Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. W. Matthew Broadbent

United Church of Christ 5^th Sunday in Lent

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos, CA 94022 March 9, 2008

THOMAS / WHO DO YOU SAY THAT I AM?

John 20:19-29; Gospel of Thomas (excerpts)

When I began this series of sermons on the question - “Who do you say that I am?” - I began by reflecting on the formation of the Biblical canon. How was it put together and why? In our present age there is a lot of suspicion about the motivations of the early church fathers and the influence of the recently converted emperor, Constantine. Why were women excluded? Were there more gospels than just Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? What was so bad about Gnosticism? And then there is the anti-orthodox, anti-dogmatic prejudice of progressive churches. Can we trust the canon? What about all those Dead Sea scrolls and the books found at Nag Hammadi library in Egypt?

One of the first articles I read was an essay by Walter Brueggemann, Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World. He writes: “The canon is an act of bold, venturesome imagination that is concerned to ground and sustain a peculiar community. Without lingering of over the complexity of prehistory and the literary-theological antecedents of the canon … in the history if Israelite religion, it surely must be recognized that the [Bible] is a statement of social construction, that it is immense in its power and in its scope and in its construal of reality.”

That’s brilliant! But does it preach? I don’t know, but I did love the phrase “venturesome imagination.” This is exactly what Bible Study and theological application is all about – using our ability to explore new ways of thinking to compare and synthesize what we are discovering with the deep memory of the past - venturesome imagination. Today we will venture into the Gospel of Thomas and compare it to a bit of the Gospel of John.

The Gospel of Thomas begins: These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded, and then proceeds with 114 sayings of Jesus in what appears to be a random order. This is what is called a sayings Gospel like the “Q” source, the Secret Book of James, and the Gospel of Mary. Because the Coptic text was found in the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt it has been classified as a Gnostic text, though some scholars think of it as a link between Gnosticism and what came to be known as orthodoxy.

There is an active debate on when the Gospel of Thomas was written. The present Coptic text discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi dates from the 4^th Century, but its discovery revealed that there were other, older fragments from the second century in historical archives. Gnostic scholar, Elaine Pagels, believes Thomas to have been composed in the same period of time as Matthew, Mark and Luke. She makes this claim because it appears that there was a well-developed church that followed the leadership of Thomas in Syria that was exerting a strong influence on Hellenistic Christianity. She notes (Beyond Belief: the Secret Gospel of Thomas) that there seems to be conflict between the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas even though the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas are theologically similar in almost every respect except one, and there are certain passages in John can only be understood in light of a community based on the theological teachings of the Gospel of Thomas. John is the only one of the canonical Gospels that gives Thomas a speaking part – indicating respect for Thomas community.

Listen to some of the sayings and aphorisms of this Gospel and hear how familiar they sound. You can hear a common source of shared wisdom that resonates in all of the Gospels.

25: Jesus said, “Love your friends like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye.”

31: … “No prophet is welcome on his home turf; doctors don’t cure those who know them.”

32: … “A city built on a high hill and fortified cannot fall, nor can it be hidden.”

34: .. “If a blind person leads a blind person, both of them will fall into a hole.” (Another funny one reads…)

53: His disciples said to him, “is circumcision useful or not.” (This suggests the writer was not speaking to a Jewish audience.) He said to them, “If it were useful, their father would produce children already circumcised from their mother…

90: Jesus said, “Come to me, for my yoke is comfortable and my lordship is gentle, and you will find rest for yourselves.”

This all sounds very similar to what we are used to hearing in theGospels, though his inclusion of women disciples is eye opening.

61: … Salome said, “Who are you mister? You have climbed onto my couch and eaten from my table as if you are from someone.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the one who comes from what is whole. I was granted from the things of my Father.”

(Salome said) “I am your disciple.”

(Jesus said) “For this reason I say, if one is (whole), one will be filled with light, but if one is divided, one will be filled with darkness.”

In the last saying we have Jesus speaking of the unity of male and female that reflects the Syrian-Persian influence that finds its highest expression in a celibate life. In modern terms this is not dissimilar to the Shaker communities of the 19^th Century. The last saying reads:

114: Simon Peter said to them, “Make Mary leave us, for females don’t deserve life.”

Jesus said, “Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.

I know this phrasing does not sit well with modern feminist sensibilities, but think for a moment of the radical gender equality this saying suggests is inherent in the kingdom of Heaven.

This leads us to where Thomas and John diverge - their attitudes about the Kingdom of God and the nature of resurrection. Is the Kingdom of God a time and a place to come – at the end of time – as suggested in John? Or is the Kingdom of God “within you,” as Luke (17:10) says. The Gospels in our Bible all look to a future fulfillment of God’s realm in which the risen Christ returns and overthrows the powers of the world and ushers in the new age. John, especially believes in the bodily resurrection, but for Thomas, the resurrection is a spiritual one.

In fact he says that the Kingdom of God is not an event that’s going to be catastrophically shattering the world as we know it, sweeping up the saved in a rapture, etc. and ushering in a new millennium. He says, instead, the kingdom of God is already here.

3: Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds will get there first. If they say ‘it’s in the ocean,’ then the fish will get there first. But the kingdom of God is within you and outside of you. Once you come to know yourselves, you will become known. And you will know that it is you who are the children of the living father. But, if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are poverty.”

You can hear the influence of the Greek philosophical tradition to “know thyself” an inscription on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollos at Delphi. Thomas says “it is within you and outside you of you.” It’s like a state of consciousness. It is not an intellectual abstraction, like knowing physics. Rather this knowledge is a matter of insight, of self-knowledge. It is a question of knowing who you really are – not in objective or sociological terms – but at a deep, relational level. The secret knowledge that Thomas presents is that when you know yourself at that level you will also come to know God, because you will discover that the divine is within you.

In some ways Thomas is very modern. Walter Wink, in his award winning book, Engaging the Powers, describes the changing worldviews from ancient to modern. In the ancient world heaven and earth were two parallel realities. Heaven was the place of perfection and earth was its reflection. Every earthly event, therefore had its heavenly counterpart. If war begins on the earth then there must be war in heaven. Likewise, events initiated in heaven would be mirrored on the earth.

How are we to deal with such a condition, if this is a true picture of reality? One solution is to take a spiritualist view. It must be that if heaven is “perfect” then that is the true reality. Earth is a fallen, flawed, failed illusion and must be rejected as false and corrupt. Salvation is only through the knowledge of one’s lost heavenly origins and the secret of the way back. This was the Gnostic world-view, as well as John, and the Puritans whom we mark as our spiritual predecessors.

The materialistic view denies the efficacy of heaven. “The spiritual world is an illusion. There is no higher self; we are mere complexities of matter and when we die we cease to exist…” Wink says, “This materialistic view has penetrated deeply even into many Christians, causing them to ignore the spiritual dimensions of systems or the spiritual resources of faith.” In response to materialism theologians invented the supernatural realm that could not be known by the senses effectively separating heaven off into an hermetically sealed capsule.

But, there is a new integrated world–view that is emerging that sees everything as having an outer and inner aspect. It affirms an “inner spiritual reality as inextricably related to an outer concretion or physical manifestation.” It is this integrated view which resonates with the Gospel of Thomas – “it is inside you but it is also outside you.” I find this fascinating.

Who do you say that I am, Didymos Judas Thomas? The secret is in the name. His name is Judas, better known to family and friends as Jude. Hey, Jude. He is called Thomas Didymos in the Gospel of John. Didymos is Greek for twin, and Thomas is Hebrew for twin. Did Jesus have a twin brother, or does this mean something else? Are they spiritual twins?

Elaine Pagels writes: “…Jesus comes to reveal that you and he are, if you like, twins… And what you discover as you read the Gospel of Thomas, which you are meant to discover, is that you and Jesus, at a deep level, are identical twins. And that you discover that you are a child of God just as he is. And so that at the end of the gospel Jesus speaks to Thomas and says, (108) Whoever drinks from my mouth (receives this wisdom) will become as I am, and I will become that person, and the mysteries will be revealed to him.”

Jesus is the one who reveals the knowledge of the inner self and encourages us to go on a spiritual quest of our own to discover who we are, that will lead us to know that we are the beloved child of God just like Jesus.