Second Sunday in Easter: Growing in faith from our doubts

The second Sunday in Easter: Growing in faith from our doubts

John 20:19-31

This morning’s reading always follows Easter. It is at the opposite end of what Easter is: the human need
for tangible proof. Between Easter and this Sunday’s story of doubting Thomas, we wrestle with the core
of Christian faith versus the facts of the story. Where Easter is the celebration around an event that can’t
be understood in rational terms, the story of Thomas is our natural reaction to it. Thomas voices what
we feel at times or have dealt with, that is, an attempt to understand Jesus’ resurrection and our faith in
purely rational terms. To echo last week’s theme, they both don’t make sense and aren’t supposed to,
because faith in Jesus and his resurrection comes from a spiritual connection to them. And like Thomas,
we struggle to balance our natural attraction to the facts, rather than balance them with a spiritual
understanding of the resurrection. Thomas’ crisis is not so much a crisis of faith as it is a crisis of
plausibility, trying to explain a spiritual encounter with Jesus in terms of what he can perceive and 
describe rationally.

In his book “Flee, Be Silent, and Pray,” Ed Cyzewski describes his faith and life as “saved by grace, but
when it comes to actually living like a Christian, I’ve spent years struggling to pray, failing to meet the
standards of my faith, and wondering if I’d somehow been abandoned by God.” He goes on to describe
Christians like him who “affirm grace and ‘faith alone’ in theory, but we also worry that we can never pray
enough, serve enough, evangelize enough, read the Bible enough, or ‘grow’ enough to satisfy God.” This
is the context that Thomas might have found himself in if he had lived today. We struggle with
proclaiming our belief in the risen Christ because we get wrapped up in justifying our faith through
Christian “things.” When the feeling of being abandoned, or ignored, or overlooked by God is mixed in,
there is a sense of urgency or even desperation in proving that we have faith, that we are worthy of God’s
salvation. Like Thomas, we want to put our hands in Jesus’ wounds, not just to satisfy our doubts from
trying to understand the resurrection logically, but to do something to find our faith.

Thomas’ crisis of plausibility is our crisis of plausibility as well. We pore over scripture and argue over
the finest of details, trying to show that our faith is true and justified. We fret and get angry over how
others don’t follow the truth obvious to us. We run from appearing to have a lack of faith from not doing
the right things, praying the right prayers, or making the right gestures. Our constant attempts to
defend our faith belies an unspoken questioning of it. But it is precisely this moment of questioning our
faith, the same moment that Thomas experienced when his hands touched Jesus’ wounds, that we
become open to the possibility that there is more than having a sensible, defendable explanation. That
uncomfortable moment when belief begins to appear to be based on flimsy arguments or meaningless
sayings or quotes is the moment when we have the opportunity to express our faith from a different
perspective.

It is not abandoning our faith, chasing after a false beliefs, or backsliding to define our faith through
experiencing it in a new context and describing it differently. It is not disobedience to God’s sovereignty
 to question our faith in search of a deeper spiritual understanding of Jesus and his resurrection.
 Thomas’ faith came from the living Christ who he could touch and hear, feel and listen to, just like our
 experience with the Bible. But in the moment when he was questioning his faith in the person of
 Jesus, at the moment he touched the wounds, he could see a new dimension of his faith by accepting
 the presence of the risen Christ. This new dimension didn’t come from trying harder or persevering
 despite his doubt, but instead from simply accepting the unprovable truth that his soul understood.
 The truth that he saw was the joy in his soul from the new reality of the risen Christ, and it was his
 questioning doubt that lead him to it.

When we strive for our faith through Christian “things,” we can end up questioning our faith because
God doesn’t respond the way we want, or doesn’t respond at all to our most heartfelt prayer. We try to
live in a faith built on our terms, built out of things we say and do, but Jesus instead affirms what he
calls us to: “Blessed are those who have not seen, yet have come to believe.” We don’t have to prove
our beliefs, demonstrate our worthiness, or justify our faith. We just have to believe and proclaim our
faith as a response to Jesus’ resurrected presence in our lives. It is only when Thomas allows his
physical experience of Jesus’ wounds to lead him to a spiritual understanding can he believe who and
what Jesus was as the Christ, the Messiah. His logical understanding of Jesus could only take him so
far, and when he was ready, it lead him to a deeper spiritual understanding.

Thomas’ encounter with the risen Christ provided a way for later Christians, including us, to have faith
without being eyewitnesses, to believe without proof. That is the power of Jesus’ resurrection: to have
faith for no other reason than because we believe that Jesus overcame eternal death with eternal life
by his resurrection. Eternal life brings hope for us and the world, that nothing is ultimately lost to
eternal death. Hope for the broken world we live in looks very different when we look at it this way, and
act in it because we believe that there is hope for it and for us. We don’t need to see or put our hands
into random acts of kindness or touch the radical advocacy of the disadvantaged to have faith that the
world can be resurrected from its brokenness. We just have to respond to the brokenness of the
world with Thomas’ words and astonishment: “My Lord and my God!” We can legitimately question
our faith in the way things are, and encounter the risen Christ in the most unlikely places that can heal
the brokenness.

Thomas was transformed from doubt to a deeper faith. We can be transformed, too, by letting our
doubts lead us to a more meaningful, deeper encounter with the risen Christ. And as we are
transformed, so can we transform the world from the logic of the status quo to one reflecting the hope
in Christ. No, it doesn’t make sense to the rational mind, and it isn’t supposed to. By accepting the
unexplainable mystery of Christ’s resurrection without effort on our part, we can have a peace-filled
faith and find a way to peace and wholeness in our world.