"Doubting" Thomas?

John 21:19-31

19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

     24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin, one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

     26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

     30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

It’s not easy to believe that someone rose from the dead, so it presumably would be quite helpful to see it with your own eyes.  The first wave of believers were those who had followed Jesus in ministry and to whom he had appeared following his resurrection.  As we see in Acts, they soon felt compelled to share the Good News that God raised Jesus from the dead, that through him you could receive forgiveness of sins, even that death had been defeated.  And to add weight to his preaching, Peter appeals to the disciples’ status as eyewitnesses of the risen Lord.  He’s saying to the crowd: “I know of what I speak”.   The surest way to believe is to see for yourself, but the next best way is to receive a firsthand report from someone who did.  But does not the testimony get weaker every generation, as we irrevocably move ever more distant?  

Scripture itself is the answer to this question, preserving for us the eyewitness accounts so that we stand in closer proximity to the crucial events.  The New Testament, especially, is the church’s way of saying, here are the voices you can and should trust; they know of what they speak.  Peter made his case in Acts by appealing to the Old Testament - to the Scriptures his audience already considered authoritative - to argue that Scripture always had foretold Jesus’ death and resurrection, that this is not some dubious claim but has always been part of God’s plan.  

But what if you don’t already consider Scripture authoritative?  Christians easily act as if believing that God wrote the Bible comes prior to believing in the God who wrote the Bible.  In the statement of faith on many church websites the first item is not God or Jesus, but the Bible.  This placement follows the logic that, before you can believe you must first trust the source, the authority who speaks, so you must believe the truth of the Bible before you can believe anything about Jesus. 

Do we always have to take someone else’s word for it?  Or might we come to know it directly?  

These are the questions that arise in the story of “doubting” Thomas.  On the day after Easter the disciples were all together in a locked room, afraid but hopeful, when Jesus appeared.  He showed them his hands and his side, commissioned them to share the Gospel, and imparted the Holy Spirit.  The disciples, in this account at least, remain silent.  

Thomas was not there, but the disciples reported that, “we have seen the Lord”, to which Thomas famously replied, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”  Despite what his friends have told him, despite the reports of the empty tomb, Thomas does not believe.  In fact, he seems categorically to rule out belief in the resurrection based on anyone’s testimony; he must see and touch for himself.  

The Christian tradition has been largely unsympathetic with Thomas; none of the other disciples ended up with a pejorative modifier like “doubting”.  And indeed the conclusion of the story has Jesus saying, “Do not doubt but believe…Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  Thomas enjoyed a privilege that future disciples will not enjoy; their belief will result not from seeing but from believing despite having not seen.  

Jesus doesn’t explicitly criticize Thomas but the implication seems to be that Thomas really should’ve believed based on what he’d heard.  There is no doubt that the moral of the story is that belief for future disciples - the belief of those first hearing this Gospel decades later - will necessarily be based accepting the testimony without having seen.  This is clearly a challenge that the John’s Gospel wrestles with, especially as the generation of eyewitnesses begins to pass away.  

But this moral can get pushed too far, to the point that, not only must faith be based on testimony and not eyewitness experience, but where faith is considered more truly faith the further removed it is from actual experience, the less reason there is to believe the more impressive it is when you do. Faith is something we have not because of experience but in spite of it - so faith becomes divorced from reality.   

Thomas stands as a negative of example of someone who needs proof, who makes extraordinary demands, rather than simply believing.  Doubt reflects weakness; belief equals strength.  We will not get what Thomas got, and we are better than him because we believe anyway.  

It’s worth noting, however, that Jesus does indeed comply Thomas’ conditions; he offers himself for inspection.  One interesting question is whether or not Thomas actually did touch Jesus’ hands and side.  He said that is what he would need in order to believe, and Jesus invited him to touch hands and side, but it’s unclear if he makes it that far.  

It’s also worth noting though that the climax of the entire Gospel comes when Thomas declares, “My Lord and my God!”  No one else in the Gospels makes such an explicit, such an exalted, confession of Jesus as God himself.  And it might even be that Thomas sees this, not in spite of his need to see and touch Jesus, but because of it; that having seen - possibly even touched Jesus - he has a more significant, more substantial, encounter with the risen Lord than anyone else.  He’s not willing to take anyone else’s word for it; he demands a flesh and blood encounter, and the Lord grants that desire. 

We might consider that Thomas provides a positive example for us, that is demand to touch Jesus doesn’t expose his weakness but simply the refusal to take his faith secondhand, not satisfied with Christ to be merely an invisible idea, but to demand that it be an incarnate reality.   

It’s not that Thomas needs all the answers, that he needs an explanation of how Jesus rose from the dead, what it all means, how this man could also be God.  He’s not the patron saint of empiricists who only accept what they can quantify and understand.  Thomas is the inspiration for  all who long to experience God for themselves, who insist that if it’s true than it must be embodied in the world.  He doesn’t just want to hear about the living God; he wants to know the living God.  

The first line the church motto/slogan/? is, “belief made believable”.  This formulation is in part a reaction against faith being presented in a way that makes it seem unbelievable - like, you just need to believe anyway.   But in this place and time - whether it ought to be like this or not - most of us are more like Thomas.  We’re not going be content believing just because some authority told us to.  We’re quite skeptical of authorities, generally, and attempts to establish authority are rarely convincing.  But we do want to believe, we long to believe.  Whether we name it or not, we desire an encounter with the the Truth; we want not just content to believe about God but direct experience of God.   And to desire this it nothing to apologize for; it is the most authentic expression of our humanity.  

My desire is that this would be a community where people do indeed encounter the risen Christ - not just new people, but all of us.  In the coming Sundays we’ll see that belief in Scripture comes not merely from hearing, but hearing accompanied by an incarnate reality: Jesus revealed in the breaking of the bread; The Christians sharing all things in common; the Holy Spirit transcending boundaries and unifying the community at Pentecost.   The truth of what is being proclaimed is made manifest in the world.  And if what we proclaim is true - and if we want to believe it for ourselves - we should expect to see it, some way or another, made incarnate.