A sermon for the Church of the Epiphany, Second Sunday of Easter (Thomas Sunday), which coincides with the six month anniversary of the October 7 attacks and the beginning of the war in Gaza

Thomas cried out, “My Lord and my God!” He recognized in the face, the voice, the wounded body of Jesus the love of God that would not leave him wondering, or doubting, or alone. But more than that, he identified Jesus with God’s own self.

This is why the doors were locked. This is why the disciples were afraid of their own countrymen, of their own community, of their own congregation. Because to name Jesus as God was a departure. It was a fracture. It had to be painful.

A few weeks ago one of you noted the uncomfortable way in which John the Evangelist writes about “the Jews,” reminding me that we really do need to talk about John’s language, and what it means, and what it doesn’t mean.

Let’s start here: whenever you read something like, “the doors were locked for fear of the Jews,” cast your mind back to chapter four of the very same book, where Jesus meets the woman of Samaria beside the well. Remember what he says to her: “Salvation is from the Jews”! For all of its “us and them” feeling, the Gospel of John is clear that Jesus is also one of them. He is a Jew.

He is the Lamb of God, the Word of creation, the light of the world, rabbi, Messiah, the King of Israel, the Son of God. He is steeped in the traditions of his ancestors. He is on fire for the purity of the Temple. He attends every Jewish festival. He dies and is buried according to the customs of his people, the Jews.

So when John writes the phrase, “the Jews,” he doesn’t mean by any means to undermine the covenant that God has made from long ago with God’s first-chosen people.

The phrase may mean different things in different contexts throughout the text; clearly Jesus’ assertion that “salvation is from the Jews” comes from a different place than, “the doors were locked for fear of the Jews.” In the first instance it no doubt is more universal; in the latter it is clearly narrower.

The context of the writing is one factor; the context of the reader is certainly another. We do not hear John’s words in the same way as his community did two millennia ago. We have an awful lot of history and cultural accretions that colour our understanding and complicate it. Raymond Brown, a formidable scholar of John’s Gospel, argues that John’s first readers would more readily recognize “the Jews” of the Gospel as the people they knew as their proximate neighbors, members of the same synagogues, who were hostile to their innovative and, to the ears of many, blasphemous proclamation of Jesus as “my Lord and my God.”[i]

For all of our contextualizing, the language remains uncomfortable for us in the western world of the twenty-first century. There is good reason for that. Anti-Jewish interpretations of scripture have been used to justify the worst atrocities, and we know that the conspiracy theories and the dangers to the Jewish diaspora were not ended by the treaties of 1945. It is unthinkable that the Christ, who healed the ear of the one who came to arrest him and who rebuked the disciple who wielded the sword; Christ, whose dying prayers were from the Psalms of David, and who rose again to put all violence, all cruelty to shame; it is unthinkable that such a Christ would allow such hatred from his followers. He is the life of God’s love in the world after all.

It is also difficult for us in this moment, in our history, to hear John’s antagonism toward those he labels “the Jews” and not to think of the continuing brutality of the war in Gaza, which was not unprovoked, but which has claimed far more than an eye for an eye, and which continues to break the teeth of the children of Palestine with famine and destruction. Again, there is a difference between Jewish ethnicity and the politics of Israel. The Jesus who drove the marketeers out of the Temple was no less Jewish for his resolute adherence to religious values over the economy and ease and exploitation of the political classes. We cannot let righteous outrage over the unrighteous devastation of Gaza become fuel for a broader brush with hatred.

In fact, Jesus himself may be our best guide and interpreter of the language of John’s Gospel that we find hard to hear and understand. Jesus, who taught his followers from the scriptures that he knew the best that the way of God is love; that the promises of God are faithful; that the mercy of God endures; that the justice of God does not set a sword between peoples but sacrifices itself for their reconciliation.

Jesus, who breathed peace upon his disciples, who were locked up for fear of their own shadows. Jesus, who came back for Thomas, because he would not leave the doubtful, the denying, any beloved child of God longing for the sight of him and unfulfilled.

This is the Jesus I have known and try to follow: my Lord and my God.

[i] Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the Gospel of John (Doubleday, 2003), 166-172