April 7, 2024

John 20:19-31

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.”

You run out for a few errands and this is what happens. You miss out on all the news.

And Thomas, being of a more skeptical frame of mind than the other disciples, was not going to let this news pass unquestioned.

But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

As I was reading over this passage for today, I thought to myself, not another sermon about Doubting Thomas. His story rolls around once or twice a year and, if you were attentive last Sunday, he made an appearance already this spring.

In a nutshell, the regular Thomas sermon is that it is okay to have doubts. Doubts are good. Belief without doubt is problematic. Have doubts but also try to have faith. There you go, sermon done in record time.

Instead of focusing on the “doubt” part of the Thomas story today, I got caught up in a weird little fact that John throws in as an aside, as a pretty much ignored facet of this tale: Thomas, who was called the Twin. Thomas the Twin. He is sometimes referred to as Thomas Didymus, with Didymus being Greek for “twin.” And if you dig further into the etymology of the name Thomas, it comes from Aramaic and also means “Twin.” So, he was Twin the Twin.

Someone was trying to make sure we knew that he was a twin. Which begs the question: who was the other twin? If you look back over early Christian texts, there are theories on that subject. And the most surprising one of all was that Thomas was the twin brother of…Jesus. Surprise.

How could Thomas have possibly been the twin brother of Jesus? We have two separate accounts from Mattthew and Luke in which we hear about the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. We even have an entire holiday about that. But at no time in that festive season do we trot out the factoid that, oh by the way, Thomas was there next to Jesus in the manger.

In this alternate Biblical tradition, Thomas was said to be the son of Joseph and Jesus was the son of God. Fraternal twins of the strangest sort. There is also another tradition in which Jesus was also a twin, but his brother’s name was Judas. Can you imagine that family therapy bill? To be clear, the name “Judas” (or more likely “Judah”) was a common name at the time, like all the many Marys we read about in the Gospels. It was not supposed to be that Judas.

Remember that the Bible is not actually a book. It is a codex, a collection of smaller works. The various books of the Bible could just as easily be called scrolls following the Jewish tradition. And they would have been literal scrolls for centuries. Books as we recognize them would not be invented until a century after Jesus’ life and even then they did not become popular until a couple of centuries later. Popularized, by the way, by Roman Christians who developed the Bible as a codex, or compendium, of other books.

And if you imagine the Bible as a collection of many different writings, you might also entertain the notion that at some point in time, someone sat down and collected those scrolls and stories and decided which would make the cut. The Bible as we might recognize it was assembled and edited in the fourth century. And when they decided what was going to be in the Bible, they were also deciding what was not going to be in the Bible.

For example, there are other texts called gospels out there, like the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, and yes the Gospel of Thomas. These did not pass muster. Why? Because in some cases their subject matter diverges from the classic story of Christianity we now know but which was being developed at that time. And so, by this traditional account, Jesus does not have brothers or sisters and Mary had no other children.

Which, if you think about it for a moment, makes no sense. Jewish families at that time sought to have many children because a large family was a blessing. Sons and daughter helped support the family. By some accounts, the Apostle James was also Jesus’ brother, but we do not dwell on that story either.

Consider for a moment what we know about Jesus. Other than what is in the Bible, there is little evidence out there about his life. There is evidence that he existed, that he died, and that his followers kept on going. Which is far more substantive proof than we have for many ancient figures. But we do not know much about Jesus’ life other than the stories in the Bible and legends passed down like this one about Thomas the Twin.

Why does any of this matter? We are given a story. Like any story, its details are used to convey a certain understanding of the characters, the message, and their meaning. When the Bible’s editors decided to leave out the Gospels of Mary, Judas, and Thomas, they were making a choice about consistency. That which was not consistent was placed aside, some of it branded as heresy.

If Jesus was a twin, that means the accounts of his birth are unreliable. If they are unreliable, then why should we read them or anything else in the Gospels? Again, someone chose the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. They chose them even though they are different in many ways from the Gospels of Mark and John.

But they are not as different in their messages as compared with Mary, Judas, and Thomas. These are considered Gnostic texts. Gnostic like agnostic. Agnostic means without knowledge and gnostic essentially means with knowledge. Specific knowledge…secret knowledge.

Gnosticism is a heresy involving claims about secret knowledge. Knowledge that only followers of Jesus received directly from their great teacher. And you too can learn all that secret stuff if, and only if, you follow Mary, Judas, or Thomas and their respective disciples. You might guess the problems of having such a secretive and exclusive treasure trove of knowledge as the path into religious life. By modern standards, it has the hallmarks of a cult. And so, Gnosticism was declared to be bad.

But what if they are right? What if that is what Jesus wanted? You might ask that. You might go running to leaf through these secret and mysterious texts, which I will warn you are pretty strange and rather tedious. But that may be because I am used to one version of the story. The more familiar one that has survived, or that was adopted, depending on your perspective .

And it is impossible to know what is right and true because the people making those editorial choices centuries ago did so for their own storytelling purposes. We might never know what happened.

But does that matter?

There is a distinction to be drawn between belief and faith. Belief and faith are not the same things and yet we sometimes use those terms interchangeably. Belief is something that you know to be true. Faith is about things that you feel to be true.

Knowing is about certainty, about something being capital “T” truth. Feeling is personal and individual. And I cannot not know what other people feel, just what is in my heart and mind. I can make educated guesses from behavior and past practices, but that is not knowing what they are feeling. They can try to tell me about their feelings, but even then there is always a sense of distance between what someone says and truly what they are feeling.

Does it matter if Jesus had a twin brother named Thomas or Judas or James? Does it matter if Mary had other children besides Jesus?

Did the magi bring frankincense and myrrh to Jesus in Bethlehem or was it warm socks and a few sandwiches? These details are not the pivotal points upon which the story changes. Though socks and sandwiches might have been nice.

Put another way, does anything fundamentally change if you accept or reject these ideas? For me, I do not think anything changes. It does not matter one way or the other if these questions are decided one way or another—or if they are ever answered.

I have in past sermons invoked Caggiano’s Rule of Theological Necessity, a theorem of my own obvious invention. Anyway, here is the rule: if there is a theological controversy about something, anything really, imagine for a moment if it were to be determined one way versus the other. If the virgin birth was true or not true. If the Trinity was changed, a binary system or some of configuration different in way or another.

Fill in the blanks of any religious question that has ever troubled you with all the possible answers. And if after answering it any which way, it does not change anything fundamentally important about your faith, then it is an unnecessary concern. The answer may be interesting, like Thomas being a twin, but it is not ultimately a determining factor for anything.

What if the Trinity is not the Trinity as organized by the Council of Nicaea decided in 325 CE. The Trinity has become important in the minds of certain religious people, but would it be any different if there was simply and only God? “Simply and only God” is rather a banal way of rounding off the nature of the divine, I realize, but as there is absolutely no way of knowing the answer to such a questions, why bother?

That was essentially the argument of Immanuel Kant when he decided that his philosophy was going to place aside metaphysical questions about the divine—unanswerable question about the nature of God. Instea, he sought to focus on human scale matters open to reason and logic. I do not disagree with Kant, though he is practically impossible to read without a lot of patience and quite a few naps.

And his outlook was philosophical while mine centers around the religious and theological. But the same logic holds in my estimation.

I even came up with a name for this religious outlook: a Necessitarian. Listen closely as you might well be a Necessitarian and not know it. As a Necessitarian, you must be dedicated to using reason and faith together. Together like the two arms of a set of scissors used to cut away unnecessary religious disputes and sideshow theological arguments. Snip, snip.

Necessary does not mean minimal in this case. It is not like having to clean your room just enough so that your mother does not yell at you. Necessary in this sense is like needing oxygen, like requiring Vitamin C to avoid getting scurvy. What is necessary versus what is not?

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson, perhaps a proto-Necessitarian, decided to create his own Bible. He focused on the New Testament and literally used an 18^th century Exacto knife to cut out the parts he thought did not belong. He took out anything in the text that he thought was supernatural. He took out all the miracles. He took out the parts that require you to set aside reason and an understanding of the natural world.

He called his new book The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It is primarily a collection of the teachings of Jesus. Jefferson had been criticized for being irreligious in his life and so he created this book to reduce the Gospels to their core message to prove that he was in fact, a he put it a “real Christian…a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.” And he placed his faith in those doctrines, not the miracles.

In our prayerbook from which we read every Sunday, there is a line in the Prayer of General Thanksgiving. In part it gives thanks for, “thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by the teachings of Jesus Christ.” Inestimable just rolls off the tongue.

If you compare our prayer book with the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer you will find many similarities, but that line is different. In the Episcopal version of the same vintage as ours, from 1928, the line reads “the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ.”

What is the difference? The difference between the world being redeemed by the teachings of Jesus versus the existence of Jesus. If you believe that Jesus righted all the wrongs in the world and mended a rupture between God and the people of the world, you might also rightly believe that there is nothing else to do in this life. In modern terms, you just need to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and all is right between you and God. Now the rest of you, well, you might be in trouble.

But if instead you believe that redemption is found through the teachings of Jesus Christ, then does that not suggest that you must follow the teachings of Jesus Christ?

This is sometimes where we slip down the rabbit hole of Protestant theology. Well, as we all know, God is outside time and therefore God always knew what was going to happen in our lives and therefore everything is predetermined. And you can have faith in that. But you cannot believe that. Believe meaning knowing it is true. Because it is impossible to know such a thing to be true. Some old guy in Switzerland said that a few centuries ago (i.e. John Calvin) and now many people believe it, but that does not make it true.

I do not believe that. And I do not have faith in that. I do not believe in predestination or original sin or the virgin birth for that matter. Why? Because these ideas violate Caggiano’s Rule of Theological Necessity. Nothing changes in my outlook on life if I say they are true or not true. Nothing fundamental shifts in my approach to following the teachings of Jesus. And as a card carrying Necessitarian, I have to think about what I am saying up here to be sure it hangs together logically and philosophically as well as religiously and theologically.

Here is my preferred understanding of the nature of God and the world. The world began and there is a creative force that brought that about. I do not know much more than that. I know that this universe came into existence and we live in it by its rules. The basic rules are fairly familiar to us, with the effects of gravity and the passage of time being pretty commonplace in our experience. But it gets pretty weird when you go very big or very small, the size of galaxies and the size of subatomic particles.

Just recently, scientists have postulated that there is no such thing as nothing. Nothing is impossible. Underneath all of creation, the atoms and quarks and other squirrely objects that make up existence, there is still something there. They have given it a truly terrible name, quantum foam. And quantum foam is that from which all things came into being. It is the source of everything. It is possibility itself.

Now that does not mean you can go stir the foam and make a new car. All that is possible means subatomic particles can come into existence that can then coalesce into more complex matter and energy and then onward into more complex forms. I think of that backdrop as being truly miraculous, but not exactly miraculous in the ways we sometime imagine or often wish for in our lives. And that knowledge is no more useful than the rules about subatomic particles, meaning it is not overly practical for us in everyday life, though I find it terribly interesting.

What then is necessary? Necessary for a good life? The teachings of Jesus.

The Prodigal Son and the need to forgive. The Good Samaritan and the requirement to help others. The Beatitudes and the call to make peace. To act meekly (meaning humbly). To be merciful because we all need a little mercy from time to time because we all make mistakes. And to love one another. In this mode of thinking, you do not need to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior. But must, must, must embrace Jesus of Nazareth as your personal teacher, as your personal guide, as your personal North Star.

Those are what is necessary—necessary to live a good and moral life, which is about all any of us can we really handle. We will find redemption in this world through the teachings of Jesus Christ because those teachings are how we learn to be together, to care for one another. That for me is the best take home advice to offer because it has real meaning in this world. That is what I think Jesus offered to us and that for me is the cornerstone of my faith.

Faith that if we love each other, if we love God and all God’s creation, as weird and mind bending as it is, we will redeem ourselves and those around us in time. Anything more than that and I need to break out my rules of necessity, my scissors of reason and faith, and give it all a good hard think.

But for now, no more thinking. Go forth and love each other. It is the best advice I have ever found and I am sticking with it. Amen.