Tag Archives: Doubting Thomas
Doubting Thomas: Faith in an Uncertain Age
All the disciples devoted their lives to this story. At first, the people who believed the resurrection were fewer than are in this church today. But they suffered exile, violence, hunger, and worse to tell that story to anyone who would listen. Because why not? If God’s power is so great and glorious, why not risk everything to share it? If God’s power is so close at hand, why not ask anyone at all to imagine it? What are we afraid of? To believe this story is to be changed by it.
Doubting Thomas: Take and Eat
So how does Jesus answer Thomas’s doubt? He appears also to Thomas, and he invites the very violation that Thomas says he demands. And I like to imagine that he does it just as Professor Most suggests: gently, sadly, lovingly; seeking not simply to be Thomas’s Lord and God, but his protector and friend. Jesus had his hands and side pierced by his enemies, and now he invites a disciple to do the same thing. He has suffered to redeem the whole human race, and yet he is willing to suffer again in order to bring his friend to faith.
Doubting Thomas: Believing and Seeing
Now here’s the thing: Thomas doesn’t, in this story, turn to his friends and say, “It seems you were right,” or “ I’ll be darned, he really is alive.” Or even “this must be some kind of hallucination, or a ghost.” Everyone believed in ghosts back then. Instead, he answers “My Lord and my God.” All of his pent-up love, all of his frustrated faith, all of his hope and yearning for Jesus comes out in that one moment. Jesus asks, rhetorically, “have you believed because you have seen?” But in a sense, he hasn’t. Thomas has seen because he believed already, without really knowing it. He wanted to see Jesus. He hoped to see Jesus–if only in the meal he shared with the disciples. And so he saw Jesus.
Doubting Thomas: Believing Without Seeing
In America the past becomes history very quickly, at least for some of us. By the time I was growing up, Martin Luther King, Jr. was an official symbol of the nation, which he still is today. I learned about him in school in a town that had deliberately excluded African-American homeowners into my lifetime. What was left out of the picture I was given was the profound hostility many people, north and south and everywhere else, felt toward him at the time of his death. What I had to learn later, on my own, is that he spent the last years of his life warning about the danger posed to American cities, and to the American soul, by generations of oppression and deprivation; that he spent those years trying hard to prevent chaos and violence; that he was not heeded by politicians or public opinion; and that the chaos and violence came, most explosively after his own murder. No one who was living in Chicago in 1968 can forget that.
Doubting Thomas: The Gift and the Wrapping
As the big day of confirmation got closer, my anxiety increased. Everything I was preparing to say I believed became harder and harder to swallow.
But you would not know any of that from the people who had been willing to accompany me on this journey. I had been away from church for a long time, but I was welcomed back with open arms. I was skeptical, but people were eager for me to believe. Where I was sarcastic, my friends and pastors were patient, tender, and completely without religious snobbery. They willingly invited me to see and touch and ask and test everything they believed. People I came to admire, trust, and love passed on the gift of faith to me wrapped in their own good work and faithful witness. And someone they admired, trusted, and loved passed it on to them. And someone else passed it on to them. And someone else to them, and on and on, a great chain of gift-giving that goes all the way back to that locked room. This weekend we even add a new link to that chain, as the children of the parish are invited to take this great gift of faith in their hands, to enjoy it, and to some day take up their own role in passing it on.
Brutally Ordinary Things 