John 20:19-31
Second Sunday of Easter
3rd
April 2016
Thomas has received a lot of criticism over the centuries
for his doubt. And ever since then, it
seems, doubt lost its place in the world of faith. No one wants to be called a Doubting Thomas.
I can remember as a boy struggling with doubt. I was taught, either directly or indirectly, that
God wanted my belief, complete belief, one hundred percent. I was taught that doubt, being the opposite
of belief, was a bad thing, to be avoided, and eventually conquered. I was taught about “justification through
faith” (Romans 5:1). God wants my faith
in order for faith to be effective. Doubt was evidence that I didn’t believe
enough, have faith enough to be saved.
The text from John seems to support this view. Thomas was nowhere to be found when Jesus
first appeared to the other disciples on Easter. When Thomas returned and
learned that he just missed Jesus, the risen Lord, you can see why he would be
extremely skeptical. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put
my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe”
(John 19:25). In other words, I won’t be
made the fool. I want to see the evidence. I want to see it myself. I want to touch his wounds myself.
And then, a week later, Thomas was with the disciples at
home, behind shut doors. Jesus stood
among them again and said, “Peace be with you.”
Word of Thomas’ incredulity must have gotten back to Jesus because he
says directly to Thomas—who was probably beating himself up all week for not
being home when Jesus showed up the first time (I would have)—“Put your finger
here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt,
but believe” (John 19:27). And then
Thomas answered, “My Lord and My God.”
Thomas came to believe through evidence and then Jesus says, “Blessed
are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (John 19:29). With Jesus’ words here you can see why we’ve
come to disparage doubt and desire belief.
We don’t have Jesus’ wounds to physically touch. All we have is
belief—but who wants to be like Thomas?
But is all of this criticism really warranted? Is there really no place for doubt within the
life of faith? Are they polar opposites?
My own dualistic, either-or thinking on this subject began to collapse
when I was in college. It was in a
theology class (offered by a very secular, public university in New Jersey),
when I heard the professor, Hiroshi Obayashi—a teacher I highly respected, a
Christian—say, “We should always maintain a healthy agnosticism.” We need to
leave space for humility of knowledge, somewhere between faith and doubt, to
say we don’t know and will never know everything. Slowly I learned that doubt was important,
incredibly important—not the kind of doubt that leaves us cynical or always
skeptical—but doubt that keeps things open, open to discovering something new
and different, open to discovering what one thought was true is no longer true
or was never true and so you have to lean into a new way of knowing the world
or yourself or neighbor or even God.
Maybe we need more doubt in the church—again, not the cynical, skeptical kind, that becomes tiresome—but the
kind that leaves us always curious.
On Friday morning, our own Jeff Bolognese, who works at
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, hosted what may have been
the very first Presbyterian Pastor Tour at NASA. Dorothy Boulton, David and Molly Douthett,
pastors serving in National Capital Presbytery and very dear, longtime friends,
and I were treated to a remarkable behind the scenes walkthrough of some of the
test facilities. We finished the tour in
an observation room looking down at the construction of the James Webb SpaceTelescope, which will be launched in October 2018. It’s the most ambitious telescope ever made
by Goddard, costing billions of dollars, which will allow us to see into the
darkness of space and search in the darkest, coldest reaches of the universe
for some evidence of light, original light that emerged at the beginning of time. It was extraordinarily humbling to stand
there and see that telescope—I felt tears welling up in me—for who knows what
this will discover. We stood around
talking about the nature of scientific research. Jeff said, “Scientists change their minds because
of data.” Scientists want more data
because they want to discover more. Once
the Hubble Telescope was launched they said, “What’s next?” Scientists ask questions, explore the
evidence; they’re learning, discovering all the time, always asking, “What else
don’t we know?” The questions push us
forward. The truth is out there, but the
truth is open-ended.
Thomas the doubter sounds oddly contemporary. Maybe he deserves our thanks and praise.
That’s what James Loder (1931-2001) said.
Professor of practical theology at Princeton, with considerable interest
in science, a mentor and friend, Loder wrote a short piece in praise of
Thomas. Jim wrote, “It is to Thomas’
great credit that he knows a problem when he sees it. …I see Thomas’ famous
dubiety not so much a problem of whether
[Jesus] lives, but if He lives—for that presents the problem. His doubt is rooted in a profound sense of
the implications of such a claim and an unwillingness to take that step
seriously.” “It’s a problem,” Loder writes,
“to have the presumably dead Jesus, radically reversing the universal tendency
of matter to disintegrate, appear before you in a form of tangibility you’ve
never seen before. It is a problem so
great that it may violently awaken you from a deep Newtonian slumber and put
you into the world in a new way—yet without any sense of direction…perhaps, all
you know to do is wander off and go fishing.”
Thomas “sees all too clearly that if
he lives, [if Jesus lives] the apparent and assumptive world we have always tended
to take for granted is not actually definitive of us after all.”[1]
We could just say we believe and be done with it and go
about our lives. This is what Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905-1980) called bad faith, ‘Just say you believe in God, then you won’t have
to think about it anymore.”[2] Loder
says, “Oh, yes, I know—‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’
Cynically, one can say, ‘Thank goodness he said that. I haven’t seen anything and I don’t want to,
so I can say I believe, and by this saying, I can be better than Thomas and
still not have it make any difference!”
But it made a difference to Thomas. It made a difference because his doubt, his
search for proof was evidence that he actually cared enough to know the truth. The polymath Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) said we only come to know something or someone when we care enough to know; we come to know through love. “Of course, if Thomas had really wanted to avoid the implications of the
claim his companions were making,” Loder suggests, “if he had really wanted to
avoid changing anything, he made a big, tactical mistake. He should have just walked away, left the
scene so as not to be associated with a marginal person who thought that way.”
Thomas’ doubt was an expression of how much he
cared. He had “the courage to say so,
and the tenacity not to let go of it until he had an answer.” Thomas “believed the empirical test was necessary
but found, like so many after him in all fields of human endeavor…that the truth
always exceeds the proof.” But the doubt
pushed him there. That’s because, as
Loder said and as he knew firsthand in his own life, “Yes, sooner or later,
when you get passionate about this you will walk headlong into the resurrected
incarnation. When that stunning moment
occurs or when that astounding realization gradually dawns upon you over a
considerable length of time…when you say ‘My Lord and my God,’ without actually
having to touch Him after all, you know you have been struck an immortal blow,
you have been permanently wounded by the sheer awe and wonder of this
grace. Once wised up, you can’t wise
down.”
So, here’s to Thomas. Here’s to doubt. Here’s to being curious,
courageous, and caring enough to pursue and explore and fathom what we really
mean when we say we believe, “Christ is risen!”
[1] James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment (Colorado
Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1989).
All the references to Thomas are found in the Epilogue, especially
213-215. For more on Loder, see Kenneth
E. Kovacs, The Relational Theology ofJames E. Loder: Encounter and Conviction (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
[2] Cited in Loder, 214.
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