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April 15, 2007
Thomas’ Quite Reasonable Doubt
Daniel 12: 1-3/John 20: 19-25
April 15th, 2005
Last Sunday was Easter, as I’m sure you remember. This morning I invite you to think with me about the evening of that first Easter as it was in the life of Thomas, one of Jesus’ disciples. We think of him as Doubting Thomas.
The rest of the disciples were excited as can be. They’d seen Jesus alive. They blurted out to Thomas, “We’ve seen Jesus.” They expected he would be thrilled. Not so. He tells them not just “I won’t believe until I see for myself, but “Unless I see the nail-prints and put my fingers in them and put my hand in His side I will not believe.” Thomas had to see and touch!
So we call this fellow Doubting Thomas. But do you think you or I would have responded differently? Our first encounter with Thomas comes midway through John’s Gospel. Jesus had just told His disciples He was going to prepare a place for them and they knew the way. Thomas replied, “We don’t know where you are going: how can we know the way?” Thomas was an honest and faithful man.
Thomas knew that less than three days before his world had been shattered for reasons that had the rest of the disciples weeping with him. Perhaps he watched Jesus’ body being carried from Golgotha to the cave-tomb of Joseph of Aramathea.
Thomas is intriguing to a lot of us because we too doubt. How can anyone help some uncertainties? In matters of faith we’re talking about not only unseen things but also about matters of which self-confident authorities make conflicting pronouncements. How do we know which self-confident authority to believe?
Many modern folk think they have found a friend in Thomas as a skeptic about the bodily resurrection of Jesus—that is the very hinge of the Christian faith. After all, as St. Paul said, “If Christ has not been raised all this preaching is foolishness. We are of all people the most pitiful, because Jesus’ resurrection is the heart of our confidence in God’s intentions toward us.
In The Gospel of Thomas, supposedly written by this same disciple of Jesus, we read that Jesus said, “I am amazed at how the great wealth [the spirit] has made its home in this poverty [the body].” If Jesus believed that the body was worthless this adds fuel to the idea that the bodily resurrection of Jesus was an idea made up by Jesus’ disciples—that placed far too much stock in the body.
The low esteem of the body suggested here was not shared by many Jews in Jesus’ day. In fact the Old Testament, the Bible of the Jews is packed with references to the resurrection of the body. The testimony from the Book of Daniel that Pat read for us this morning is a summary statement of a confidence in God’s promise of the resurrection of the body that existed since the days of Abraham.
As I reminded you last Sunday, there was a prayer composed five hundred years before the time of Jesus that devout Jews would say three times a day. Jesus would have said this along with Thomas and the other disciples. Observant Jews still pray to God: “You are mighty, You humble the proud . . . You sustain life giving life to the dead; in the blink of an eye you bring salvation. Blessed are You, Adonai, who gives life to the dead.”
Thomas would have prayed this prayer. He would have known what the Bible taught about Abraham being able to see in the blessing that would proceed from his family—because he would rise from the grave. Ezekiel foretold that “them bones, them bones gonna walk around” so that devout Jews who could afford to, stored the bones of deceased loved ones in ossuaries to help God at the resurrection. The Gospel lesson this morning simply informs us that Thomas’ doubt was like the uncertainty of the rest of the disciples’ until they saw Jesus and then understood He was the first to experience this resurrection.
Was Thomas a habitual doubter? I don’t think so. He’d left all to follow Jesus for three years. Until they’d seen Him the other disciples were: doubting John, doubting Andrew, doubting Peter, doubting Thaddeus, etc. The New Testament gives us no clues that Thomas was uniquely defective in faith.
Thomas has become something of a hero in our day when doubt and skepticism are treated as virtues, signs of intellectual honesty. It’s not hard to see why this might be. The word “doubt” as we use it is very broad and suggestive. In fact it suggests far more than Thomas’ reasonable uncertainty.
Doubt today includes reasonable confusion when looking at the mass of religious options claiming our allegiance. There are so many Christian groups claiming to have it right. Do I believe the one with the most glamour, or that speaks the loudest and most often? That has the most people? Do I choose the group with the most striking personality at the helm? Do I stay with the one I’m used to or do I try something new? Should I give them all a look-see? But how do I choose between them once I’ve looked them all over?
Then, there are so many non-Christian religions that have found a home in our land. They have become almost as American as apple pie. Our Constitution welcomes them as much as it does Christianity. Maybe I should choose one of them. Others have. Why not become a Muslim—they’re not all like Al Qaida or the Teliban. Or maybe I’ll become a disciple of Hare Krishna? Why not Scientology or Jehovah’s Witnesses?
With all the scandals that have shaken the Church, both in the Protestant and Catholic versions of Western Christendom it’s easy to wonder if any of them stands for what is good, true, and beautiful.
Add to this the individualism bred in our free society that suggests to people they should forever hedge their bets in matters religious. In fact there are institutional forms of this hedging of bets.
John Updike described an institutionalized form of this outlook that is attractive to some folk today. “It seemed so milky, so smugly vague and evasive; an unimpeachably featureless dilution of the Christian religion as I had met it in its Lutheran form.” I won’t tell you which religious organization he is describing. But the same outlook has infected our denomination.
Brad Longfield, son-in-law of the late Sue Whitford, one of the former General Presbyters in our presbytery, wrote a very good book, The Presbyterian Controversy, that I used in the Church history segment of the Commissioned Lay Pastor course I taught two years ago. He concludes the book by asserting that we’ve got to offer a clearer message as Presbyterians.
I was surprised at the response to this book within our congenial class. Before discussing this book we enjoyed such harmony in the class. But at our last session there were those who were troubled that had chosen Longfield’s book as a way of proposing that the message we proclaim should be clearer. The Gospel of inclusiveness seems to demand something less than a clear message that might be offensive to some who are searching to find their way.
Within our denomination there is such celebration of diversity that many people hungry for the Gospel are confused at the message they’ve hearing from some of our pulpits. When the outward forms of hymn-singing, creed-saying, and ceremonial Bible reading celebrate make-believe, what’s the point? If we replace a faith rooted deeply in the Bible as the source--in the virgin-born, sinless-living, death-defeating Jesus as its cornerstone, what is there beside cultural interest in Christianity? I know I’m mostly preaching to the choir in saying this here. I pray this pulpit will never sound with a smugly vague and evasive; an unimpeachably featureless dilution of the Christian religion.
Well, all of this finds no friend in Thomas, Jesus’ disciple who had to see and touch Jesus before he would believe Jesus was alive and well. As things turned out, seeing was enough for him. When he saw Jesus he said, “My Lord and my God!”
Early Church tradition tells us that Thomas became a missionary to far away places. In the land where my brothers and I spent much of our early life the Mar Thoma Church, the St. Thomas Church in south India claims to be founded by this famed doubter, Doubting Thomas—who obeyed the Great Commission—go and tell. There were many who heard Thomas preach that earned Jesus’ commendation: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
Let me conclude by coming back to this matter of doubt that may be an issue for you. Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, observed a few years ago that belief “looks like a demand to bind oneself to yesterday . . . Who wants to do that in an age when the idea of ‘tradition’ has been replaced by the idea of ‘progress’?”
He seems on target in proposing that the way Christianity looks to a lot of modern people is a “convulsive effort to proclaim as contemporary something that is, after all, really a relic of days gone by.”
How is a person to think, living in an environment that surrounds us not so much with honest uncertainty, but skepticism and cynicism and hedging bets in matters of faith? Doubt is a modest kind of not-knowing. But skepticism and cynicism may be relentless tendencies of thought supported with pride. I sense that some skepticism is defensive, maybe a bit lazy, and perhaps even dishonest. It’s not hard to stand back and ask questions hard to answer. Some doubt derives from painful memories or from disappointment with oneself.
Belief draws us out of ourselves. Jesus did not invite us to engage in whimsically fond thoughts about Him, but to trust in Him. Trust is demanding. We are not trusting Jesus if we simply hold some ideas about Him that we may have been taught by our parents, or that serve as passwords securing the friendship of people we like. Trusting Jesus is a robust, demanding way of life.
Those who give themselves to a life where Jesus is at the center, His commands governing their responses to life’s situations, His teachings informing their consciences, His name held with reverence in their thoughts, find a way of life that satisfies the deepest needs of the heart. Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us in his Introduction to Christianity that following Jesus may not banish every doubt and fear all the time because at times our inner weakness may trigger fearful self-doubt—doubting God. Some of the greatest saints have feared at times that they didn’t believe at all.
But what kept them on track was sheer, dogged obedience in life. If in moments or seasons of doubt we start to do things we ought not, or if we quit habits of private devotion and public worship, we will drift away from the faith itself. When we realize this and pray with that fearful father in the Gospel story, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief,” and then begin again to pray, to choose good habits, to read the Bible—with the intention of doing what it teaches, and to resume the discipline of public worship, perhaps we’ll discover that we’re not so overwhelmed with the rootlessness we had before.
This morning we will baptize a little boy and a grown lady. In claiming the sign and promise of baptism they accept God’s claim on them that they can remember when they are troubled by doubts and fears. “Remember your baptism,” Luther told the fearful Christian. Whatever you think about Jesus from time to time in moments of weakness, there is no doubt what God thinks of you all the time—that He loves you and in Jesus Christ He claims you as His child.
O Lord, grant us to trust this is so. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at April 15, 2007 10:00 AM