Beyond Doubt

A locked room full of fear.  A trumped-up charge by a controlling state.  A missing corpse.  Wow.  The makings of a mystery.  But I think you’d agree that the lead-up is to the entrance of the missing gang member. I’m talking, of course, about today’s Gospel, the one about “Doubting Thomas”: http://www.usccb.org/nab/050111.shtml#gospel He’s the guy who personifies doubt, is absorbed in his role.

Over the past three evenings I’ve watched the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.  “The Girl” is Lisbeth Salander, a young woman besieged by troubling memories and a lifetime of sexual abuse and manipulation.  Her role is played by Swedish Actress Noomi Rapace.  No.  The role is not played.  The role totally absorbs the actress.  I was shocked to see the actual actress, in an interview with Charlie Rose, her face warm, her speech animated, her personality self-disclosing and trusting.  Gone were the piercings, the black makeup, the face a locked room full of fear. 

How she had allowed herself to enter Lisbeth’s wounds!

Thomas finds a way to escape the fear that has brought his companions to this room after their leader Jesus is executed.  He lets doubt absorb him and goes about his business.  He forgets the whole thing and goes on with his old life, the life he had before Jesus.

We can do the same. Jesus came back a second time.  Thomas had heard from his gang that Jesus showed up.  He rejoined the gang in that room, and sure enough Jesus comes back and … you know the story.

What stuck with me as a kid was the (ew, gross!) thing about Thomas being told to put his finger and hand into the wounds.  And it strikes me now, but in a different way.  I think that if we’re going to escape the escape, the withdrawal from hope into lives of despairing forgetfulness, we going to need to be willing to get into something that can absorb us like those wounds did Thomas’s finger and hand: life in the real world.

The locked room and business as usual: these are the popular options available to post-Easter Christians.  But there is, too, the invitation to enter the woundedness of the world, as Noomi Rapace entered the woundedness of Lisbeth Salander.  She did not enter the role alone.  The credits following each film ran for several minutes, listing the hundreds of people who made her successful role possible.  And we do not enter the real world alone either. 

Jesus knows in his own humanity that these guys are going to need a lot of help.  He breathes his Spirit into them (literally inspires them) and begins to give them “sacraments” (literally, “holy-making” tools) like reconciliation and ordination. We need help too, and so these next weeks we’ll find more of the same: more surprise appearances, more sacraments.  Will they convince us to be absorbed by the role?

The wounded world depends on our response.