The Power Doubter

       It was a hard decision.  Sure, there was the promise.  I had heard the testimonies of others.  But how could I really know the truth?   There I stood at Jersey Mikes sub shop on Los Angeles Avenue, frozen in indecision.  

       Sure the bag said, “Taste and Believe!”  But before I could taste, I had to buy.  No one was handing out free samples.  I couldn’t just taste and believe.  I had to believe in order to taste.

       Of course I wasn’t risking all that much.  If it turned out to be a bad sandwich, I was only out $7.99. 

       But some decisions of life are much more crucial.  One of these is who we will trust with our life and with our death.   If I chose wrong, if I put my weight down on the wrong place, I will waste my life.  I will live a lie.

        This Easter morning we are looking at the man called Doubting Thomas.  Yes, he doubts.  But Thomas is also the person who makes the most radical confession of faith in Jesus Christ of any of the apostles after the resurrection. 

        How Thomas comes from doubt to decision, and how we can come from doubt to decision, is our focus today.  As we look at his story, let us remember that his story is also our story.   In many, many ways this Doubting Thomas is you and this Doubting Thomas is me.

       We can construct the Easter sequence from the various gospels and from Paul's writing in 1 Corinthians 15.  Jesus appears first to Mary Magdalene and other women by the empty tomb.  They run to tell the Apostles that they have seen the risen Lord.  But their testimony sounds like nonsense to the Apostles.  They don’t buy it – even though Peter and John go and find the tomb empty.  But later that day Peter meets the risen Lord.  Peter goes and tells the other disciples.   Then Cleopas and his companion return from their walk with Jesus on the Emmaus road.     

       Jesus' resurrection body does not have the physical limits of the earthly body.  Locked doors aren’t an issue.  The stone wasn’t removed from the door to the tomb so Jesus could leave.  It was so the disciples could enter and see.  While they are still telling what happened Jesus Himself appears in the room. Jesus shows them His hands and side.  He proves that He is alive.  Luke says that He even eats a piece of fish to prove that He is not a ghost.  The Disciples rejoice.

       But for some reason or another, Thomas is not present when Jesus confirms himself to His disciples in the Upper Room.  We don't know why Thomas was absent but there is a warning here about being spasmodic in attendance with the people of Christ.  You never know when something might happen.

       Let's look at Thomas for a moment before he enters the Upper Room and hears the excited testimony of the other disciples. 

       To Thomas the cross is only what he had expected. When Jesus said that He was going to Bethany after the news came of Lazarus' illness, Thomas’ reaction is: "Let us go also, that we may die with Him."

       Thomas never lacked courage.  But he is a courageous pessimist.  He loves Jesus. He loves Him enough to go and die with Him when the other disciples are hesitant and afraid.  But he never expects any good to come of it. 

       Thomas is also an honest questioner.  In John 14 Jesus speaks of going to prepare a place for His people and promises "to come again and receive you to myself, so that where I am, you may also be."   Then He says, "My way there is known to you."  Thomas doesn't understand what Jesus is talking about and he isn't going to pretend that he does understand.  "Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we possibly know how to get there?”  Jesus tells him, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me."  If you know me Thomas, you know the way.

       This courageous, pessimistic, skeptical Thomas enters the Upper Room.  The other disciples immediately announce: "We have seen the Lord!”  Thomas replies: "Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails; and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in the wound in His side, I will not believe!"

      Last year the Gallup organization did a survey to learn which people in our society are the most gullible.  It asked about belief in stuff like dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses and astrology.  The survey found that traditional Christian faith greatly reduces belief in such things. Education, on the other hand, has almost no effect.  There are plenty of Phds who believe in such things as the ability to communicate with the dead, the existence of mythical creatures such as the Loch Ness Monster, and alien encounters with Earth.

       Only 14 percent of respondents who described themselves as “evangelical” rated high on the index. Meanwhile, 30 percent of those who rejected the “evangelical” label scored high on the same index.

       Baylor University Professor Rodney Stark, the lead researcher on the project commented that there is an enormous amount of belief in parts of the academic and the scientific community that biblical Christians are “just suckers for anything -- that they’re just credulous people.”  The truth is the opposite.  There is a purity of Christian belief that excludes the stuff in the tabloids.  Christians have found the real thing and aren’t suckers for the other stuff. 

       Stark commented:  "There's an old saying that a man who no longer believes in God is ready to fall for just about anything, and it turns out our data suggests it's true.”

       Thomas is certainly centered in reality.  You won’t find Thomas killing himself in San Diego with the Heaven’s Gate cult in order to join a spaceship hidden in the tail of a comet.  Thomas has never heard of the Maya Indians.  But he wouldn’t care one bit that the Maya calendar ends next year.  Thomas isn’t a sucker.  Like people here he likes to sift things and discern the truth.  This place is full of engineer types.

       What is the truth?  What are Thomas’ questions?  What are the options?

       Well maybe his friends are confused.  After two or three days of grief and fatigue, “if onlys" – a kind of wistful hope -- start to assume the shape of reality.   Thomas is saying Your "if onlys” won’t do it for me." 

       Or maybe they’ve seen a ghost -- an apparition or spirit from the world beyond. That is also not good enough for Thomas. Or perhaps they saw an angel.  After all, the women said they saw angels at the tomb.  Thomas is saying that an angel is not good enough for him. 

       Thomas is saying that even if an angel from God, a messenger from God Himself, comes down and says, "Everything is all right, Thomas," that will not do the job.   He says: "unless I put my hand in nail prints..."  An angel does not have nail prints, neither does a ghost, neither does the wishful dreaming of the disciples.  They cannot conjure that up.

       It seems that Thomas is saying something like this: "I have followed Jesus for three years.  I have seen His actions and heard His words. I know that this man Jesus was crucified and that death is most real fact of all for me.  I will believe Jesus if He is alive but that’s all I’ll believe,

       It has to be physical.  He will not believe in a Christ of faith who is not the actual Jesus whom he has known and trusted.  Thomas does not doubt Jesus but he doubts the witness of the other disciples. 

       What really happened at Easter?  Did the disciples out of heroic faith, decide to believe in love and in truth and in hope, in spite of the reality of death and cruelty and hatred?"  Is that what Easter is? Many people today believe that.

       Did the disciples have some sort of new-agey, rainbow colored spiritual breakthrough?  Is this why they are now confident that love and goodness and truth and God's kindness are really stronger than death and hatred and sin and the devil and all the rest?  Do they believe something simply because it feels good to believe it — in spite of the evidence?  Some so-called theologians suggest that the Disciples didn’t really see Jesus but only felt that He must be still alive through “the eyes of faith” – which is simply another word for mass hallucination. 

       “Well, listen,” Thomas is saying, “if that's what your Easter faith is, it is not good enough for me.”  Thomas is saying that the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith – the Lord we pin our hope on -- must be the same person. You cannot have the one Jesus who taught wonderful truths and died, swept under the rug and now Easter comes in to take His place and we end up with a sort of Christ idea — the spirit of love that we are going to adore for the rest of history and hold onto courageously against all evil and against death.  That would be an empty, New Age faith.

       “No,” Thomas says.  “The bodily resurrection must have actually happened because the death people die is a real death and only a real resurrection can undo a real death.”  This last year, some of you here have suffered profound losses of loved ones.  You know that you need a real Easter to undo those very real and painful deaths. You know that a bigger and better story or symbol won't do it.  It has to be physical.   Thomas agrees.

       Another person who agrees is the later John Updike.  I’ve always enjoyed a poem by Updike written back in 1962 to sophisticated Americans who buried Easter faith under a feeling that resurrection means fresh green hills at spring, or blooming bulbs and Easter dresses, or a vague "spirit of Jesus" who plays in the same league as the "spirit of 76" and the "spirit of Christmas."

        Updike wrote his poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter to those who water down the radical claims of the resurrection.  Listen to Updike’s Seven Stanzas:

       "Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body;

        If the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

        the church will fall.        

        It was not as the flowers, each soft spring recurrent;

        It was not as His spirit, in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;

        it was as His flesh: ours.

       The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that—pierced—dies, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring might new strength to enclose.

        Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:

       Let us walk through the door.

       The stone is rolled back, not paper-Mache.

       Not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.

       And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.

       Let us not seek to make it less monstrous for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

       Lest awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance."

        The remonstrance of which Updike writes is awakening on that "unthinkable hour" the Day of Judgment, only to find that things are exactly as Jesus declared they would be -- and then demonstrated as true by rising from the dead.

       There is no Easter message or Easter hope without the Easter fact. There is no Easter message or Easter hope without the Easter fact. Paul makes that clear in 1 Corinthians 15:17, "if Christ is not raised from the dead, then our faith is empty and we are still in our sins.” Christianity consists of great hopes and precepts and joys but it is based on seven words of fact — "He, is not here. He is risen."

       Jesus says to Thomas "have you believed because you have seen Me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." (That's us.)  And yet, thanks to Thomas, we have greater assurance that the risen Jesus of faith is also the Jesus of fact.

       For eight long days, the disciples, including Thomas, continue to meet together.  Jesus is not to be seen.  Thomas may even have come to the beginning of an "I told you so" attitude. But on the eighth day, Jesus once again stands in the midst of His disciples.  He turns to Thomas and says, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand and place it in my side. Do not be faithless but believing."

       John does not record that Thomas did what he had said he must do in order to believe even though Jesus invites him to do it. He doesn’t need quite as much data as he’d thought.  Instead he says to Jesus, "My Lord and my God."  Thomas’ one great virtue is that when he finally goes, he goes the whole distance.  He immediately sees the cosmic implications of the resurrection more clearly than any of the other disciples. He falls at Jesus’ feet and cries, "My Lord and my God."

       Unlike many people, Thomas has not aired his doubts for the purpose of mental acrobatics or for the purpose of evading commitment.  His doubts are honest. When he is honestly answered, he surrenders completely and finds life.

       In the story of Jesus and Thomas we can learn some important lessons.           

       One lesson is about doubt.  There is a great significance in the statement: "eight days later the disciples were again in the house and Thomas was with them." Thomas could easily have succumbed to either of two temptations.

       The first temptation is obvious.  He rejects the temptation to leave the people with whom he now feels out of step.  If you have doubts, let me urge you not to leave the people who have faith. If you are in despair, don't separate yourself from all of the people who have hope.

        It's not easy.  Eight days with the disciples and he cannot believe what they believe and keep insisting is true.  They had this joyous experience on Easter and now they're making up all these songs.

       But when you have doubts is not the time to leave.  That is the time to hang in and find out what might be true. 

       I’ve had my doubts about the Christian thing.  In fact, when I was in high school I spent four years as a bad atheist.  I say a bad atheist because I didn’t believe there was a God – and I hoped God wasn’t too mad at me for that.  I think there’s a place for that in many people. 

       Doubts are not wrong in themselves. One writer has called them "the ants in the pants" of faith.  They push us to question, to learn, to grow.  They only become problems when you get frozen and don’t question, learn and grow.

       The second temptation faced by Thomas is more subtle.  That is the temptation to superficially agree with the convictions of the other disciples in order to keep everybody happy.  Thomas takes his doubts seriously.  He stays with the disciples but he stays honest with them.  And the other disciples also stick with him until he is one with them – until the doubter who asks the right questions discovers the resurrection for himself.

       Westmont College chaplain Ben Patterson tells about his encounter when he was in college with the campus atheist.  You know how every campus has its leading atheist.  The atheist said, “If you pray and ask that the science building levitate five feet off the ground and it happens, I’ll believe that there is a God.  Patterson, asked, “Would you commit you life to this God after He shows Himself to you?”  The atheist replied, “Of course not.  That’s a separate issue.”

       Thomas says that the issue is the same issue.  You can ask to be shown.  But one you are shown, the balls in your court to honestly follow through.  That’s what Thomas does.

       There are some here today who are here for the first time.  Maybe you intend to come back — we do meet on a regular basis – or maybe you don't.  Maybe you have honest questions -- or maybe you just want to keep peace at home so you show up at church one or twice a year.

       Let me challenge you today to be honest.  Pray and ask Jesus to confirm himself to you.  Pray even if you don’t believe in Jesus or prayer.  Come to worship for a period of time and commit yourself that when Jesus does confirm Himself to you, you will honestly respond.

        Let me tell you who we worship here.  We don’t worship as phantom Jesus, a fantasy Jesus or the brave faith of men and women about a memory about Jesus.  Our faith is in the Jesus who lives – the Jesus who is literally here for us right here and right now in the most literal sense possible. 

        Paul said, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus Christ as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”  So John gives the bottom line of his gospel in verse 31. "These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.

       That is the bottom line for John and it is Jesus’ invitation to you. 

I am indebted to Dr. Earl Palmer of University Presbyterian Church in Seattle for some of the insights in this sermon.