second sunday of easter

Poor Thomas, when Jesus appeared to the disciples on the evening of the day of the resurrection, he had been absent, so when they told him that Jesus had appeared to them in the locked room, he just didn’t believe it. The poor man was probably still suffering from shock at the events of that weekend.  Maundy Thursday, and the arrest and trial, going into Good Friday, and the continuation of Jesus’ trial before Pilate, and then his crucifixion, and now Mary Magdalene had been to the tomb very early that Easter Sunday morning and found it empty.  What had happened, had someone stolen his body or had he truly risen from the dead as he said he would. Thomas really didn’t know what to believe. No wonder he told the other disciples, ‘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’. But a week later when all the disciples, including Thomas were gathered in the same house, Jesus came and stood among them and offered Thomas the chance to prove that he had truly risen from the dead.  ‘Put your finger here and see my hands.  Reach out your hand and put it in my side.  Do not doubt but believe’., Thomas’ response, ‘My Lord and my God’.  Jesus reproaches Thomas gently by saying, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me?’

Doubting Thomas.  These words have marked Thomas out for ever as the one that didn’t believe.  And yet in my opinion it’s an unfair title to have landed him with.  Questioning Thomas would more fit the bill. Yes, he didn’t believe that Christ had risen, he hadn’t seen him himself as the others had.  But he really was no different to those other Disciples, because they didn’t believe it when Mary Magdalene told them that Jesus had risen from the tomb.  They needed the visible proof themselves before they believed. Weren’t these the same disciples that didn’t believe that Jesus was truly the Son of God, who deserted him when things got difficult, even denied knowing him after his arrest so they wouldn’t be linked to him and be arrested themselves.

Is Thomas that much different from us, don’t we want proof that something is what it claims to be? We are always told to check the label before buying, and rightly so; people get caught in scams all the time and lose their money.  And yet in our Christian life here and now, some 2000 years after the resurrection we call him ‘Doubting Thomas and pretend we would act differently.  So we assume ‘doubt’ to be wrong or the opposite of faith.  We tend to think of Thomas as something less than a faithful disciple of Christ. We seem to think that owning up to having doubts about aspects of our faith makes us somehow not quite Christian, not quite part of the Jesus Party, not the same as the others sitting in the pews around us who are clearly very devout and pious.

The Theologian, Frederich Beucher said in his book, ‘Wishful Thinking’, “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep.  Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith.  They keep it awake and moving.” And I must confess that I am with Thomas, he really is my Patron Saint, I had many doubts when I felt God calling me to the Priesthood, and wanted to see the evidence before I truly believed, a letter or an email from God telling me his purpose for my life would have been so very helpful, but it didn’t happen, but I still doubted for many years and looked for evidence of the truth of it.  I didn’t feel I was being disloyal to God, I thought I was being sensible, but that was probably my previous career coming through! I still have many doubts that God really wants me to be part of the Jesus Party, but that’s my own insecurity coming out, not God’s belief in me, God of course loves us all, warts and all, so he has no doubts at all in our own individual abilities or lack of them. The truth is it’s our human condition to question, to seek clarification, to seek evidence to confirm what we hear, and see. We need to question to believe, it’s really no good just accepting things without question, because there will come a time when that’s exactly what we will do, question the truth of it.

You could say that the opposite of a healthy doubting faith is ‘Blind Faith’, which worries me enormously, and has the real potential for evil. Look at the evidence of blind faith in the 20^th century.  Communism, the Nazis, North Korea, Fundamental Muslims, Fundamental Christians. In previous centuries we based our right to conquer other countries and to take other human beings as slaves on blind faith on passages from the Old Testament which we interpreted for our own ends.

Literally believing every word in the Bible can be very dangerous. Was the world really made nearly 5000 years ago and in 6 days, then God rested on the 7th as Creationist believe?  Can we really dismiss the evidence of millions of years of creation scientifically proved all around us and insist that the world was created by God according to the Book of Genesis? Blind faith is what the Jewish religious leaders had in the time of Jesus. They believed every word in the Pentateuch, the first five books in the Old Testament, and lived there lives strictly according to them, so no work was done on the Sabbath, the dietary laws and hygiene laws had to be obeyed, the sacrificial laws had to be obeyed, God was a God of Judgement, punishment and vengeance, not the God of Love I recognise Him as in the New Testament,, and the Messiah would come down from heaven on clouds dazzling white and overthrow the Romans. They couldn’t believe the evidence of their own eyes that this carpenter’s son was the Son of God.

When Jesus came again to the locked house and stood amongst his disciples, including Thomas, it’s as if he was saying, ‘Doubting is nothing to be ashamed of.  Doubting is ok because its part of life’.  We don’t need to be sure about everything, when you think about it we are often unsure about things, falling in love, buying a particular house, applying for a job, moving jobs, and then work it out in my minds and come to an assurance that moves us on. It’s the same in our religious life.  God doesn’t require us to be doubt-free.  God is calling us to be people who stop and listen, to question, to learn, to grow in understanding and faith.  God is calling us to be people who know our need continually to acknowledge and discover what it is that we don’t know.  We have to have the courage and good sense to understand that and deal with our uncertainties and doubts, not just sit in the pews week after week and go through the ritual of the liturgy. I’m not talking about the kind of cynical disbelief some people have in everything and everyone, even though at the moment we may have cause to be cynical, especially about the financial industry MP’s expenses and many of the Government institutions.  I am talking about our inner journey to faith which we all travel during our lives, and ebbs and flows as our life experiences ebb and flow through joy and disaster.

Thomas had the courage to doubt and didn’t try and hide it or pretend he believed what the other disciples told him.  He tested the truth and used it to discover the true meaning of the Risen Christ in his life, and went on to be a founding father in the early Christ and gave his life for his Risen Lord. So we too should be like Thomas and question what we don’t understand or have doubts about.  We should not sweep them under the carpet or simply ignore them, we should examine them and let the truth of what we discover lead us to a fuller understanding of God and a stronger and more lasting faith in His Son our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.