In our gospel reading for today, a nasty schism occurs between Thomas, and the other 10 apostles. The other 10 have this bizarre story that Jesus is alive again, and Thomas JUST CANNOT accept their testimony to it. He has to experience it for himself. No amount of convincing short of poking his finger through the HOLE in Jesus' HAND, is going to bridge this schism, and restore unity to the group. And so Jesus promptly returns, and offers to Thomas his hands and his side....
Imagine you are Peter or James or John in the situation of our gospel reading today, what could YOU say to Thomas? “C'mon Tom, all 10 of us saw him walk right through that solid wall right there! All 10 of us agree on everything we saw and everything we heard Jesus say! If this were a court of law, only 2 or 3 witnesses would be enough to settle the matter, and you have 10 witnesses standing in front of you. Tom, after all we've been through together, how can you not trust us? Don't you believe in our mission any more? What IS your PROBLEM?” And you might come to the conclusion that Thomas really shouldn't belong in your group of apostles after all.
If you were to ask a sports team what keeps them unified, what would they say? They would say, “we have a common goal, winning the championship.” If you were to ask a married couple what keeps them unified, what would they say? “We have trust in each other to be totally faithful.” If you were to ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change what keeps them unified, what would they say? “We have agreement on how climate change should be measured, modelled, and addressed.” And if we were to ask ourselves as a church, what keeps US unified, we could say that we have, to a large degree, all three of these. We HAVE a common overarching goal, which in the simplest formulation can be expressed as “Making Christ known.” We HAVE a larger than normal degree of trust in each other – a heritage of our family connections, our small-town roots, and our history together. And we HAVE agreement on many, many things, including our particularly Lutheran outlook on faith, and our reliance on the Word of God.
And yet, common goals, human trust, and logical agreement, can be unreliable things upon which to build unity. When sports players get injured, they can no longer actively contribute to pursue the common goal. When one incident or misunderstanding destroys human trust, marriages can fly apart as a result. When scientists truly pursue truth, they can often change the group of scientists with which they agree. Thomas, up to the point of our gospel reading today DID have a common goal, a sense of trust, and a sense of agreement with the other 10 apostles, and yet it wasn't enough in the situation he faced. It wasn't enough to ENSURE unity in the church back then, and it isn't enough to ENSURE unity now.
But we keep striving as if it did. We try to unify our church by calling it to a heightened sense of purpose, a better understanding of our mission in our communities, a clearer picture of the appropriate actions associated with Christian discipleship. We try to unify our church with policies and procedures and disciplinary boards, that strengthen our trust in each other, or at least our perception of trust in each other, or at least our perception that the damage we can cause to each other has been minimized. And we try to unify our church with endless discussion on the issues of disagreement, until either we “agree”, or at least we agree that disagreeing is OK, or at least we are unwilling to put the effort into punting those who disagree. And if we feel that unity is slipping away from us, we blame our LACK of purpose, LACK of trust, and LACK of agreement. It's as if we think that without constant striving for unity on all our parts, the church would splinter like a dropped crystal vase.