'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 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?
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.