A Doubting Thomas, or a Choosing Thomas?
For 13 years, starting in the year 2000, I worked in biomedical research at U of L. I generated data every day, and the words said to me “If it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen” were the reason why I kept a detailed notebook and every machine printout from every experiment. It was a world of numbers and facts, much like the world where we prepare our tax returns, or know how many square feet our home is, or what the Angels baseball pitcher Shohei Ohtani’s ERA is this year (it’s 3.18). This is a familiar world to us, and one that Thomas and the disciples were living in when Jesus appeared to them in the closed up house. They wanted the facts, hard proof that Jesus was still alive, and who could blame them? They had spent months or years following Jesus around the countryside, listening and learning from him a new way to look at the world, themselves, and God. They had celebrated his arrival in Jerusalem, only to see him arrested, tried, and tortured to death in a very short time. Yes, they wanted proof that Jesus hadn’t failed, and this wasn’t all for nothing.
Several years ago, I had the privilege of sitting with a resident of the church home at the moment that she peacefully took her last breath and died, and I was there purposefully so that she wouldn’t die alone. It was a holy, deeply emotional moment where she left this world for the next, and the Holy Spirit was present and moved me to pray that she would be welcomed into a new life in God’s presence. At the end of that day, I was exhausted from the experience, yet I felt energized from witnessing this transition of life. This was the faith-filled world of Jesus, while he was alive and after he was resurrected. Words could not adequately describe what had happened to him after he died, how he had been transformed. But instead of a quiet, calm death, his was agonizing, slow, and intended to deprive him of his humanity. Who could blame him for coming back to show the disciples that there was more to him than his humanity and his experience of death?
When I worked in the research lab, I would sometimes extract fragile RNA from viruses and make a more stable DNA copy of it to work with. You can’t see RNA or DNA, so we used indirect ways of detecting it, measuring it, and characterizing it. It took a lot of faith to work with RNA or DNA, faith in your skill, faith in the instructions someone wrote down from their experience, and faith that all of the things you couldn’t control would work together. It was the same faith that I relied on to get me through the death of the church home resident. It was a curious place to be and work in, in both the world of fact and the world of faith. I still live in that space where they overlap, where I now work with the facts of words and analysis of scripture and the faith I have in God and Jesus to hear their voices in those words and proclaim the Gospel to the world. In the lab I learned that facts do not prove the validity of my faith, because sometimes my efforts failed. In the pulpit, I learned that my faith did not prove facts to be true because faith is belief in a truth that doesn't need to be proven. Yet together, seeing the results of my work or reading scripture both factually and with faith provided me with a deeper perspective than either one could offer alone. I saw truth in a different way when I looked for facts and looked with faith. Jesus pushed the disciples to do the same, to see the truth of who he was from both perspectives, because that was where the truth about Jesus and his death lay.
This is what I see happening in the closed up house where the disciples sat quietly, afraid of what would happen to them if they, as followers of Jesus were discovered. They knew what had happened to Jesus, they had seen it and talked about it as a fact. But only when Jesus appeared to them, said “Peace be with you,” and breathed the Holy Spirit on them did they begin to see him through faith. They understood that they could see Jesus both ways, as a person having died on the cross and as the resurrected Son of God, risen in glory. Jesus didn’t have to be a sinner put to death and so couldn’t be a prophet, as the world insisted. The disciples rejected that view because they found that they could live in both the factual world and the world of faith, seeing the nail holes in the hands of the living Christ. Jesus’ reappearance to Thomas and invitation to inspect his wounds was the bridge that Thomas needed to enter Jesus’ world of faith. I don’t think this was necessarily a weakness of Thomas’ faith, but instead Thomas’ unawareness that he didn’t have to make a choice between fact and faith. Where he insisted on seeing Jesus’ wounds to prove to himself that his faith was true, Jesus said that he didn’t have to see to believe, that his faith didn’t need facts. Blessed are those who have not seen, yet have come to believe.
We struggle with facts and faith in our lives, and sometimes we get them confused. We have seen this with the pandemic, where we retreated to faith when the facts about COVID from authoritative sources contradicted each other. We have seen this with the culture wars in America, where we have retreated to facts because different Christian faiths have contradicted each other around human sexuality, for example. We have fallen into the same trap that Thomas was caught in, putting facts before faith, or faith before facts, depending on what we wanted. And, really, who can blame us? We are scared like the disciples were scared. We’re scared of exposing our faith to ridicule, and scared that presenting facts will lead to scorn. We’re tired of having to pit one against the other, having to choose one over the other, and being called out for confusing the two. So, where do we meet Jesus when we are locked up in our rooms, too afraid to talk, too afraid to listen?
Our encounter with the risen Jesus in fact happens every day. We put our fingers in the nail holes in his hands and declare “My Lord and my God'' when we understand the difference between facts and faith and don’t use one to discount the other. That leads us to seeing ourselves and our world both as fact and as faith, together, and we hold them together in tension. That tension is uncomfortable, and creates the illusion that only one of them can be right, or be the truth. Yet they can be both true, without contradiction or incompatibility because that is our experience of Jesus resurrected when he says “Yes, I died, and I have risen. Look with your own eyes. Have faith.” That tension is in the person of Jesus, a human and God incarnate, died and risen, the Word walking among us. So, to have faith in Jesus is to have faith in that tension as well. Within that tension is the Holy Spirit, too, driving us and guiding us to see tension as part of a whole, as a source of insight, and reconciliation, and growth, not as something wrong that needs to be fixed.
Jesus’ resurrection doesn’t make sense, and it isn’t supposed to. This is what he was trying to get Thomas, and us to understand, that fact and faith don’t contradict each other, or are mutually exclusive. They co-exist, two perspectives that create a more complete picture that either one could alone. The peace in Jesus’ words “Peace be with you” is the peace from knowing that the conflict between facts and faith doesn’t have to exist, and that the tension between them won’t hurt us. There is so much more to see when we look at the world both ways, at the same time.
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