Sermon – “Faith & Doubt”
John 20:19-29
April 11, 2021
Chris Coon, PBPC
Introduction
I want to claim that I was an early adopter of Facebook, way back in 2007 or so. I also have to confess that I have never posted a single thing on my Facebook page. I have just never been motivated to enter into the social media world, or felt the need to let everyone know what I’m up to. But I have a large family, and many of them are on Facebook, and I often get email notifications that one of them has posted something, and I usually take a look. One of my millennial-generation nieces posted a quote that read, “It is more important to be Christ-like than a Christian.” Wow – that’s a loaded statement. For some, it’s profound; for others, it’s obvious; and for yet others, perhaps heresy. It speaks about the high regard for Jesus that many, especially younger, people have; while at the same time downplaying or outright dismissing the importance of faith. In fact, one of the responses to the posting from another person came right out and said, “It is not important to be a Christian.” It’s interesting, because on the one hand over the years I have engaged with Christians who were so focused on their belief in Jesus that they didn’t feel like it required anything of their lives, other than to keep from sinning too horrifically. But now on the other extreme we have a younger generation who has perhaps seen too many people who appear to be Christian in name only, and they’ve taken up the position that all that really matters is following the ethical example of Jesus; belief in Jesus as anything more than an enlightened human being is unnecessary.
Issues of faith and doubt and who Jesus is and how we should respond to him are not new – they go back to the beginning, in fact to the first day after Jesus’ resurrection. So today we spend a little time with one of Jesus’ disciples named Thomas, who has gained the nickname over the years, deserved or undeserved, as Doubting Thomas.
John 20:19-29
19 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.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 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.”
26 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.” 27 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.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 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.”
Thomas the Doubter
The disciples have an encounter with the risen Jesus on the evening of the Resurrection, that very first Easter Day. What an incredible moment, as the despair and the confusion and the fear are all suddenly met by the presence of Jesus himself. Even though the room where they are staying together is closed up and the door is locked, suddenly Jesus is right there in the midst of them. What a shock! But Jesus’ first words are, “Peace be with you.” There is no need to fear. And in case they doubted who this was, or thought he was a ghost, he showed them his scars – the nail marks in his hands and wound in his side from the spear. This was Jesus in the flesh, the risen Christ. And the disciples were filled with joy.
But there was one who wasn’t there with them that evening: Thomas, also called Didymus, or the Twin. We don’t know why he wasn’t with them; each of us mourns and deals with disappointment in our own way, and perhaps Thomas was one who preferred to be alone as he dealt with the loss of his teacher. Thomas was a somewhat dour character, from the few lines he speaks in John’s gospel, and he seems to be a practical realist. When the other disciples excitedly tell him about their encounter with the risen Jesus, he is unwilling to reengage his disappointed hopes. He doesn’t know what the other disciples experienced, but he won’t believe unless he personally sees Jesus and touches his wounds.
Now Thomas has kind of gotten a bad rap over the years, with his name becoming linked to the adjective “doubting.” But all of the other disciples believed after they had seen – seen the empty tomb, seen the grave clothes lying there with no body, seen Jesus himself when he appeared to them. Thomas merely wants the same confirmation for himself before he will believe that Jesus has risen from the dead and is therefore who he claimed to be: the Messiah.
The Blessedness of Doubt
It’s important to acknowledge that a certain amount of doubt is good. God has created us in God’s image, which means that we have the ability to think and to understand and to apply our intelligence to the issues before us. Unfortunately, we also live in a fallen world, and there is deception; some people use their God-given creativity and free-will to deceive others. And then of course there is human fallibility: often people are just wrong about things. For this reason, we need to be on the alert to discern what is true and what is false. A healthy amount of doubt can be a good thing.
But doubt should not be an end in itself. Our goal, especially when it comes to issues of eternal consequence like our relationship with God, should be to find the truth. There is a form of doubt that seems to only seek a reason not to believe, to justify not ever making any sort of commitment of faith. But integrity calls us to engage with the truth claims of Jesus Christ, to search and to understand as best we can, using the minds and hearts that God has given us. Doubt can actually be helpful in pushing us to deepen our understanding and strengthen our grasp of truth. But doubt should never be an end in itself; truth should be the goal.
Eventually our response to Jesus will require a step of faith. Thomas was with the rest of the disciples one week later when Jesus appeared again, this time with a special encounter with Thomas. After seeing Jesus and seeing the scars, just as he had required, Thomas fell down and was the first person to say, “My Lord and my God.” Thomas was blessed, and he wasn’t faulted for wanting firsthand proof. But at the same time, Jesus points forward to the future and those who would come to faith when he was no longer physically present. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
What Is Belief?
The purpose of John’s entire gospel is that we would come to believe. As the final verse of this chapter goes on to say, this is “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.” But we need to get past our modern understanding of the word believe, which is usually understood to mean intellectual assent to a proposition, such as that two plus two equals four, or that the earth orbits the Sun. While these statements are true in a factual sense, believing them probably does not make any difference in terms of who I am or what my eternal destiny will be.
Belief in the biblical sense is more wholistic, much more akin to faith or trust – I believe something to be true not just with my intellect, but with my heart and my whole being. Biblical believing is, above all belief, in a person – a personal trusting in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, the one who brings us into true relationship with God. But this believing is completely life-transforming, because it leads us, like Thomas, to proclaim, “My Lord and my God!” To proclaim that Jesus is God is to worship him; and to proclaim that Jesus is Lord is to give your life to him.
To return to that Facebook post: We can see from John’s gospel that it is not more important to be Christ-like than to be a Christian. The purpose of the gospel is that we believe in Jesus. But we must also become like Jesus, and we can’t do this apart from Jesus. By believing in him, we will have life, his life, flowing through us; and this will define who we are and all that we do, for we will be living for Christ and Christ will be living through us. Evidence of this: the Bible tells us that Thomas went on to be a leader in the early church as it exploded on the scene in Jerusalem and then spread through the Mediterranean world – he was all-in; and church tradition tells us that Thomas went on to take the gospel message all the way to India, planting the first community of faith there, and the Christians in the state of Kerala trace their lineage of faith back to apostle Thomas.
Conclusion
We cannot separate being Christlike from being a Christian, we cannot divorce being like Jesus from believing in him. True belief is what the gospel is all about, because true belief means entering into a relationship with Jesus; it means proclaiming Jesus as Lord and God; and it means entrusting our lives to him – both our lives in this world as well as our eternal lives. It is through this wholehearted belief in Jesus that we have life in his name. And it is only through believing in Jesus that we can be like him, because it is through believing that we take on his life and his spirit and are sent by him into the world.