Faithful Doubters Club

John 20:19–29 NRSV

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Do we have any “seeing is believing” people here? Any healthy skeptics? I feel like we live in a world that really celebrates the critical minded outlook on the world. After all, being free to think for ourselves, reason rationally, and decide for ourselves whether or not something is good and true is one of the hallmark traits of being human. God gave us a rational mind.

Something that I think has been one of the shortcomings of the church over the years has really been the way that we expect people to believe in things that they can’t see and even use guilt or shame when people have questions.

This is why I am a Methodist. I was introduced at an early age to a faith tradition that allowed me to question things and to wonder about things and to not really fully agree with things without being told to get out. I was allowed the space that I needed to formulate an understanding of God that became my faith in Jesus.

And all of this leads us to our dear friend Doubting Thomas. If you’ve never heard this story before today, well then I hope that you leave with a positive view of old Thomas. And if you’ve grown up in the faith with an attitude of disdain towards Thomas, then I hope your understanding of him is resurrected today.

So we are in a sermon series called Resurrected where we are looking at how some of the encounters that people had with the Risen Christ brought resurrection to their lives, and how that same resurrection power is available to us today.

So when we talk about good old Thomas we are entering into one of the greatest question marks in the Gospel accounts. This passage in the only place that we really find out anything about Thomas besides his name in a list of Jesus’s disciples.

There’s no other backstory. We don’t know his life before Jesus. All we know is that he was a part of Jesus’s ministry crew, and that after Jesus’s death he went out to do something and missed Jesus’s first visit to the disciples after his resurrection. And he was not ready to believe his friends at their word. I think that’s reasonable. And quite honestly I think Jesus saw it as pretty reasonable as well.

I mean come on. Who is not with Thomas right? Your buddies all sitting at home, and you come back and they are like hey man Jesus was just here. And you know, you know he died. I mean imagine that scene. Put yourself there, you’ve been through the ringer the past few days, exhausted with grief and these dudes are clearly out of their minds right?

So when Jesus shows up we get this beautiful and kind of weird scene where Thomas’s requirements for believing that Jesus has been raised from the grave are met, and Jesus seems to rebuke him. At least in the way that we tend to read it. But look at what Jesus actually says.

“Have you believed because you have seen me?” Well duh, but remember… everyone up until this point has believed because they have seen Jesus.

“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” What we need to understand is that this does not meant that those who see and come to believe aren’t blessed. Jesus is simply making a statement of future fact, because we, you and me, we aren’t going to have the luxury of seeing Jesus face to face for quite some time.

In fact, Thomas’s words “My Lord and my God” are an ultimate confession of faith. Lord and God are the two names given to the God of Israel. So Thomas has made a huge confession of faith, he’s gotten to the core of Jesus’s identity as the Lord of the entire cosmos. And yes, he’s gotten there through a moment of doubt, but Jesus doesn’t reprimand him. He doesn’t say “ye of little faith.” He blesses all those that will follow in Thomas’s footsteps, declaring Jesus as the Lord of Creation without having the luxury of physically seeing Jesus face to face.

This is honestly the climactic moment of John’s entire Gospel, in which the Disciples finally get it, they finally understand who this man they have followed for 3 years and devoted their lives to is. And the climactic moment comes at the hands of Doubting Thomas.

So tell me, does Jesus scorn those who doubt with a sincere heart? Jesus knew Thomas. Jesus saw that his heart was rooted and grounded in love. Jesus took that and used it to ignite the movement that was to come. A whole community of people who would read and learn from this account that Jesus Christ is Lord. Immediately after this John tells us why he wrote his gospel! Why did John write the Gospel of John?

John 20:30–31 NRSV

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

It’s a shame that we’ve taken this story and used it as a means to say “you shouldn’t have doubts and you shouldn’t have questions” because honestly it’s a story about how one man’s doubts and questions led to a stunning and full understanding of who Jesus is. And isn’t that what we want both for ourselves and for those around us? To fully understand, to comprehend the fullness of who Christ is?

I don’t know what Thomas thought about Jesus before this. But by having some questions and some doubt, he arrived at a much deeper understanding. He didn’t say “I won’t believe ever,” He said “I wanna experience something.” So Jesus gave him an experience that turned his doubt into the faith and trust that he needed to go on to be an Apostle of Jesus and build his church.

This is the same experience that God wants us to have as well. It’s an experience that has been passed down alongside of the Gospel message for thousands of years.

Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians penned these words:

Ephesians 3:16–21 NRSV

I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Paul says I pray that you are strengthened by the Spirit and rooted in love so that you have the ability to comprehend how vast God’s love is.

Comprehend. Not just know upstairs here, but know down here in our hearts. Not a dead knowledge, but a living, breathing, critical understanding of God’s vast love that we know what to do with.

For Paul and the early church this meant that they needed to open up their minds. Because the vastness of God’s love meant that somehow, the Jewish Messiah, this Jesus wasn’t just for the Jews.

And in our modern day, I think that this means that we have got to open our minds to the idea that Jesus is not just for church people. Not just for people who have all the answers. In fact, I’m absolutely certain that Jesus loves it when we doubt and wrestle with our faith because it means that we are actually thinking about him.

The story of Thomas is a resurrection story that is good news for so many of us today. Maybe you are at this crossroads moment in your life where you are either quite openly or secretly wrestling with your faith. You’ve got questions about some of the claims that the Bible makes or some of things that you learned about Christianity as a kid or at least some of the things that you’ve grown to believe that Christians believe.

I’m here to tell you that it’s really ok. Like it’s really ok to ask questions. It’s really ok for you to be curious about things. I get it. I’ve been there so many different times. I may have answers to your questions.. I definitely have responses to your questions. This is a safe space to explore those questions.

But maybe the story of Thomas has something else to teach you.

You see we’ve all got this box. It’s a box in our mind and its walls are the limits of our imagination. Those limits are put in place by our own experiences, our own education, our own theological understanding, and our own opinions. And what we do is we take God, and we pick God up and we put God inside of this little teenie box inside of our little finite minds and we say, “Here it is, I’ve figured it out. This is who God is, and this is all that God is.”

And it’s really comfortable to have God in this box, because we control it. We get to decide for ourselves how we will experience God, as well as how others have to as well.

But we can’t keep God in the box. Because the box can’t contain God. And by keeping God in the box we are depriving ourselves of the ability to seek out and comprehend the fullness of who God is. You see in my experience, the more questions that I ask, the bigger and more incredible God gets.

We’ve got to get comfortable with doubt and with asking questions. We need to be exploring what God has been up to in history, and what God is up to right now. Otherwise, our faith is kind of weak. When we become certain about the wrong things, when we trust the box more than we trust God then our faith is in ourselves, not God.

Humility allows us to recognize that the box we try to contain God in, its not big enough. So we need to ask questions, experience faith through the lives and experiences of others. Get down to the nitty gritty stuff of seeking to fully comprehend God, so that we can more accurately represent God to the world around us. We need to recognize that the church is really just a faithful doubters club. And that’s ok.

Today can be the day that your faith is resurrected. Our doubts can become trust and our faith can become humble as we seek to do what the community of faith does best — experience the presence and love of the Resurrected Christ together in new and previously unimaginable ways.