The Rev. Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

© 2024, Dr. Tamilio

Today is Thomas the Doubter Day.  Poor old Thomas.  He happened to be absent when the resurrected Jesus appeared to the other ten disciples (Judas had committed suicide at this point), so, when they told Thomas about the event, he said what most people would say: “I’ll believe it when I see it.”  His name has become synonymous with doubt simply because he thought his friends were pulling a fast one on him!  You can almost hear him:

You guys said Jesus rose from the dead.  People do not rise from the dead.  Plus, he’s not here at the moment.  How convenient!  Where’s the “candid” camera?

The argument employed by Thomas is no different than the one used by the contemporary skeptic or atheist: “You may believe in God and Jesus and all that, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”  It is difficult to get someone to see something beyond their senses, yet there are many things that people can’t see that they have no trouble believing in.  Gravity for example, or the fact that the universe is far vaster than what anyone can see with the naked eye, let alone the highest-powered telescope known to man.  But that is a sermon for another time.  Today, I want to reflect on the fact that we can see Jesus.  We see him all the time.

We see Jesus in our sacramental life.  That is what sacraments are, in part: they are ways that we celebrate Jesus’ presence among us.

Those of you who grew up Catholic — or had a lot of Catholic friends — may understand this a little better.  The Catholic Church believes that Jesus is physically present in their sacramental life, most especially when they celebrate the Mass.  Catholics believe in transubstantiation, which means that when the priest blesses the bread on the altar that it becomes the body of Christ.  Literally.

Protestants have a hard time with this.  I remember, as a kid, hearing my Roman Catholic cousins talking about their first Communion and how they would be basically imbibing Jesus.  It sounded like cannibalism to me.  It sounded like cannibalism to the earliest critics of Christianity.  Are they really eating the flesh and blood of the person they follow?

This is not a critique of Roman Catholic theology, for which I have a great affinity.  The Protestant Reformation offered a detailed critique (or better yet critiques, plural) of this practice, concluding that the presence of Jesus at the meal is not meant to be taken literally.  One of the ideas that emerged at this time was that Jesus is present at the meal, but the bread does not actually change.  If you were to test it, in other words, it would still be flour and water as opposed to blood and DNA.  It is as if Jesus infuses the elements in some way, but does not change them.

I could go on and on about this all day, but only those really interested in sacramental theology would want to reflect on this.  It isn’t exactly fodder for a homily.

Maybe an example is in order…

You come to worship.  You feel haggard.  It’s been a long week.  The boss has been a pain in the you know what.  You’ve been fighting with your spouse.  The kids are teenagers, which means that they know everything.  The car needs a brake job.  The neighbor insists on letting his dog out late at night and all he does is bark, and bark, and bark.

You wake up on Sunday morning and wonder, “Do I sleep in, or do I go to church?”  You drag yourself out of bed, pour a cup of coffee, and crack open your Bible or read a devotional.  Something about what you read strikes you.  Maybe it is a passage such as Matthew 28:20 — the last verse of that Gospel: “And remember: I will be with you always, even until the end of the age.”  That gets your brain spinning: “He will be with me always?  How?  Where?  When?”  So, you decide to go to church and see if there are answers to your questions.

You jump in the shower, you get dressed, and you go to church.  You greet the people there.  Some of them you know.  Some of them you don’t.  If you’re lucky, the preacher will look like a young Paul Newman or Robert Redford.  (Cough.)  Prayers are shared.  Hymns are sung.  An offering is taken.  And then, you are invited forward to receive the bread and cup of Holy Communion.  You do so — as does the rest of the congregation.  There is something deliberate and meaningful about this many people coming forward to the same table to receive the same thing.  It is solemn.  It is sacred.  You return to your pew holding the bread and up and, when instructed, you eat and drink with everyone else.  Or maybe it is a church where you take a piece of bread and dip it into a chalice and receive it then.

It is then that it hits you.  This is no ordinary meal.  It is hardly a meal, the way we understand the term.  No one would call a small square of bread and a thimble-sized cup a meal.  The meal is highly symbolic, but what it achieves is real — quite real.  As you look around the sanctuary and see everyone reverently doing the same thing, you realize that there is a unifying aspect to all of this.  After all, the words “communion” and “community” share the same root word.  There is something unifying about this sacrament.  It knits the congregation together in ways that nothing else does or can.  It creates an indissoluble bond.  As I have written about and stated many times before, it is no accident that the Apostle Paul refers to the “bread” of the Lord’s Supper as “the body of Christ” in 1 Corinthians 11 and then, in the very next chapter, uses the same phrase (“the body of Christ”) to refer to the Church.  In other words, the Church becomes the body of Christ more fully by partaking in the body of Christ.  It is about identity, yes.  It is also about presence: Jesus is present at this meal.

He is at the table welcoming you.  He is at the font pouring his Holy Spirit out upon Francis and the congregation that promises to offer him their love, support, and care as he lives and grows in Christ.  His is revealed in the Word read and proclaimed.  Jesus is present with us beyond the mere physical.  He is the spiritual nephesh that knits us together as a people.  Nephesh is a word that appears in the Old Testament that literally means “the breath of life.”

Jesus offered that life on the cross, and, when he rose from the dead, he offered that life to us all as when the resurrected Christ breathed on the disciples and said (in the passage we read today), “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  Many think this is akin to him saying (at the end of Matthew), “And remember: I will be with you always, even until the end of the age.”

He is.  He is with us.  And he always will be, even to the end of the age.  Amen.