Letters to Jesus

John 20:19-31

Dear Jesus,

I often have imagined what it would have been like to be present for that first Easter, the day of your rising. The accounts proclaimed from the gospels always thrill. My imagination allows me to be on that seashore in the morning’s first light as you prepare the breakfast of fish and bread and invite the disciples who have labored on their own through the night to hawl in the catch you directed and come and eat.

My name is Didymus, the Twin. I identify with my namesake who missed your first appearance to the apostels and Peter back in the upper room where you had eaten the final supper with them. Some things are too good to be true. Thomas is popularly called the doubter. But did he doubt so much as having hoped against hope find himself in that same vulnerable position of eager expectation evocked by your words of promise. How could he have known that being your disciple meant not only walking behind you and learning from that but also it meant having to let go of assumptions generations old about what the Messiah would do, the kingdom he would bring about? He believed in a God who visited people in power and majesty. How could he find it easy to accept a God who loves by pouring out self in service?

It is not easy following you. No matter how long the journey has been going on, disciples constantly find themselves at Square One, so to speak. Following you is a constant process of having to let go of assumptions and personal ambitions. How long have I been about this? From my early childhood your stories have fascinated me. How often did I pray that you would send me a sign that I could trust as assurance that what I found in those stories was so? So often it seemed too good to be true. Of course I focused on the easier parables, the ones about God’s abiding love, God’s desire that we be with God forever. I glossed over the more demanding ones in which you hinted at the cost of discipleship.

And here I stand now in the shadow of this latest Easter comforted by the celebration but realizing also that as disciples, people on the way, we are constantly in process. We continually must enter into the dying even as we rise with you. And some seasons the dying dominates. The rising remains something hoped for.

The other Didymus after whom I am named was there a week later when you returned. You invited him to handle your wounds and become a believer. But handling, like seeing does not make a believer. Faith goes deeper and requires grace. The Spirit empowers belief. And he said, “My Lord and my God!”

I wish I could have been there. But I was not. And yet I think I hear you challenging me to handle the wounds and become a believer. I can only do that when I find you in the poor, the disenfranchised, those who are sick and dying. That is where I must find you. And in my own woundedness, too.

I claim you as my Lord and my God. Yet you remain one whose majesty is heralded in your desire to serve because that is how God loves. God’s love comes to us through you. I have to be sure that is the kind of God I want. I have to be sure that I can die the death service of you demands. Can I pour out myself the way you do? Can I be satisfied to aspire only to being a foot-washer?

Even in Easter you say to me, “If you would follow me, take up your cross every day and follow me.” Why am I still surprised when I feel the cross’ weight? Does that mean that I am still atSquare One? Please be patient with me as I try again to learn from you and follow.

Sincerely,

Didymus