April 20, 2006
Doubt
Easter 2B Jn 20.19-31
That we seem to remember the disciple Thomas more for his doubt than for his faith probably gives him a lot more grief than he deserves. We call him Doubting Thomas. Braveheart Thomas might be more appropriate to his enterprise.
While the rest of the disciples were cowering full of resentment and fear that they’d bet their lives and whatever fortunes on a loser and the Romans were breathing down their necks, Thomas was out pounding the pavement, risking arrest, renewing old contacts, checking the want-ads, and looking for work. He didn’t believe the talk about Jesus, and he wanted better evidence than the behavior of his former colleagues.
But then, when he got what he wanted, he signed on for good or ill. He accepted his commission as an apostle, wrote a gospel, and, some say, started a new church over in India. “Brother Thomas’s Sawdust Trail” sounds like an evangelist to me.
We don’t have the hard evidence Jesus presented to Thomas. (If walking through closed doors with holes in your head and your side and your hands and feet can be called “hard evidence.”) John, the Gospeler, knew that, but he apparently knew something else, as well. Faith is not only always surrounded by doubt and without evidence. Faith creates doubt and evidence.
Faith is risk, and risk wouldn’t be risk without doubt. And faith that comes only after evidence is no faith at all. It is trust, yes, but not faith. Faith is that act of the will, that daring commitment that climbs out on life’s limbs and leaps. And that is all the evidence we get.
It works two ways. My faith is a kind of evidence for me and maybe also for you. And your faith is a kind of evidence for you and also maybe for me. Our faith as a community — all that touch and go — is what makes church church. The ekklesia — the called — doesn’t even deserve the name if it is not first and foremost a community of faith — and probably of doubt, as well. And there is no evidence for that — even the kind that moves mole hills, let alone mountains — until there is a pulsing, dynamic, non judging heart of love at its core.
The disciples in the upper room would probably never have convinced Thomas until he experienced the vision of the risen Lord, himself. Nor if fear is keeping us in the closet would we ever convince those who pass by. Not until we show the world by the way we love one another — a rather risky leap, itself — can our witness ever become a winsome and compelling evangel of the Lord.
For it is in that nourishing and healing love that transcends both faith and doubt, wherever such love is found, within or without these naves — and only there — and that is where the Lord is risen, where He is risen, indeed. And it is there that we find “church.”