Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor
© 2021, Dr. Tamilio
Poor Thomas. He will be remembered all his life as a doubter, just because he asked a question that many of us would have asked in his situation. Diana Butler Bass — reflecting on the fact that this famous resurrection story featuring Thomas is read on the first Sunday after Easter each year — Bass writes that most “Christians in American churches [miss] its point.”[1] She claims that the story is about gratitude, not doubt.
I remember attending a class at Boston University led by one of my doctoral advisors, Prof. Horace T. Allen, Jr., one of the scholars responsible for the Revised Common Lectionary. He began talking about this story and said, “Thomas isn’t a doubter. He’s a believer.” He went on to say that we need to look at the story in its entirety. When Jesus shows up a second time, Thomas puts his finger into Jesus’ wound and then offers one of the greatest proclamations of faith in the Bible: “My Lord and my God!”
If you break this all down, it looks something like this. Thomas begins with faith. (He was, after all, a disciple of Jesus. He chose, of his own free will, to follow Jesus.) Then, he experiences something that causes him to question (at least part of) his faith. People do not rise from the dead. Hearing that anyone did (even the person you believed to be the Messiah) would make you stop in your tracks and say, “I’ve got to see this to believe it.” In other words, life has caused Thomas to question what he believes. But the story does not end there. Thomas does not give up. He does not abandon his faith. He explores that which he questions. The result? An even stronger faith!
Having faith. Testing that faith. Having a stronger faith as a result.
So many Christians see asking questions as a lack of faith. They look at such a sinful, negative act. They see it as heresy. This is why the phrase “Thomas the Doubter” is a pejorative expression in our culture. As I have said many times before, doubt is not the opposite of faith. The opposite of believing in God is not believing God. Doubting, struggling, wrestling with one’s faith basically shows that someone is trying to reconcile some real-life occurrence with what he or she believes. That’s normal. That’s human. I often find that those who are honest with themselves and allow themselves the freedom to ask the tough questions end up with a stronger faith. As T.S. Eliot once wrote — I had to bring ol’ Tom into this sermon for Richard James, who is joining us on Zoom — as Eliot once wrote, “doubt and uncertainty are merely a variety of belief.”[2]
Such questioning often comes to the forefront when people face a crisis. If you’ve ever asked, “Why me?” then you know what I’m talking about. Some of those crises are individualistic, meaning the stressors and tragedies that occur in your own lives. Some of those crises are communal, meaning they happen to groups of us: neighborhoods, communities, and nations. Right now, all of us (the entire world) is facing a crisis unlike any that any of us have seen in our lifetimes. The Coronavirus continues. The numbers may be dwindling, but not here in Canton. One report says that we have the highest rate of COVID-19 cases of any community in the state!
Many people wonder where God is in the midst of all this. Why isn’t the one who healed the sick and the lame, the blind and the demon-possessed, heal those who are struggling to breathe? Where is he? If he were only here in the flesh and we could stick our hands into his side (where the Roman soldier thrust his spear) and our fingers in the nail marks on his hands and feet, then we would believe that he rose from the dead and is here to save us now.
What did Jesus say to Thomas after he saw Jesus and believed that he rose from the dead, after he proclaimed, “My Lord and my God”? Jesus said, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Many Christians puff themselves up when they read these words. They are basically saying, “Jesus is blessing me here. I’ve never seen him, yet I believe he rose from the dead. Thomas needed to see him to believe. Look how righteous I am! I believe without seeing.” Let’s not be too quick to pat ourselves on our spiritual backs. This isn’t a competition. It isn’t as if Jesus is saying that all of you are paragons of the faith and, therefore, are blessed, but Thomas isn’t. There are times when we are just like Thomas — many times. We live in a world filled with Thomases.
So, doubt is normal, especially when we know that something is just wrong — that the world isn’t the way God intended for it to be. It makes some think that maybe there just isn’t a God after all, or that God doesn’t really care about our plight. Neither claim is correct. God is very real and God cares. We cannot understand the mind of God, which is another cause for our doubt. However, we can have hope even amidst our moments of skepticism. The great modern Catholic thinker Henry Nouwen once said, “While optimism makes us live as if someday soon things will go better for us, hope frees us from the need to predict the future and allows us to live in the present, with the deep trust that God will never leave us alone…”[3] Optimism is not the opposite of doubt, neither is surety. The opposite of doubt is hope. That hope comes to us from the one who defeated the powers of sin and death to offer us new life.
So, my friends, although doubt is normal — we’ve experienced it before, and we will encounter it again — we have something greater than doubt in our midst: we have hope. In this Easter season, we need to constantly hold hope before us. I say this not just because I believe that hope will see us through. Rather, holding onto hope is the way that we hold the Living Christ close to us. It is a sort of confession. It is to say, “Jesus, I cannot see the end of what lies before me, but I know that you will walk with me through the shadow of the valley of death, that you will deliver me, whatever deliverance means.” Hope is ultimately a matter of trust. Although we do not know what will happen, we believe — deep in the recesses of our being — that our Lord will not abandon us, or leave us isolated in our fear and anxiety.
Let the doubts come, but let them go just as quickly. Hold fast to hope. Hold fast to the Risen Jesus. Amen.
[1] Diana Butler Bass, “ ’Doubting Thomas’ story is about gratitude, not doubt” April 11, 2018, taken from Religion News Service (online).
[2] Lyndall Gordon, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1998), 189.
[3] Henri J.M. Nouwen, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1994), 37.