2022.04.24 | Seeing is Believing?
Seeing is Believing?
John 20:19-31
Preached by
Marvin Lance Wiser
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA
24 April 2022
Χριστός ἀνέστη! Christ is Risen! Christ is risen Indeed! Some of you remembered our paschal greeting. Good.
This Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter Sunday, is often referred to by many as “Doubting Sunday.”
Easter Sunday that we just celebrated is very confident in its claims of the extraordinary. But where is the room to ask questions, to inquire of the stories’ veracity? Do we make space, do we hold space for the uncertain or the inexplicable?
Thomas alone is forever branded as the follower who wouldn’t believe until shown proof. In Spanish there is a well-known dicho or saying that pervades many cultures, which I myself use often, Yo soy como Santo Tómas, hasta no ver, no creer; I’m like Saint Thomas, until I see, I don’t believe. His role as the archetypal doubter is engrained in Christianity. It almost doesn’t seem fair that one instance of doubt could sway the afterlife or reception of one of the twelve. Protestants don’t often have at the ready recall, that it was the apostle Thomas who is credited with sharing the Good News as far as India, possibly establishing seven churches there. So much transpired with our friend Thomas after this episode of doubt. But take a look back at Thomas with me.
John first writes of Thomas (other than just listing him among the twelve) in Chapter 11 when their friend Lazarus had “fallen asleep.” Here Jesus is told the grave news, and ultimately decides to return to Bethany where Lazarus lay, at the risk of possible persecution and even death. In verse 16 Thomas exclaims, “Let us also go, so that we might die with him.” – Here we hear not a “Thomas the Doubter,” but “Thomas the Audacious.” One willing to take great risk for the sake of his friend. This speech-act embodies Jesus’s saying, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
“Let us also go, so that we might die with him.” Thomas the Audacious.
John next writes of Thomas in chapter 14. Jesus had just finished explaining to the disciples that he will only be with them a little while longer, to which a naive Peter suggests that he would like to follow him anyway. We know how this story goes, in the shadow of certain persecution, three times Peter denies Christ; though he is still remembered as Peter the Rock, not Peter the Denier. It is in this context that Thomas in verse 5 asks of Jesus, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” which elicits the famous response from Jesus that later becomes quintessential doctrine, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Thomas was the one in the classroom that had the chutzpah to ask the teacher the question everyone had on their minds, but were too timid to ask, “How can we know the way?” Not, “Oh yes, I know the way, so I’m following you too.” What we read here is honesty, confidence, and eagerness to learn, in essence, a disciple. It is within this sphere of critical engagement that constructive doubt arises.
“Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Thomas the Confident. Just keeping it real.
Our reading today picks up in John 20, after the stone had been found rolled away and Jesus had appeared to Mary Magdalene. Of course, it is easy to read Doubting Thomas in this passage; Thomas who demands proof. However, I’m not so convinced that we should focus solely on Thomas here.
Just before our reading begins, in verse 18, Mary is said to have gone to the disciples and announced her encounter with the risen Lord. The text mutes their response. There is no joyful noise, no merry festivities. What we are told is that the disciples had bunkered down in the house where they had earlier all met — the one with the upper room — presumably all out of fear, that they would be crucified next.
So, I am inclined to imagine the disciples not taking Mary with much seriousness. Mary had seen Jesus early in the day, and it is now evening and no notable response. But Jesus later appears in the room with them, unrecognizable at first as with his appearance to Mary, but they recognize him once he reveals his wounds. With Mary, he only had to speak.
Verse 20 reads: “After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
The rejoicing here seems contingent on confirmation. Once they received the Holy Spirit, like Mary they too were sent out. At some point they come across Thomas, and like Mary, retell the miraculous story.
Thomas then is actually in like company when he demands as a response to his comrades’ bewildered reporting, “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.” The disciples did not rejoice at the first preaching of the Gospel by Mary. It was only at their seeing their risen LORD that they rejoiced. She was the first apostle sent by Jesus to tell the rest of his ascension to God. This then turns into less of a lesson on doubt and more a lesson on why a room full of men should take a woman seriously.
This undertaking of reexamining or rescuing the character of Thomas has been done so to dispel a misconception. We have found that Thomas was Bold, Audacious, and Confident, in addition to being a doubter in times of uncertainty — not unlike the other disciples. This exercise, however, although valid as it may be, still is operating under the presumption that doubt is bad — even antithetical to faith and being a good disciple — and Thomas needs rescuing from this. Is it and does he? And the corollary then for us is, do we? Perhaps not. If not, then it is not Thomas that needs reclaiming necessarily, although he does bear the label, but rather “doubt” itself.
My first inclination was that Thomas gets a bad rap, being labeled “Thomas the Doubter,” even after exclaiming his affirmation of faith “My Lord & my God.” However, stories about him continue en gusto in spite of his chronicled episode with doubt, carrying the Gospel to what is modern-day India. The story doesn’t stop with doubt — in some ways it is where it begins. In fact, our reading of John chapter 20 today interprets doubt as a trait common to all of the disciples — and so perhaps one not to be so easily disparaged.
Many years later, a disciple also journeyed to India, we know her as Mother Theressa of Calcutta. In recent years through the publishing of various letters to her superiors in “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” the world was shocked to learn that even she expressed seasons of doubt in God. Mother Teresa had wanted all her letters destroyed, but the Vatican ordered they be preserved as potential relics of a saint. At times she even found it hard to pray. When we see life as God does not intend it, when we see bombs falling, hear screams of the innocent, feel hunger, witness need for shelter, when chaos ripples too close to God’s design of goodness, it is natural to doubt. But like Mother Theressa, like Thomas, injustice should spur us to respond, “ My LORD, and my God.” And we respond in the way that Jesus lived. We become his hands and his feet amid the chaos, in spite of doubt.
Doubt is necessary for critical engagement. Whether we are getting a second medical opinion, gauging employment opportunities, housing options, questioning vaccine booster timelines, doubt can help us make better, more informed decisions. Doubt compels us to dig deeper. Of course doubt can also spin webs of darkness, as the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s 2008 movie, Doubt, shows. But it is often through the Dark Night that we pass onto the Second Naiveté, as philosopher Paul Ricouer describes, onto spiritual maturity, having a greater willingness to embrace the paradoxes and mystery of faith. The doubt that this mystery of faith produces is a constructive space, occupied by many creativists the world-over. Here are some calls for us to embrace the uncertain, the ineffable:
“It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt,” writes Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevski
“Faith which does not doubt is dead faith,” pens Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno
Paul Tillich theologizes, “Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.”
And let us remember that before the Easter event, Christ himself wondered, “God, why have you forsaken me.”
Church, I am happy to be called into a midst of doubters—faithful darers, audacious doers, critical responders. This applies not just to the tenets of the faith, but also to this journey we call life. There are times when we doubt we will ever be called to a specific ministry that fits our gifts, there are times when we are told we have to move and we don’t know when, how, or by what means; times when we don’t know how we’re going to make next month's rent; or if we’re good enough to get into an academic program. Times are uncertain — time like light, travels in waves. And we ride those waves together as a community of questioning believers, helping one another in discernment toward wholeness.
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” This is us. Yet, seeing alone is not sufficient for faith, and so it goes neither is belief itself. John knew doubt was an element of faith. And in a world of Empires where sometimes it is hard to keep the faith amid systemic oppression and inequalities, the bombardment of chaos, we write things down, we share stories, and we pass values along, so that as John writes, “we might keep on believing.” As he did, as Mother Theressa did, as did Thomas, and as we do. A faith not mired at the cross, but ever turning outward, a progressive doing faith, endeavoring forward, making the way as we walk, spreading the table wider wherever life’s journey takes us, from Palestine to India to Hayward. Amen.