoned, by the very people who claimed to be God's servants.
However the text itself disabuse us about the warm and fuzzy feeling that starts to grow on us, because the text indicates to Jesus and the cross through the not so oblique words of “he laid his life for us”. However any sentimentality is dispelled by the context of this passage. Jesus speaks of thieves, bandits, strangers and wolves, and the violence and risk . The setting isn't a nice, quiet pastoral hillside, peaceful and calm. No, here we read of confrontation with authorities and questions about Jesus' authority, and danger is in the air around these religious leaders.
Craddock continues: In every age since those earliest days of the church, there have been "shepherds" who abandoned their flocks and failed to live up to the image of the good shepherd. Contemporary example could be the pedophile scandal in the church. However, as Craddock reminds us, it's also true that in every age, there have been faithful ones: "Before Roman sword or Nazi boot, burning cross or constant harassment, economic pressure or political reprisal, they remained with the sheep."So the first element of the story is the protective element, against the back drop of violence which the wolf represents.
The wolf has been identified with Satan, “ruler of this world” , Jesus dying at the hands of his cosmic enemy enhances the honor due to the “ruler of the word” and the shame brought upon the so called “ruler of the world”.
I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. At the beginning of Johns’s Gospel, the evangelist places the story of Jesus in both cosmic and historical dimensions. Jesus is described as the pre-existent Logos and simultaneously as the Holy One if Israel who has pitched his tent amidst his people. The historical event Jesus for the Johanine community is the contemporary moving in of God into our neighborhood, our building, our city. The Incarnation means that God lives here. The Incarnation means that God the Creator of all Reality has decided on “his own accord” to become creature, to become sheep. God in Jesus The Good Shepherd knows what is to be sheep, what is to be snatched, terrorized and eventually killed by the wolf.
Belonging to Jesus, knowing him and being known by him, shapes us as a community of faith. Bernard Brandon Scott interprets this text as saying that the "community is founded not upon doctrinal unity but upon God's knowing us and being for us. We do not achieve that, but it is the way God is. God is for us. "In our essential belonging, our being is bound up with the entire flock: with believers who break bread and recite prayers with us, and with those sheep whom Jesus knows and God sees, but whom we can scarcely bring ourselves to acknowledge and welcome, let alone live alongside or die to protect." The second element is the intimacy.
Into your hands I commend my spirit. Part of the Good Friday series
Saturday, 25 de April de 2009
NO_TRANSLATION_AVAILABLE
Into your hands I commend my spirit.
Psalm 31:5
Into thy hands I commend my spirit; thou hast redeemed me.
Shame. In any insular community, public humiliation is the
ultimate punishment. It is true in junior high schools, where cliques of girls
enforce morals about sexuality by blasting judgments of their peers through
text messages and face book posts, and it was true in the tribal communities of
biblical times.
As anyone who has ever lived in a small town can tell you,
the loss of status that follows a public shaming is not only suffered by the
individual – it is also suffered by everyone in relation to that person. Their
family members, friends, business associates, children may all feel the impact.
And during biblical times, when members of different communities prayed to
different gods, the shaming extended beyond the individual and included the god
they prayed to as well. In essence, a public ridiculing amounted to an
indictment of your family’s god, and a declaration of his impotence. Just as
you were shamed, your god was shamed as well.
Many of you know that I was raised in the South, and my
pride at the culture I come from is often mixed with a measure of shame at what
members of my community have done. For this reason, Jesus’ crucifixion is very
real to me. The angry mob descending on the jailer, demanding their prisoner;
the jailer feebly trying to disperse the crowd before washing his hands and
saying this man’s blood would not be on his hands; the public procession with
the accused through town; the public beating; the stripping of his clothes to
add a layer of sexual humiliation; the final culmination of an accused man,
hanging, while a crowd mocks below – the story of Jesus’ death is no different
than the story of any other lynching in our history.
And like any lynching, the murder of one person accused of a
crime is only the tip of the iceberg. A lynching is designed to terrify the
community, to warn them. A lynching is a public statement that the rule of law
does not apply here, and we can do this to you just as we do this to him. Your
government won’t protect you. Your legal system won’t protect you. Your jailers
won’t even protect you.
Jesus’ death on the cross was intended as a message to his
followers to stay in their place. Don’t challenge Rome. Don’t challenge the priesthood. Don’t
try to change things. Look what will happen to you if you do. The public
humiliation of Jesus was not merely a punishment to him; it was a lesson
intended to warn others not to do what he had done.
And Jesus was learned in the scriptures. So it is no
surprise that his last words were actually the words of one of the Psalms –
Psalm 31, where David, having been publicly shamed, pleads to God for
redemption.
In Psalm 31, David pleads with God, saying, “I am the scorn
of my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors.” He describes himself as “beset in
a besieged city.” Certainly, this was true for Jesus as well, who was fighting
the Roman occupation as much as he was battling the establishment of the high
priests in Jerusalem.
At this moment, we know that Jesus, the human, must have
been in incredible pain. Close to death, he was not able to deliver a long
sermon or summon another parable to help his followers understand what was
happening to him. But he knew that his followers, and those in the lynch mob,
would be familiar with the Jewish texts, and so he spoke a line from this
psalm. Into your hands, I commend my
spirit.
Just as we sing the Psalms here every Sunday, Jesus’
contemporaries did also. The Psalms are songs – indeed, the word psalm comes
from the Hebrew word that means “to pluck” meaning to pluck the strings of a
harp. The Psalms were folk songs, hymns that most in the crowd likely would
have known the words to. And when Jesus, close to death, cried out, as the text
tells us, in a loud voice, Into your
hands, I commend my spirit, it is likely that the crowd should have known
the next line: thou hast redeemed me, O
Lord, faithful God.
The passage in the text can be interpreted in many ways.
Jesus, in pain, was pleading with God to end his suffering and hasten his
earthly death.
Or, Jesus was accepting the plan that God had created for
him, just as we should all be willing to fulfill God’s plans for us.
Or, Jesus understood that, under Jewish law, one who was
hanged was thought to be cursed by God. Knowing that his contemporaries would
believe this, he instead was reminding his followers, and the people in the
lynch mob, of his teachings, reminding them that things were different now. Jesus
preached often that the only commandments were this: to love the lord with all
your heart, and to love your neighbors as yourselves. By speaking this line
from Psalm 31, Jesus was once again turning everything upside down. Whereas
before, a hanged man was cursed by God, now, Jesus led us to the text that says
instead you have redeemed me, God.
At the moment of his death, Jesus had one more opportunity
to teach the people he had walked among for so long. By speaking the verse of
what was likely a well-known hymn, Jesus was instructing those in the crowd –
his disciples and his persecutors – to look to the message of the hymn and the
scriptures from which it came.
The final lines of Psalm 31 are this: “Love the Lord, all
you, his saints! The Lord preserves the faithful but abundantly requites him
who acts haughtily. Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who
wait for the Lord!”
This could have been a reminder to the disciples that they
should not despair in the months and years ahead, when the Christian experience
would not be an easy one. It could also have been a reminder to us, that we
must not focus only on Christ’s death, but on his life and teachings –
especially that we must love the Lord with all our hearts, for the Lord, as the
Psalm says, will preserve the faithful.
Thomas Jefferson ranks as one of our nations greatest intellects but not many people know that he rejected the notion of miracles. When he approached the scriptures he could not tolerate those passages which dealt with the supernatural. So what did he do? He wrote his own bible.
In the Thomas Jefferson Bible you will find only the moral teachings and historical events of Jesus' life. No virgin birth. No healing of Jairus' daughter. No walking on water. And, no resurrection. Here is how the his bible ends: "There laid they Jesus and rolled a great stone
at the mouth of the sepulcher and departed." Jefferson which you can read online (http://www.sullivan-county.com/deism/jeff_bible.htm) was titled: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels.
The ethical Jesus as very important to Jefferson, proportionally as the Christ God was nothing but delusion to him. It is not like he did not believe in God, but he did not believe in the incarnation of God in Jesus.
On another tack, in the town of Guantanamo, three children of my congregation died during a fire, set accidentally by a candle lit to the memory of some saints by the children’s grandmother. Their mother went out to have a beer and padlocked their home door to prevent the kids from leaving while unsupervised. During the funeral which I officiated, harsh words were hurled at God.
Second slide
Thomas reaction to the question of faith is closer to the mother in Guantanamo than to Jefferson’s. Thomas has already lowered his expectations, Thomas, probably from a psychological stand point, was on his way to wholeness, by accepting the incontrovertible truth, that the man they have managed to believe was God, has just died like everybody else does. Thomas mourning had began, mourning for the tragic and shameful death of a delusional friend, friend nevertheless, mourning for the time and life lost in a futile enterprise of following Jesus. Probably feeling very embarrassed for having believed in someone, when the truth is that people should not be trusted. Thomas can not get his head, or perhaps his heart around the idea that God is a wounded God, that God is suffering God.
Although Jefferson’s unbelief and Thomas’s come from different strata of the edifice of faith, meaning the cognitive and the affective, Jefferson’s, namely Deism, come perhaps from a similar source buried in time.
Both for the mother in Guantanamo and the empiricists, the fundamental problem is Divine efficacy, if Jesus is true God he would have come down from the cross, he would have died, not suffered, he would have not be subject to other people’s wills and evil intentions, subject to the limitations of space and time. If Jesus was true God, he basically could not like us, vulnerable, toy of forces greater than our own wills.
Third Slide
The Black Death was one of the deadliest pandemic in human history, peaking in Europe between 1347 and 1351, around 40 to 50% of the European population died, with some countries averaging 70% of the population. Church response to the pandemic, prayers, ceremonies, masses and so on, had minimal impact, so the burning of Jews and witches. The prestige of the church and of God to certain extend was greatly affected. It marks the end of the Middle Ages and the transition to the Modern Era.
In 1492 Christopher Colombus travels to America and creates the idea of Europe, it also marks the emergence of the modern state and national languages. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis and initiated Protestantism. In 1564 the emergence of the scientific method in Europe was championed by Galileo Galilee. These are the headwaters of empirical knowledge. These are the headwaters of Jefferson’s thinking when hi put his Bible together.
So although for Jefferson Deism was the fashionable intellectual position to hold while involve in scientific research and the creation of a new nation, his position and the attitude of the mother in Guantanamo and by extension the response of Thomas all come from the same source; Divine efficacy.
Fourth slide
Year c. 1621-23 Artist Hendrick ter Brugghen predecessor of the great Dutch painters, one of the first and most influential caravaggists chiaroscuro technique in Utrecht, 1620 was the year that Europe was in full swing at expansion, the Mayflower pilgrims departed in September of that year,
1600 were also a time of profound change in thinking, in 1620 after being disgraced Francis Beacon wrote the Novum organon, the new organ that tries successfully to change the method of philosophical reflection,
incidentally he is the author of the aphorism "knowledge is power"
from deductive syllogism to interpret nature he believed that philosophical method should go
guided by inductive reasoning from fact to axiom to law.
Depicted on the painting: Jesus has appeared at the disciples a week earlier, incidentally scaring the beejezesus out of them, while they were meeting as the defeated shards of Jesus family, afraid -behind close doors- Thomas, the Twin was not present at that meeting and when he shows up, he refuses to believe what the other disciples were telling him and he utters the now famous words: unless I see and touch, I will not believe
The painting we are seeing here depicts the second appearance of Jesus, presumably done for the only purpose of convincing Thomas
There are four men around the central person of Jesus, he holds with one hand his robe open so the wound and the blood staining it can be seeing and the other he holds Thomas’s hand, like guiding it and controlling it at the same time
By the use of light, the central person is Jesus, and two other people at each side, his right and left sides, the other two disciples in the background praying and praising.
Fifth slide
One is obviously Thomas, at Jesus’s right your left, nicknamed The Twin (Dydimus) the one with the finger, whose eyes are so intent on the wound and his own finger, his face shows some repugnance at the idea of touching a wound, presumably of dead person, serious taboo for any observant Jew, his face is weathered and aged in part by following the man whose risen status he was about to prove
Sixth slide
The other person at Jesus’s left and your right I am puzzle by it. Has not being identified as far as I know. It does looks like a disciple, he is wearing glasses, an anachronistic device probably used to indicate learning, he is in a Thomas-state, finding out, he also wants to know and he is looking at Thomas probe with equal or more interest, his hands looks like the a bird of prey, and so is his face,
there is some jaded delight in his face as he follows the Thomas probe.
Seventh slide
The other two disciples in the background have being done with, they now believe, because they have seeing a week earlier. The one cover with the tallit or prayer shawl have his eyes closed and the other his eyes opened and gazing up above. They could stand for the church, now distanced to the back of the group, while religious intellectual pursuit (Thomas) and the world scepticism of the church claims (represented by the old man with his eye glasses) flack Jesus on his right and his left.
Eight slide
Dorothy Sayers: It is unexpected, but extraordinarily convincing, that the one absolutely unequivocal statement in the whole gospel of the Divinity of Jesus should come from Doubting Thomas. It is the only place where the word God is used ... without qualification of any kind, and in the most unambiguous form of words .... And this must be said -- not ecstatically, or with a cry of astonishment -- but with flat conviction, as of one acknowledging irrefutable evidence: '2 + 2 = 4,' 'That is the sun in the sky,' 'You are my Lord and my God!'
It is in the place of doubt that faith has found its birthplace.
The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote an ambitious poem entitled 'The Wreck of the Deutschland.' It commemorates the death of five Franciscan nuns drowned on the German ship Deutschland at the mouth of the Thames in the winter of 1875. One half-line especially intrigues me: 'Let him easter in us.' Let Christ 'easter' in us. A rare verb indeed, but it suits this sacred
season, ... How does Christ easter in us? In three wondrous ways: (1) By a faith that rises above doubt. (2) By a hope that conquers despair. (3) By a love that does justice.
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Canonigo
Juan Quevedo-Bosch,
Rector
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