Doubt’s 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 because we don’t know what to do. It can be liberating, freeing us to let go a false certainty to seek a true one. It can be unhealthy, especially if it becomes obsessive; it can also be healthy for us, reminding us we might not know quite as much as we think we do. It can be dishonest, a pretense to disguise a determination not to believe something—sometimes, to disguise that even from ourselves—but there is also such a thing as honest doubt, and 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 jogging in place 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 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. When we read John’s account as if he does, it says more about us than about either Thomas or John.
We don’t see much of Thomas 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. King George V of England used to say, “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. As Pastor Andrew noted last week, we see this in John 20. Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb, finds it open, and comes running to Peter and John to tell them someone’s stolen Jesus’ body. They go running, look in the empty tomb, 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 all 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. After all, it was one thing to believe Jesus had come back to life; that was hard enough. To have expected 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, and 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 this, 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 maybe start telling a few stories—and instead, he gets a cockeyed story 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 other disciples.
The next Sunday, they’re all together again 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 at this point that 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, after all, 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. To avoid accidentally taking God’s name in vain, no observant Jew would ever, or will ever, say it. Instead, they substitute the word “Lord.” For Thomas to call Jesus “My Lord and my God” can only mean one thing: he’s declaring Jesus to be the one true God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Notice how Jesus responds to this great confession of faith. 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. He’s 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 Thomas did, but unlike him, we’ve had to go forward by faith alone; we haven’t been able to rest on personal physical proof the way he could.
When we dismiss Thomas as a doubter, we read this passage as if we stand above him, as if we’re better than his doubt. When we do that, we cut ourselves off from the comfort Jesus offers here. We need to come into the story at Thomas’s level and stand beside him as people who also have times when we struggle to believe, and maybe even are afraid to. It can be hard to believe in Jesus. 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 his 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.
John wrote this gospel to carry that blessing. He wrote to give us reason to overcome our doubt and fear and believe in Jesus Christ—again, and again, and again. That isn’t a once-for-all struggle we leave behind once we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. The Enemy never stops trying to bring us down, so we need John’s witness, we need to hear the promises Jesus made to all who follow him. We need the reassurance that when we doubt, Jesus doesn’t condemn us; rather, he comes gently to us as he did to Thomas and restores our faith, so we can say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”
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.
What matters is that our God is in the heavens and he does whatever he pleases, as Psalm 115 says—whatever he pleases, far beyond the limits of our feeble possibilities—and he has given us a mighty word to declare to the nations, a word to bring hope to the hopeless and deliverance to the captives, a word to make the blind see and the lame walk, a word even to raise the dead. It’s not dependent on our faith or weakened by our doubt—it lifts our faith and carries us in our doubt—because it’s his word, full of his power. We have been given the word that there is no failure that is final, no grief that cannot be healed, no enemy that cannot be overcome, no shame that cannot be restored, no sinner who cannot be forgiven, because God has overcome every enemy and broken down every obstacle. We have been given the good news that in this world of sorrow and failure and pain and death, sorrow does not have the last word, and failure does not have the last word, and pain does not have the last word, and even death does not have the last word, because God has spoken the last word, and that word is: resurrection.
When our faith is strong, when doubt rocks us, this remains true beyond our power to make or mar: there is a resurrection. If your hopes have failed and your plans gone awry, there is a resurrection. If you’re grieving the death of someone you love, there is a resurrection. If you’re suffering, if you’re in pain, there is a resurrection. If you’re worn down and beaten down by guilt for something you’ve done, there is a resurrection. If you’re alone and lonely, there is a resurrection. If those you love have hurt you and let you down, there is a resurrection. Whatever you have done, whatever this world has done to you, whatever is wrong in your life, and by all that’s holy whatever is wrong in this world, take heart, for there is a resurrection.
Photo © 2016 Koonankurish. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
