Scripture: John 20:19-31
I’ve been in a not too terribly serious mood this week, and my initial thought for this morning was to do a sermon entitled “The Top Ten Reasons Why Thomas Should Not Be Considered a Doubting Thomas”. But then I wasn’t sure I could come up with ten reasons, though I could think of several off the top of my head, so you got the sermon title in the bulletin: “Several Reasons…” Besides ten seemed like it would take too long on a morning when I was wanting to be on the short side since we have several things to do today during and after worship. Long title. Not that long a sermon.
You’re all aware that the phrase “doubting Thomas” comes from the portion of scripture that we just heard, that continues the story of the women discovering the empty tomb and Jesus appearing to Mary. That evening, Easter Sunday evening if you will, the story says that Jesus appeared to some disciples who were gathered in a locked room, greeted them, spoke briefly with them, and blessed them. Thomas, though, we are told, was not with them. And when Thomas did show up and the other disciples told him what had happened, Thomas wasn’t totally convinced. “Are you sure?” he might have said. You know, when you’re grieving and stressed like you are, the mind can play some funny tricks. I’m sure you experienced something like what you say, but that doesn’t mean it’s really true. I can’t believe something like that unless I experience it myself. To be honest, I don’t know what to make of what you’re telling me, but I’ll tell you I’m not feeling like much of a believer right now, not yet.” And for that kind of reserved, hesitant-to-jump-on-the-bandwagon, approach Thomas earned himself the name, pretty much for eternity it seems, of “doubting Thomas”…and bequeathed that name to future generations of doubters of all stripes and descriptions.
Now I’m not suggesting that Thomas is totally undeserving of the term “doubting Thomas”. I am saying that it is unfair and misleading to label Thomas in that way, as though that’s all there is to be said about him, as though you can pretty much sum him up with that one word. But more importantly, I want to say that describing Thomas that way is not good for us. In my understanding of the term doubting Thomas, it refers to someone who can find a reason to be skeptical about almost anything, or who doesn’t think anything will work, someone who is just sort of negative by nature. That doesn’t describe Thomas, and it doesn’t describe the real experiences you and I have as we move toward a faith that is honest and abiding.
For one thing doubt is always part of a process, a process, as I say of moving toward faith or belief. It is not an end in itself or a good in itself. It’s not a bad thing either. It is just part of the spiritual life of anyone who is sincerely trying to be a person not of doubt but of faith. It was that way for Thomas. He was a so-called doubter for just a few verses. The next thing you know he is trying to find words for his heart-felt faith. Why call him a doubter when in fact his doubting was just part of his process of moving toward belief. Why should any of us think of ourselves as doubters when whatever doubts we may experience are just a good and necessary part of our journey of faith? A faith that is come to without doubts, a faith that seems to come easily, is also likely to be a faith that can be abandoned easily. Doubt is just a subset of a much larger reality we refer to as faith. A true doubting Thomas or Thomasina would be a person who acts as though doubt is the point of our spiritual lives. There may be such people. I don’t know them. Thomas was not one…nor you…nor me. That’s my first reason Thomas should not be called a doubting Thomas.
The second reason is similar, but not quite the same. Doubt is part of the journey of faith. But that journey is not a simple, straight line, one way journey. It is not as though we all begin at a point of great doubt and gradually move through stages of less and less doubt until we arrive at faith. That is partly true, a little bit true. People do experience themselves as non-believers or as people who are not people of faith, and sometimes their journey does move them gradually toward some point where they finally are able to think of themselves as believers or as people of faith. And dealing with one’s doubt is an important part of that journey. But even for people who already consider themselves people of faith—we are not done with doubt. The journey of faith is a winding path and people of faith do encounter doubts of all kinds along the way. It is part of the life of faith, not just a means of getting there. So in reality there is no absolute separation between doubting and believing. We are all in some sense believing doubters. We are all in some sense doubting believers. Thomas’ journey was not over when he blurted out that his heart now told him Jesus was Lord. It was just the beginning. We do a disservice to Thomas calling him doubting Thomas. We would do him an equal disservice calling him believing Thomas. We do ourselves a disservice thinking of ourselves, or other people, exclusively one way or the other. Our spiritual lives are much more nuanced than that. That is the second reason I don’t like the term “doubting Thomas”.
And here’s something else. From a certain perspective doubt was not what Thomas was involved in—only in a secondary and very minor way. What he did was refuse to just accept what other people told him. Without questioning the genuineness of the experience of the other disciples, without questioning their honesty or their sincerity, Thomas said essentially, as I read this story, “That’s fine. But I can’t base my faith on your experience. My faith needs to be my own.” This story says to me that there really is no such thing as second hand faith. It’s fine to listen to what other people have to say. It’s important to listen to what other people have to say. It’s especially important to listen to the experiences that lie behind the faith statements of other people. We always gain when other people can say and we can hear what another person’s biography of faith is, how their faith came to be, what has touched their heart, what about their faith is most important to them. That’s all fine…and important. It doesn’t provide us with a faith that is our own. Although that listening can be part of the experience that leads us to our own faith. But what Thomas was involved in was not so much doubting, though as I say that was involved a little bit, but searching for a faith that was authentic to him, to his experience, to who he was, even if that meant that his faith would turn out to look or sound a bit different from others. To insist that our faith be our own, not what someone else offers us on a platter, that may involve doubt. The doubt is real but almost beside the point. The point is the quest for a faith that is real for us, and that is quite a different thing. Was for Thomas. Is for us. Reason number three.
Furthermore, I don’t read Thomas as being a doubter so much because I think of doubting as something we do more with our heads that our hearts. I don’t get to hear too many sermons, but I have heard a few and read a few where the preacher was criticizing Thomas for asking for proof, whereas faith is not a matter of proof, doesn’t deal with things that provable. And so Thomas is criticized for having a kind of mathematical mind that wants God to be proved like a geometric equation. No imagination. No sensitivity to other kinds of truth. No willingness to take a leap of faith. Jesus does say in the scripture, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe,” seeming to emphasize the point that we are called to live a faith that has not been technically, logically, proven and is not provable. Well, I don’t read the story this way. Thomas as I see him is not involved so much in doubting, if doubt means being skeptical and demanding so kind of intellectual satisfaction. Thomas is not doubting primarily. He is grieving.
And what he is asking for, I believe, is not proof but comfort. And mostly our struggles with the faith, not just Thomas’ struggles but yours and mine, are not the struggles of the mind, but the struggles of the heart. I don’t mean to “dis” the thinking thoughtful aspect of faith. Faith shouldn’t ask us to check our heads at the door. And so the thinking parts of ourselves are important too. But that’s not all of Thomas and it’s not all of us. Sometimes, more than sometimes, what gets in the way of our faith or causes us to struggle with our faith is not intellectual questions but breaking hearts, breaking because of personal losses, breaking because of something that is going on in the world around us. Breaking hearts can indeed cause us to ask questions and look for answers. They can also cause us just to reach out for God. Which I believe is what Thomas was doing, just reaching out for God. He didn’t want or need proof. He wanted Jesus just to be there. Sometimes, in difficult times, we may wish we had some answers that would make sense of things, but what we really need is just to know that God is there. Like Thomas did. And that is reason number four that I don’t want to call Thomas a doubter. Again it seems somehow beside the point.
Here is reason number five, the last one for today. It’s only halfway to ten, so it’s a good thing I didn’t try for ten. Reason number five is the wounds, the wounds Jesus showed Thomas that seemed to convince Thomas he was real, really risen, and so forth. But again I don’t quite read them as quite in the nature of “proof”, though I understand that some may see them that way. There is a message here for me of a somewhat different sort. The risen Christ, for Thomas, was not the glorious, triumphant, otherworldly figure Christians sometimes sing to on Easter. He was still the wounded Christ, the human Christ, the Christ we encounter in all our human woundedness. Thomas didn’t want to know there was some completely transformed, otherworldly person named Jesus come back from the grave who bore little or no resemblance to the Jesus he had known. He wanted to know the presence of the same Jesus who had moved in the brokenness of the world, healed as best could the woundedness he encountered there, and who was wounded himself by the world’s brokenness. He wanted not so much to have Christ proven to him, but to be called again, as he had been called before, to the sharing of wounds and the work of healing. That does not fit my image of a doubting Thomas. I would be happy to have the faith of Thomas. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 23, 2006