Second Sunday of Easter
April 15, 2007
Acts 12a,17-22,25-29
Psalm 118:19-24
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31
Welcome, good people of St. George’s. You endured the weather to come to worship this morning on the second Sunday of Easter. “Low Sunday” they call it. The Church calls this Sunday low Sunday because, like the Sunday after Christmas this is usually a day of low church attendance. It is a Sunday when normally good, regular, church-going people have decided to enjoy a Sabbath day of rest, even from worship. Our weather conditions certainly contributed to the low part. But there is another reason I have come to refer to this second Sunday of Easter as Low Sunday. This is the day we encounter the story of doubting Thomas in John’s Gospel. Only one week after the central feast of our faith in which we celebrated the certainty of Jesus’ resurrection, we are confronted with the face of doubt and fear and other issues which are problematic to Easter joy. We have no choice but to ask ourselves, Why? Why is it that so soon after Jesus’ resurrection that we have to deal with all of its problems? Couldn’t we enjoy the certainty of Easter joy for just a while longer?
Modern psychology might describe this phenomenon as the natural low which often comes after we experience a natural high. A letdown, so to speak, after being so lifted up. Peaks and valleys, if you will. Psychologists will tell us this is not necessarily a bad thing. For one thing, neither the mind nor the body can maintain itself at high levels of exhilaration for long periods of time. But that does not explain why we often experience a tailspin which takes us to unusual lows. One wonders why we couldn’t just level off and coast for a while. But the depths of our low experiences often define the heights of our highs. For instance, the heights we achieve in joy are likely resemble the depths we can go to in our sadness. The intensity of our hope likely equals the intensity of our anxiety or despair. What is good for us or helpful to us can only be known by what is bad for us or harmful to us. So it is with faith and doubt.
We have to wonder if John’s story of doubting Thomas is introduced so soon after eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ resurrection for the purpose of addressing this very phenomenon of human experience. We have to ask ourselves if it is possible even to have faith without doubt; or doubt without faith, for that matter. We need to consider why both faith and doubt are normal, if not necessary to spiritual growth and health of a Christian.
A few years ago, my eight year old granddaughter was attending classes in religious instruction for her First Holy Communion in a Roman Catholic Church. I was pleased about it, because I know how important it is for children to receive religious instruction so that they have a knowledge of scripture and a belief system which places their life in a broader context for living in this secular world. But I have to admit, I am concerned about knowledge which comes through dogma and belief systems which are so rigid and must be subscribed to so completely that they keep a child locked up in them well into their adult life, even to the grave. Well, I didn’t have to worry about Emily. My daughter told me that after about five sessions of instruction Emily came home one day and declared: “I just can’t believe some of this stuff.” To her credit, my daughter encouraged Emily to talk about it. She didn’t say much, but Emily did go back to her classes believing it was all right for her to doubt some of the stuff she was learning. The day Emily made her First Holy Communion I beamed with joy that at such an early age she had come to that sacrament despite her doubts about some of the things the church wanted her to believe, perhaps even because of them.
So what is the issue we face on this Sunday of doubt. I say that the issue is not so much about doubt as it is about belief. And it is not about belief as we define the word and us it in our modern world. It is about belief as it comes to us from Greek transcription into biblical texts. “To believe” in biblical times meant something different from the way we use the word in modern times. For the writers of the Gospel texts belief meant putting one’s trust in something that was reliable. It meant having confidence in it. The period of the enlightenment which began in the eighteenth century changed all that. If you remember this was the age of reason; the age of science and mathematics. It is the age famous for the statement made by Rene Des Cartes: “I think; therefore, I am.” Man became the measure of all things, and the rational mind became the instrument to measure them. Everything that was worth learning and knowing and believing had to be proven by factual evidence, evidence which could be observed, and measured and recorded. Believing became understood as a rational act of truth-seeking which required demonstrable proof.
Well, you can imagine what happened to God, and to faith, no less to belief as it was commonly understood in scripture. Simply put, it became of utmost importance for enlightened people to believe THAT God exists, rather than to believe IN the truth of God’s existence. Two words, “that” and “in” changed the meaning and application of the word, “believe.” Believing THAT something is true is quite different from believing IN the truth of something. And this difference is what continues to ignite the fire in debates between science and religion. For example, in the current debate between religious believers in creation and scientific believers in evolution (or natural selection), religious believers believe IN a God who created all things, while the enlightened thinkers believe THAT a theory of evolution holds enough evidence to prove the truth of its premise. Typical of most Episcopalians and many others who are able to live comfortably in both religious and secular belief systems, we are able to believe IN a God of creation and in the increasing likelihood THAT evolution is the plan he set in place. For people who can believe in both ways the theory of evolution is capable of supporting a theology of creation which posits that all of life began in creation and is evolving toward its natural end which theologians call completion or fulfillment in God.
So what do these two understandings and applications of belief have to do with our story of doubting Thomas? More important what is this story saying to us as a people who live our life and confess our faith by two different ways of believing. And why on this Sunday are we confronted with doubt, when just last Sunday we confessed with great confidence and celebration the central core of Christianity, our belief in resurrection? It seems to me that doubt was an issue right away for people in the early church who found it difficult to believe in the resurrected Jesus. But the crisis of belief was a modern one. People like Thomas doubted what they were not able to see or prove for themselves. They wanted proof, and we know that as the church grew and expanded church leaders often found it necessary to give people the proof they needed. Reliquaries hosted bones and religious objects which could be seen and touched, and even bought for a price. But this was not the point. This was not the purpose of belief, or for believing in Jesus’ resurrection. And Jesus made that clear to us in his appearance to Thomas.
Jesus’ issue with Thomas’ doubt is not about proof; it is about his inability to believe with the confidence and trust one should place in reliable sources. Our gospel account tells us that Thomas was not present when Jesus appeared to his disciples the first time. And that is precisely Thomas’ problem. They had the proof and he did not. So he was not about to believe them unless he could see have the proof, too. The proof THAT Jesus had come back from the dead; THAT he was alive and walking among them in the world. Thomas had suspended his belief IN Jesus, and he could not believe IN what his fellow disciples said about him. He doubted that Jesus was able to fulfill the promise he had given to his disciples; that he would die, but he would be raised from the dead. And Thomas doubted the very people he could trust to tell him that, indeed, it had happened.
That is the issue Jesus has with Thomas. It is the same issue he has with people like us. People who doubt until we have demonstrable proof. Jesus tells Thomas, how blessed are those who believe and yet have not seen. Jesus wants Thomas to know that demonstrable proof of his presence on this earth and proof of his resurrection is a luxury future generations will not have. They will have to depend on generations of believers who have been able and willing to trust this story and have confidence in its truths for their lives. This story will depend on people who believe without having seen the proof. That kind of belief is central to faith, faith which Paul tells us is evidence of things not seen. One of my favorite hymns illustrates what Jesus is trying to tell Thomas. It begins, “we walk by faith and not by sight
And this is not so easy to do in a world which prides itself on its eagerness to doubt everything which it cannot prove. We live in a world of doubt. Far more so than the world Thomas lived in. But Jesus never told us not to doubt. In fact, Thomas doubted and he got his answer. But it was a proof. We doubt and we get answers, too. But they do not come in the form of proof, at least not as we know it in the modern world. They ask us to do something more; our answers ask us to trust, to have confidence in what it is we doubt and to rely on that trust and confidence to move into faith.
Jesus is speaking to us, in a world like ours when he chastises Thomas for wanting proof. We can’t have it. And we are not going to get it. We can doubt all that we want. Doubt is not our enemy. Unbelief is. Unbelief will always want proof. But doubt will cause us to ask the hard questions which can break open the possibilities of faith; the possibility that we can believe in truths beyond our capacity for human proving and human knowing. But that will always require a leap into faith. A leap out of facts and proofs and truth statements into the place where God dwells, the place where God does his work in us; a place of trust and confidence. In the end, no matter what our doubts are, we need to believe as Jesus would have us believe. We don’t have him for proof anymore. We need to rely on the people who pass down their knowledge and faith to us in the stories of scripture. And we have to trust. Not THAT the stories are true; we have to trust IN our stories. And we need to live in the confidence of their truth. Nobody can prove that the bread and wine on this altar is the body and blood of Jesus. But we believe he is present to us in them. We can trust him. We can rely on his promise to us and have confidence in living in that promise.
My granddaughter doubted so much of what she was being told to believe in the classes which prepared her for Holy Communion. But in the end, she went on to receive her first Holy Communion. And she has received many times since. Knowing Emily, her doubts are even more numerous and profound as she grows into her teenage years, but it is her belief which keeps sending her back to that altar. Not the kind of belief that needs proof. Rather, the kind of belief that needs our trust and confidence in a story we can rely on to lead us into all truth.