(Psalm 88; Luke 24:36-49, John 20:24-29)
Doubt is an odd thing. It’s a grey area between belief and unbelief—between two different kinds of certainty. It can be paralyzing, leaving us unable to act, or it can be liberating, freeing us to let go a false certainty to seek a true one. It can be unhealthy, and even obsessive; it can also be healthy for us, reminding us we don’t know quite as much as we think. It can be dishonest, a pretense disguising a determination not to believe something—sometimes, disguising it even from ourselves—but there is also such a thing as honest doubt. Doubt which is truly open to belief and truly seeking understanding can be an important prelude to true faith.
The problem is, true doubt is uncomfortable, like doing ballet on a waterbed. We want a solid place to stand. That’s why some churches treat doubt as a sin, as if believing in Jesus and following him are supposed to be easy—which they aren’t. I think that’s also why, when kids who grow up in the church have their faith challenged hard for the first time, they so often slide into disbelief like Jell-O off a steep metal roof. Doubt is uncomfortable, so our instinctive reaction is not to engage with it but to protect ourselves against it.
I suspect that’s why Thomas has gotten such a raw deal over the centuries. The Western church knows him not as an apostle of stubborn faith and the man who first preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to India, but as “Doubting Thomas.” Google told me once it found over 880,000 results for the phrase, including such definitions as “a habitually doubtful person.” You’d think he was the sort of guy who wouldn’t believe you if you told him the sky was blue. Thomas doesn’t deserve that, and when we read John’s account as if he does, it says more about us than about either Thomas or John. “Doubting Thomas” makes as much sense as “the patience of Job.” These are men who suffered agonizing loss and refused to sit down, shut up, and act churchy about it. They spoke the truth as they saw it, and their earthly reward for that has been to have their lives and characters misrepresented so others can avoid doing the same. If the church can externalize its issues with doubt by dumping them all on Thomas—which makes no sense logically, but tell that to the subconscious—it can excuse itself from facing them honestly.
Of course, that only ducks the problem, it doesn’t fix it; it leaves us trying to manufacture a fix from our own scrap lumber and leftover screws. We tell ourselves we can build a better future—this time we can get it right. We say with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.” We just have to keep our chin up and our eyes looking ahead—as Dag Hammarskjöld said, “Only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road.” But what happens when the horizon disappears?
That question leads us right into Psalm 88. For the ancient Hebrews, the sea was a place of primordial chaos; when they spoke of death as going down into the pit, they often envisioned that as being lost in the depths of the sea, the stormy sky dark above and the pounding waves dark all around, the horizon completely lost. We see that imagery in our psalm this morning, of which the Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner says, “There is no sadder prayer in the Psalter.”
The psalmist describes his existence as a living death which causes those close to him to recoil from him with abhorrence, revulsion, and disgust. The last line of the psalm is just two Hebrew words—literally, “My friends darkness.” The ESV translates this, “My companions have become darkness,” footnoted with the alternate translation, “Darkness has become my only companion.” These are both deeply sad statements, but the Hebrew in its terse abruptness encompasses both, and more besides. What the psalmist is experiencing is so huge and dark and miserable, language breaks down and words fail.
There are a few points to note on this psalm. One, as Kidner says, it names “the possibility of unrelieved suffering as a believer’s earthly lot. The happy ending of most psalms of this kind is seen to be a bonus, not a due; its withholding is not a proof of either God’s displeasure or His defeat.” Two, there is a flicker of hope in the title—and note, titles in Psalms are not like chapter headings added by editors, they’re part of the text. Psalm 88 is ascribed to the sons of Korah and to Heman; one part of the Korahite family became the singers and musicians of the temple choir, which was founded during the reign of David by Heman, who was known for his wisdom. Twelve psalms are credited to the sons of Korah, and another dozen attributed to Heman’s assistant director Asaph. The blessing that flowed from Heman’s life and ministry is immense. Kidner is right: “Burdened and despondent as he was, his existence was far from pointless. If it was a living death, in God’s hands it was to bear much fruit.”
Three, Heman’s life was marked by stubborn faith. He is not promised a happy ending and no longer expects one, but he continues to cry out to God. In fact, he addresses him as “YHVH Elohim of my salvation”—YHVH Elohe yeshuati, in Hebrew. YHVH is the personal name by which God revealed himself to Israel through Moses, which we translate as “Lord” out of respect for Jewish practice; Elohim is the name we translate “God.” YHVH Elohim is the all-powerful creator of all that exists who is also the personal, relational God who makes covenants with his people; and then Heman calls him “Lord God of my salvation.” He doesn’t see salvation anywhere on the horizon—he doesn’t even see the horizon—and yet this is how he names the one to whom he prays. Thus, four, Heman is reaching beyond anything he knows to pray for. As Old Testament scholar James Luther Mays observes, “The psalm reminds us of the limits set for praying that is not based on the knowledge that God raised Messiah Jesus from the grave. This Old Testament prayer sounds like a cry to hear that good news as its answer.”
With this in mind, let’s turn to Thomas. We don’t see much of him in the gospels, only a few brief appearances in John, but I think we see an introverted man of deep emotions, with a definite pessimistic streak—perhaps the sort who used pessimism to protect himself against hope. In John 11, Jesus tells his disciples he’s going back to Jerusalem; when it becomes clear they won’t be able to talk him out of it, Thomas says, “Let’s go with him so we may die with him.” After the crucifixion, the rest of Jesus’ disciples huddled together for comfort, but not Thomas. We’re not told why, but I suspect he was off by himself trying to come to terms with his grief and pain on his own. You may know people like that—when they’re hurting, they shut everyone out and process it by themselves, until they feel ready to deal with other people again. I recently quoted King George V of England saying, “If I have to suffer, let me be like a well-bred animal, and let me go and suffer alone.” That, I think, was Thomas all over.
As readers, we have the advantage of a bird’s-eye view of the events following Jesus’ resurrection. We know the whole story, and we can see where everyone is and what they’re doing. The disciples didn’t have that. They hadn’t read the end of the book—they were living the story and trying to make sense of it. Look back to the beginning of John 20: Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb, finds it open, and goes running to Peter and John to tell them someone’s stolen Jesus’ body. They take off at a dead sprint to the tomb, look inside, and think—what? John tells us “he saw and believed,” but in the next breath he says, “They still didn’t understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” So what, exactly, did John believe?
That evening, the disciples are gathered—with the doors locked, because they’re afraid the Jewish leaders might come after them next. Then, suddenly—there’s Jesus. Never mind locked doors, never mind walls, there he is. They’ve been telling each other he’s alive, but when he actually shows up, they think he’s a ghost. That sounds bad, but we shouldn’t be too hard on them. It was hard enough to believe Jesus had come back to life at all. To expect him to defy the laws of physics by suddenly appearing in locked rooms would have been quite something else again. What else would you call someone who walks through walls, but a ghost?
Note this: Jesus doesn’t condemn them. He gives them his peace, then he invites them to touch him and see his wounds. When that’s not enough, he sits down to eat a piece of fish. Only with that proof of his humanity in front of them do they begin to rejoice. Before that moment, they had been told Jesus was alive, but whatever they might have believed in theory, when he actually shows up, they need proof—and again, Jesus doesn’t condemn them for that.
Then Thomas rejoins the group. He’s started to come to terms with Jesus’ death, he’s gotten to the point where he can bear the thought of being around the other disciples, he’s ready to mourn with his friends and tell a few stories—and instead, he gets a cockeyed tale about Jesus raised from the dead. Put yourself in his place: what would you have thought? Yeah, you’d have thought they’d all cracked under the emotional strain and taken a group vacation from reality. Thomas understandably refuses to believe a word of it just on their say-so. Before he’ll buy in to such a preposterous tale, he wants evidence—and for all the flak he gets, the proofs Thomas demands are actually less than what Jesus had already given the others.
The next Sunday, they’re all together behind locked doors, and once again Jesus just shows up in the room. Once again, he gives them his peace, and then he turns to Thomas and says, “Here I am, and here are my wounds; touch me, and believe.” It’s here the tradition really hoses the apostle. If you look at the most famous piece of art inspired by this story, Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St. Thomas, you see Thomas putting his finger in the wound in Jesus’ side—and that didn’t happen. Once Jesus is actually standing in front of him, Thomas doesn’t need anything else. That was the other disciples. Thomas doesn’t need to watch Jesus eat lunch. He looks at Jesus and exclaims, “My Lord and my God!”
This is the central confession of this gospel, the point to which the whole book builds. Faith may come hard for Thomas, but when he believes, he holds nothing back. Maybe that was part of the reason for his skepticism. It’s easy to make commitments if you only make them half-heartedly, but that doesn’t seem to have been an option for him. His declaration of faith goes so far as to be actively stunning coming from a Jew. We’ve noted this recently, talking about the divine passive in Scripture: to avoid accidentally taking God’s name in vain, no observant Jew would ever, or will ever, say it. Instead, as I noted a moment ago, they substitue the word “Lord.” So take that, and look back at the opening address of Psalm 88, and put the pieces together: Thomas is calling Jesus, Yeshua, “YHWH Elohim.” He is, with no weasel-wording, declaring Jesus to be the all-present, all-powerful creator of everything that exists who is also the one true God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the God of his salvation. I literally realized this two days ago: Thomas closes the circle of Psalm 88. He begins in the hopelessness with which the psalm concludes, and ends with its opening statement of faith.
Notice how Jesus responds to this great confession. He doesn’t praise Thomas for it, as he praised Peter earlier for calling him “the Messiah, the Son of the living God”; nor does he chastise Thomas for his doubt. Instead, he prods him a little. “Because you have seen me, you have believed,” Jesus says. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” He’s not comparing Thomas to the other disciples here—they had all had to see Jesus before they believed, and in fact had had to see rather more of him than Thomas had. Jesus is pointing Thomas beyond himself and his own situation to days yet to come.
It would not be long before Thomas would be proclaiming the news he had at first refused to believe—Jesus who was crucified has risen from the dead!—to people who wouldn’t see Jesus come popping in to prove it. The Lord is pointing Thomas to us who would come later, who would have no choice but to believe without having the evidence right in front of us, and he’s speaking to us. From the first readers of this gospel down to the present day, we’ve all believed in Jesus without seeing or touching him. We’ve known doubt just as the disciples did, but unlike them, we’ve had to go forward by faith alone. We haven’t been able to rest on personal physical proof the way they could.
When we dismiss Thomas as a doubter, we read John 20 as if we stand above him, as if we’re better than his doubt. When we ignore Psalm 88 because it doesn’t meet our standards for acceptable prayer, we stand above Heman and judge his pain and grief. We can’t do that. We need to enter them at ground level, not least for our own sake. I don’t know if the name “Stuart Smalley” means anything to anyone here—he was a character created by Al Franken during his early-90s stint as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Smalley was a would-be self-help guru whose signature line was “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” We need deliverance from Stuart Smalley religion. As one of our elders noted during our Session meeting this past week, life will get hard; when it does, self-help faith will break down.
Heman and Thomas and Job and others are not opportunities to feel spiritually superior. They are opportunities to reflect on the uncomfortable reality that we also struggle sometimes to believe, to hope, to keep getting up in the morning; and they are examples for us in those times. When we’re adrift on a stormy sea, the horizon lost behind sheeting rain and towering waves, they remind us we are not the first. They show us we need not fear we’re being judged, we’ve failed, or God has failed; we have assurance God is still with us and still in control. Heman reminds us we don’t need to pretend, that God wants us to be honest with him.
The life of faith is hard. The writer Flannery O’Connor wrote this to a friend:
I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do.
What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.
And so it is. We ask ourselves and others to believe in Jesus, but we haven’t seen him, and we haven’t seen anyone embalmed and buried come alive again. I suspect many of us have wished more than once that we could just see Jesus, and touch him, and have him give us a hug and tell us we’re doing okay. Hear me: in his words to Thomas, we have Jesus’ assurance that he knows how hard it is. That’s why he pronounced a blessing on us and on our faith. That’s why he sent us the Holy Spirit to carry us through.
And that’s why he sends us out into the world, in our woundedness and our struggles, to be his ministers to others. He calls and equips us, in Henri Nouwen’s luminous phrase, to be wounded healers. We look to Jesus and recognize, as Isaiah 53 tells us, that by his wounds we are healed; as we reach out to others in Jesus’ name, it is by his wounds they too will be healed—how? Through our wounds. If we know what it is to pray Psalm 88, affirming the ultimate answer of the Resurrection but feeling hopeless in this life, we can come alongside others who feel hopeless, powerless, despised, and rejected and pray with them.
It’s easy to feel inadequate to that task, especially when we ourselves are struggling. It’s easy to look at ourselves and think, “I don’t have enough faith to do this,” whatever “this” may be. Thing is, “enough” isn’t a category. We are no less in Christ when we doubt than when our faith is strong; and we are no weaker when we doubt, because it was never about our strength anyway. It was never about the strength of our faith anyway. Jesus said, “If you have faith like a mustard seed”—here’s a mustard seed. You probably can’t actually see it—you have to take my word for it. If you have faith like a mustard seed, what do you have? Almost no faith. If you have faith like a mustard seed, you have doubt like a mountain. And Jesus said if you have faith like a mustard seed, you can command that mountain to throw itself into the ocean, and it’ll do it. Why? Because how much faith we have isn’t the point. Faith isn’t the power here, God is the power. Infinitesimal faith is more than enough if it’s faith in an infinite God. Even our faith is his gift; however much faith you have is enough because it’s how much he’s given you.
“Sea Wave in Sunbeam” © 2024 Ray Bilcliff. Public domain. Image has been cropped to fit.