December 21, 2006
Thomas
The Feast of St Thomas
Thomas, the Apostle, had practically nothing to do with Christmas. But then maybe he had a lot to do with Christmas. Anyhow, it is good that his December 21st feast day comes practically on its eve like it does.
That we seem to remember him 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 fitting for his enterprise.
While the rest of the disciples were cowering full of resentment and fear that they’d bet their lives and whatever fortunes they had on a loser and that 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 closeted behavior of his former colleagues.
But then, when he got what he wanted, he signed on for good or ill. There’s a line in a translation of Psalm 146 that fits him to a T, “Praise (God) for what you can fathom; for what you can’t fathom, praise him.”* 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, like walking through closed doors with holes in your head and your side and your hands and feet. 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 both doubt and evidence. This Christmas faith we celebrate is like that.
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. Faith creates trust.
It works two ways. My leap of faith is a kind of evidence for me and maybe also for you. And your leap 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 this kind 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 will we ever convince those who pass by. Not until we show the world by the way we love one another — one of the greatest risks of all — can our witness ever become a winsome and compelling evangel of and for the Lord.
For it is in that nourishing and healing love that transcends both faith and doubt, the one Paul says endures forever, and wherever such love is found, within or without these naves, that is where the Lord is born. There is Christmas. And it is there that we find church, that we are church, and that we do church. Merry Christmas.
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* Stephen Mitchell, A Book of Psalms, Harper Collins, 1993