PROPERS: SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER
TEXT: JOHN 20:19-31
PREACHED AT ST. PAUL’S, MOBILE, ON SUNDAY, APRIL 27, 2025.
ONE SENTENCE: The resurrection of Jesus introduced a whole new reality into the world; we can never see the world the same.
Let me take you back a few years. Eighty-six years to be precise.
We go to the silver screen – and one of the two big motion pictures of 1939. One, of course, was Gone With the Wind. The other one – and the one to which I refer – is The Wizard of Oz.
People still get the heeby-jeebies about the black and white images of Margaret Hamilton taking Dorothy’s dog, Toto, away in a bicycle basket. And many of us had our first encounter with tornadoes in the scene which follows. Frightening for young viewers – images that stay with us for a lifetime.
But I want to focus on a different scene – immediately after Dorothy’s house, swept up by the tornado, has been transported to Munchkinland.
Dorothy tentatively steps out of her house. And suddenly her black-and-white world erupts into a world of color. The flowers, the trees, the munchkins – they are all vividly colorful. It is the same for the viewer.
We could never see the world the same again.
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The apostle Thomas in today’s gospel is clearly still residing in the tornado-tossed house. He has not yet opened the door. He is sticking with what he knows.
Thomas gets a bit of a bum rap for his skepticism. How many of us would not share in those doubts? Could we really believe that someone who had been crucified – and who was truly dead – had come back… and had been revivified.
Doubting Thomas shared something with us. He would not know the term nor would he know the names, but he was hamstrung by a post-Enlightenment world view. He believed that the laws of nature – defined by Newton, Einstein and others – always overruled the miraculous.
In short, he was being asked to believe something that the rules of the world he had known precluded.
Then, the door to the house opened.
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John Claypool, the noted Episcopal priest and Baptist preacher, wrote a book called Opening Blind Eyes.He recounted an experience when symbolic scales fell from his eyes and he saw the world anew. He was never the same.
Thomas – enclosed in a locked room for fear of safety – had a similar experience. His world was transformed when the Risen Jesus appeared in that locked room.
Like Dorothy’s experience in The Wizard of Oz, Thomas’s world would never be the same. Both what he knew to be and his expectations had been shattered into a million pieces. Like Dorothy, his monochromatic world had been transformed into a palette of brilliant colors. He was not in Kansas anymore. Theologians would later call this a new creation.
We are called to join Thomas. We are invited into that same world view. When we experience losses… when we try and fail… when we stand at the grave of a loved one… when we encounter our human limitations… we are called to be like Thomas.
We are called to look through a new prism – the eyes of faith – and see God’s work in our midst. As Jesus says in the Book of Revelation, “Behold, I make all things new.”
Let the scales fall from your eyes. Greet the New World in which you live.