Doubting Thomas and Authentic Faith of 'Show, Don't Tell'

'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 authorities, 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."

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.'

--John 20: 19-31

Back in my acting days my directors would always say, “don’t tell me, show me.” What does that mean? Telling is about relaying information, it’s cerebral.  Showing, on the other hand, is experiential.  It says something without having to use words.  Telling instead of showing is seen in the artistic world as being, well, kinda lazy. The Russian playwright Anton Chekov once said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining, but show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

The disciples who were met by the resurrected Jesus on Easter morning were so moved by the experience that they had to tell the only one not there that day about it. And that, of course, was Thomas. I’m sure they were very detailed in their explanation, painting a perfect mental picture, but Thomas doesn’t believe them.  Perhaps because he’s had his heart broken once and he doesn’t want to get his hopes up and have them dashed again. Thomas isn’t about telling, he wants to be shown.  So, the next week Jesus arrives in the same manner and shows Thomas the nail and spear marks on his body, prompting Thomas to give that beautiful exclamation, “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus appears to Thomas.

Jesus was a show-er.  Before his crucifixion Jesus showed people the love and mercy of God, he didn’t just tell them about it.  And after his resurrection, he doesn’t just rely on the disciples to tell Thomas that he has been raised, but he comes to Thomas and shows him that he’s alive.  

But, preacher, I hear you saying, doesn’t Jesus chastise Thomas for him only believing upon seeing Jesus? “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe”? We call him Doubting Thomas for a reason. To that I say, good job paying attention to the text! And also, I’m afraid that we’ve done a disservice over time, both to “Doubting” Thomas and to the text itself when we’ve used this line by Jesus as a kind of endorsement for what we might call blind faith – believing whole heartedly in something without any evidence to back it up. 

First of all, if you know anything about the communities that produced the four canonical Gospels, you will understand that the community of this Gospel, John, the Fourth Gospel, definitely bore a grudge against other Christian communities. You see, communities of faith grew up around the apostles and their stories about Jesus, which were all different, hence the reason why we not only have four canonical Gospels, but many, many others, including: the Gospels of Peter, Mary Magdalene, and Thomas. All of these communities had different ways of telling the Jesus story, and the community of the Fourth Gospel, reported to have been based around eye-witness accounts from the apostle John that were passed on, saw their story as the most authoritative, and so in the Fourth Gospel you see not-so-favorable depictions of these other apostles: Peter loses the race to the tomb, Mary Magdalene’s testimony isn’t believed, and Thomas is chastised for his unbelief. So it’s not so much Jesus being upset at Thomas as it is John’s Gospel community getting a dig in at Thomas’ Gospel community. Denominational rivalries have existed as long as there have been followers of Jesus, sadly. All this has happened before, and it will happen again!

Furthermore, when Jesus gives that famous benediction – “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe”. – it is less about Thomas specifically and more about the community who received the Fourth Gospel. Remember that none of those people knew Jesus or met him – either in his original or resurrected form. To pronounce a blessing on those who have not seen him and yet still believed his message is to lend support and encouragement to not only this Gospel community, but also every single person thereafter who would come to believe the Good News of Jesus of Nazareth without ever actually having met him. 

This, of course, includes us today. And is there anyone of us right now who doesn’t have doubts at times? Of course not! I wouldn’t be a priest now had my priest growing up not encouraged my own questions and created space for me to explore my doubts and curiosities. She encouraged me to be more like Thomas, to make my faith experiential, not just cerebral. For anyone to interpret this Gospel today – a story we hear every single year on the second Sunday of Easter - as a knock on Thomas and on anyone who doubts or has questions about Jesus, the resurrection, God, or whatever misses the point, not only of what the community of the Fourth Gospel was up to but also what Jesus himself models about faith: that it is to be shown, not just told, experiential, not just cerebral. It is to be questioned and wondered about and even, at times, doubted, for in and through the questions, wonders, and doubts, lies true faith. Blessed Theresa of Calcutta – Mother Theresa – came under fire after her death when journals were discovered in which she admitted that she had doubts and even questioned the existence of God while caring for poor and dying children in her city. Would anyone challenge the authenticity of her faith? Not likely. To doubt isn’t blasphemous, it is the path to authentic faith. To doubt and wonder is to be curious, and to be curious is to be childlike, and do we remember what Jesus said about being childlike and inheriting the Kingdom of God? 

St. Theresa of Calcutta, whose own doubts led to a deeper, more meaningful faith.

In a manner of speaking, Thomas is very much a model disciple for all of us because he would rather have an experience than simply believe something blindly.  Faith should not just be informational but lived out, it is to be shown.  Jesus showed himself to Thomas in order that Thomas may go and show his faith to others—which history says he did among people as far east as modern-day India, Mother Theresa’s backyard. Coincidence?  

One of my favorite tv shows is the 1960s British spy drama The Prisoner, which has an oft repeated line “Questions are a burden to others and answers a prison for one’s mind.” Fortunately, that ain’t how Jesus works. Because Thomas’ example reminds us that it is in questioning that we go deeper in our relationship with God and achieve greater spiritual, mental, and emotional maturity.  Our wondering, our doubting leads us to a place where merely telling is not enough.  

Truthfully, if we are to go out into the world and make disciples, as Jesus instructs us to do, simply telling will not do it; in fact, it often pushes people away. People want to be invited into an experience of the resurrected Jesus, they want to be shown the power of his love and mercy.  Lex orandi, lex cretendi, goes the old saying – ‘The law of prayer shapes the law of belief.’ How we pray – with action in our lives not just words – shows the world what we believe. Jesus showed himself to Thomas, can we not do the same?  For his example we give thanks, and blessed Thomas, pray for us.  

To Hell and Back: What Isn't Possible Now?!

The Harrowing of Hell.

Every year in the Before Time – pre-COVID – I would make a joke on Easter Sunday about how nice it was to see everyone I hadn’t seen since Christmas or last Easter. But seeing as I had COVID at Christmas and wasn’t even back from my medical leave last Easter, that joke kind of lost its punch this year, so on Easter Sunday I was simply happy to see everyone that I saw.

I said these words to my parish on that Resurrection Sunday, but it applies to us all, I believe. Because we made it, y’all. We actually made it. We made it through Holy Week and celebrating a full schedule for the first time in four years. We made it through Lent and those insanely long Gospel readings from John and the pangs of our fasts. We made it through outbreaks, starts and stops and restarts to our common life together. We made it through pandemic and plague. We made it through the sadness of loss and the empty spaces in our hearts where once those we loved took up residence. We made it. To be sure, brothers and sisters, this has been a Feast of the Resurrection in more ways that one. Alleluia! 

As I said at the Great Vigil, everything is different now because of what Jesus did. Each year we gather to not only remember that fact but to ponder what it means for our own lives right now. Christ is alive. IS. Present tense. No longer bound to distant years in Palestine, as the hymn says. This isn’t some memorial, some day to remember an event that once took place, no, this is a lived experience, a present reality for right here and now. Death is conquered, we are free, and Christ has won the victory. 

Anything is possible now. Anything. Because Jesus has done that which no one else could’ve done, and no, I’m not talking about being dead and getting back up because just a few weeks ago he raised his friend Lazarus, who was dead even longer than he was! No, what Jesus has done is that he has gone to hell and come back out the other side. That might not be a pleasant thing to ponder, Jesus going to hell. But we do believe it. Every time we reaffirm our baptismal promises or recite the Apostles Creed we declare that he has descended to the dead – or to borrow the older language of Rite I and the Prayer Books of years gone by, he descended into hell. And let me tell you, if Jesus can go to hell and come back out the other side, then what in the world is there that cannot be done, huh?! What is it that is impossible now that Jesus has gone to hell, grabbed Adam and Eve by the hands, pulled them up out of their graves, told everyone there, “Come on y’all, you’re free now!” and locked the doors of hell from the inside?! The fact that you are all still standing after everything we’ve been through is a testament to how amazing our God is, how there is nothing that is impossible because the God we know and love and worship and adore is the God who in Jesus took the instrument of shameful death, embraced it, made friends with it, and transformed it into an instrument for life. 

There has perhaps never been a better Easter sermon preached than the one Saint John Chrrysostom – the Golden-Tongued one – preached around the year 400. He knew way back then what it meant for Jesus to do what no one else could ever do. "Hell", he said, "was in an uproar because it was done away with. It was in an uproar because it is mocked. It was in an uproar for it is destroyed, it is annihilated, it is now made captive. Hell took a body and discovered God. It took earth and encountered heaven. It took what it saw and was overcome by what it did not see. Christ is risen, and life is liberated!" Good luck to any preacher ever topping that!

Saint John Crysostom

And life being liberated means that everything has been liberated, everything has been redeemed. Everything. No Gnostics around here, nu huh! The entire created order – humanity, animals, plants, dirt, sky, sea, all of it – is redeemed in the Resurrection of Jesus; after all, he is the one through whom ALL things are made, and thus ALL things are redeemed and find their perfection. In the Resurrection we are given a renewed calling to live in harmony, not just with one another but all of creation. In the Resurrection is the hope of creation itself, that we can once more know who we are and whose we are and live in right relationship with one another, with our planet, and with God, just as we did in the Garden. In the Resurrection we need not seek power, prestige, and possession to fill that God-shaped void in our being because God has not only come to us but we have been raised to God – we who are the very Body of Christ are raised with Christ’s own earthly Body to the fullness of resurrection glory. 

We must remember, though, that Jesus took his scars with him when he got up. Resurrection, after all, does not erase trauma, but it does transform and transfigure trauma. Even the Christus Rex, our parish's symbol of Jesus’ triumph over death that hangs on the wall behind the altar, bears the wounds in his hands and feet. Easter Sunday does mark the beginning of something different because of the Resurrection, yet that doesn’t mean we no longer bear whatever scars we have born through whatever fiery hells we have encountered. For Christ to be raised with his wounds, though, means that even our pain, our failings, our scars are redeemed, given new meaning and hope. We can wear them proudly now, no longer afraid of them, but grateful even for where they brought us.  Every broken road has led us to this happy morning. Because Jesus has literally loved the hell out of every single one of us! 

He IS risen. Indeed. So if he IS risen, and we with him, then where do we go from here? He told Mary – who blessedly had eyes to see and recognize him in spite of her own scars – that he was going to Galilee, to the region just north of Jerusalem where he did most of his earthly ministry. There, he said, you will see me. So where is Galilee? It’s everywhere that you find the children of God longing for and meeting the resurrected Jesus: 

It is the hospital room where the person lies in pain, longing for a shot of love from anyone who would visit. 

It is the prison where the one who sits in sorrow and remorse over his crime wishes to just know that God has not utterly forsaken him. 

It is the drag show where those told they were accursed and sinful find belonging and meaning through art and expressions of God’s fabulous love.

 It is the steps of the government building where the parents who buried their child have the courage to call for legislation that might prevent another family from suffering the same fate. 

It is anywhere that the cry for justice, for peace, for love, for mercy, for healing, can be heard. Those are the places, where Jesus was found in his earthly ministry, and those are the places, resurrected people of God, to which we are called this day. Those are the places where we will not only see Jesus even still, but may be Jesus to others. You’ve heard it said that you might be the only Bible anyone ever reads? Well, you might be the only Jesus anyone ever meets. So go love the hell out of ‘em, just like Jesus! 

Resurrection is real, y’all. I’m living proof of that! So are you! What will you do with this wild, precious, resurrected life of yours?