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March 30, 2008
Good Ol' Thomas
John 20:19-29
“Everybody says it, and what everybody says must be true,” wrote James Fenimore Cooper in the Novel, Miles Wallingford . This past year of presidential campaigning has brought that truism home for us, time and again. The power of rumor and opinion is far greater, often, than the truth. Repeated enough times, even the most distorted testimony can become common knowledge. It happens to both sides, it happens with frequency, especially in an era of blogs and text messages and the like.
The week after Easter, among the friends and associates of Jesus of Nazareth, the word was spreading fast, but not that fast. On the road to Emmaus strangers discuss what is being said in the city, and among the women and the disciples, there is much excitement in sharing -- He is risen!
There is one however, for whom the rumors and the shared consensus of those who have heard them is not enough, apparently, not even the eye witness testimony of several fellow disciples was sufficient. Thomas is a skeptic, a lone holdout. 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 his side, I will not believe.”
I have always been drawn to Thomas. One reason is obvious, we share the same name, but it is more than that. Thomas, with his questions and his reputation as a doubter has represented my point of view on a number of occasions. Perhaps the most poignant is the passage from John which is often read at funerals. Jesus says, “In my father's house are many rooms, when I go, I go to prepare a place for you and you know the way I am going.” At that point, Thomas says to him, “Lord we do not know the way? How can we know the way....?”
A few months ago I sat with someone who had just received a precarious diagnosis. In no uncertain terms, the doctors informed the patient that death could be imminent. “What is it like?” the patient asked me? “What is eternity like?” “What is heaven?” “Do I believe?”
The last thing that person needed from me was the rote recitation of some formula for salvation. What that person needed was an acknowledgement that I, too, have had questions -- that faith does not come easy to anyone. “I don't know. I don't know what heaven is like, I have no experience of it...but I do believe.” As did Thomas I believe but I also continue to wonder, and to question myself.
“Faith is the proof of what cannot be seen. What is seen gives knowledge not faith.” In spite of these words of Gregory the Great, the pope and saint from the sixth century known for calendars and chants as well as a considerable amount of wisdom, the church has always imposed a kind of judgment on any confessing Christian who also admitted to doubts. We have assimilated an understanding that solid faith means knowing the answers, to be a doubting Thomas, a questioning disciple consequently, is not considered a mark of faith, but just the opposite.
To win customers, doctrine is made simple and palpable for anyone in the new “church of seekers,” the lowest common denominator is sought and above all, controversy is to be avoided. Giant auditoriums surrounded by a vast sea of asphalt parking lots are the norm for these mega-churches, everything is homogenized, and the predominate mood is, well, happy.
There is a real problem related to understanding faith in this way. When natural doubts, questions, do occur, there is an inclination to either bury them, or skirt around them. And, when one runs from their unanswered questions, when one clings to the surface of things without taking the dive into the depths of meaning, one can end up wading in a pretty shallow pool. To experience life, is to encounter questions, isn't it? It is only the very young who know everything, the older we get, the less we realize we truly understand.
“Skepticism is a stimulant, not to be repressed,” wrote Garrison Keillor in his Gazette column the other day. 1 It is an antidote to smugness and the great glow of satisfaction one gains from being right. You know the self-righteous – I've been one myself,” he goes on. “Jesus was rougher on those people than he was on the adulterers and prostitutes.”
In the mid 1970's, a Dutch Roman Catholic Cleric named Edward Schillebeeckx, published the first volume of a trilogy, called Jesus. He was seeking to re-examine the essential core of the faith, Christology, in the light of modernity. It caused an uproar in the church. The questions he raised led to his temporarily being silenced by the Vatican while they studied his intentions. Schillebeeckx wrote the following in the introduction to a commentary on his own work. “The pluralism of accents which is so much a mark of our church life seems to me at the deepest level to be not so much a pluralism of dogmatic views, as a 'pluralism of anxieties and concerns.'“ As an author and a man of the church, he was seeking to make more accessible the person of Jesus Christ, and to do so against the backdrop of the modern world. We live in a different world than First Century Palestine; our Gospel is the narrative of the experiences of many witnesses. “The New Testament writers never give us the Christian gospel neat; it is always coloured [sic] by and the shades of their own world.” 2 How far can their interpretive work go to inspire us to a closer relationship with the God of Faith?
Are there not other questions which we need to be asking, unique and sometimes disturbing questions which are for us sometimes as difficult to frame as those which Thomas braved even in the company of Jesus in his own time?
My guess is that we all have our areas of uncertainty about what we believe. My conviction is that in the tradition of Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord, and Moses confronting God with the complaints of the Israelites in the wilderness, through Jeremiah's laments to the uncertainty of Thomas, that it is precisely by traveling the rocky path of questioning, confrontation of our doubts, and acknowledgement of our uncertainties that we come into and develop a depth of faith in the Lord of Life .
In that upper room, where the disciples had gathered for a second time one week after Easter, comes Thomas, who missed the first appearance of Jesus. Thomas was the doubter, who took the risk of confronting Jesus with his own uncertainties. Jesus did not chastise him or did he rebuke him. He did not say, as the church has perhaps heard him say, “How much more blessed are those who have not seen me and still believe.” Thomas had no way of knowing that Jesus was going to reappear that Sunday morning. He had no way of knowing that his doubts would ever be satisfied, yet he was there. He was with the twelve. He had not left the community of faith because of his uncertainties. Rather, in spite of his doubts he was willing to number himself as one of them. In fact, Thomas was the only one of the twelve who asserted his faith without the benefit of an initial visitation of the Resurrected Christ. We can assume that his doubts were addressed by Jesus' subsequent appearance, but for me, his very presence in the room with the others demonstrates his willingness to risk faith even in the midst of his own skepticism.
Thomas in our Gospels stands for a kind of doubt which Paul Tillich calls “in spite of” doubt. It is not doubt which avoids. It is not doubt which denies -- it is a function rather of faith. Embracing the element of insecurity which is empirical to any kind of human truth, doubt becomes an element of faith. “The Courage to Be” in Tillich's words. The doubt of Thomas serves to point us to the ultimate concerns of faith. Concrete expressions of our faith found in concern for wholeness, concern for healing, concern for human dignity, concern for the integrity of all life, and a willingness to openly discuss the dangers and the fears we all have that these the desires we have for ourselves and for our world may be beyond our reach. It is, ironically, this disquietude, this unwillingness to give up to pat answers or to capitulate ultimately to isolation and fear and loneliness that took Thomas right into the company of Christ.
Joseph House was an HIV/AIDS hospice in Washington, D.C. at the height of the crisis in the early Nineties. Among its residents like Leroy, who was one of the residents there, has stories of having been given up and having given up on themselves, each has a testimony about anger and lack of hope which remained self- destructive in the context of his own isolation. Through the grace of God, which at the time he did not acknowledge or comprehend, Leroy found the community of Joseph House. “It's a home of understanding, love, care and companionship...we are learning to be as one in this house...the sick helping the sick, the oppressor helping the oppressed, feeling free to express our thoughts without having to hold back feelings or determine which to express.”
The Ethicist, Larry Rasmussen, talks about what he calls feisty hope , hope which is independent of optimism or pessimism. It was that kind of hope that Thomas was acting upon, hope which transcends doubts. “What resurrection hope does do,” says Rasmussen, is “generate the energy for life which leads to caring and commitment, and does so on the home turf of a hopeless situation.” Thomas, compelled by all the sorts of very human feelings, we might imagine was drawn to that room and into community in the very presence of the risen Lord.
In a book filled with signs and wonders, as is the Gospel of John, it is at this moment, this “doubting Thomas moment,” that the revelation of the Jesus moves beyond a particular time and place and the witness of certain historical individuals into the transcendent. It was his doubts which brought him back, but Thomas never does reach out to touch, but rather in that moment of recognition understands, is overwhelmed by faith and confesses, for us all, My Lord and my God!”
A young woman, Karin, who is the daughter of the director of Joseph House and lived there in the community said in an article several years ago, “I'm glad that I can see another side of life, the people here have a lot of life, which is kind of ironic. They give me a different perspective on things. They're honest about their pain in a way that other people won't be. They're able to share their suffering, and I grow up through it.” She pauses a moment and then reflects, “Here it's like the bad part is over. It's not death anymore -- it's rejuvenation.” 3 (…or, Resurrection!)
Good ol'e Thomas! He is me…he is us. “Have you believed because you have seen me?” said the Risen Lord. A question to which I am sure the people of Joseph house would answer, “Yes!” and perhaps so would many of us, who have traveled to some pretty bad places in our lives, and then found once again our way up into the light -- “yes.” “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe...” Amen.
1 Garrison Keillor, The Gazette , Friday, March 21, 2008, page 2A
2 Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord, Oct 25, 1983
3 Joseph House, (Soujourners May, 1992)
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