John 20:24-31
Thomas, the one called Didymus, one of the Twelve, wasn’t with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples told him, “We’ve seen the Lord!”
But he replied, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand into his side, I won’t believe.”
26 After eight days his disciples were again in a house and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus entered and stood among them. He said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side. No more disbelief. Believe!”
28 Thomas responded to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!”
29 Jesus replied, “Do you believe because you see me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.”
30 Then Jesus did many other miraculous signs in his disciples’ presence, signs that aren’t recorded in this scroll. 31 But these things are written so that you will believe that Jesus is the Christ, God’s Son, and that believing, you will have life in his name. (Common English Bible)
“Help in Unbelief:
Reconciling Faith and Belief,” Week One
Across
the country, from New York to California, lighthouses built upon concrete
arrows arose throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s, and it was for a
pretty simple reason, really.
We
had finally figured out how to fly. What
we hadn’t figured out yet, in typical human fashion, was how to know where to
go next once we actually got airborne.
Which,
when you think about it, really was a stumper of a problem, because this was
well before the electronic revolution that gave us the navigational tools we
take for granted today like GPS, Google Maps, or even the universal use of
radar.
But
the fine folks at the US Postal Service of all places (yes, the USPS—we make
fun of them now in the age of email and text messages, but they used to be
cutting edge) came up with, in true USPS fashion, a profoundly technologically
basic but still effective solution: they would install these lighthouses—these
bare-bones towers with lights, really—across the country, enable them to emit
light in different colors, and then set them upon giant concrete arrows that
pointed pilots towards the next concrete arrow and tower, and then the next,
until they finally reached their destination.
(And as it turns out, you can even still visit a few of them today.)
That
wasn’t enough to ensure their pilots’ safety, though—after all, aviation was
barely twenty years old at this point, not even old enough to get past the
bouncer at a club, and so the government also laid emergency landing
fields—basically just a strip of concrete in the ground in some places—every 25
miles along the aviation routes.
So
if you could imagine essentially flying blind by contemporary standards in that
you have no electronic instruments at your disposal, and you had to rely on
glimpsing these concrete arrows on which was a blinking beacon atop a
tower…that’s a pretty remarkable act of faith to be willing to do that job,
even with an emergency airfield every 25 miles.
And
I use that word on purpose, because while the pilots, the USPS itself, and the
country believed in this rudimentary system, it took faith to actually adhere
to it, to put it into practice. And that
is what we’ll be talking about today, and for the next six weeks: the
difference between belief and faith.
This
is a new sermon series for the church season of Easter—that’s right, a season,
not just a holiday. According to the
church calendar, Easter lasts for the fifty days between the day the empty tomb
is discovered by Mary Magdalene (and, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the other
female disciples of Jesus) and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the
assembled followers of Jesus on Pentecost as described in Acts 2.
During
the first forty of those fifty days, the newly-resurrected Jesus made several
appearances to His followers so that they may know that He was well and truly
brought back from the dead, and so that their belief in Him as the Son of God
might be made complete.
But
their belief was not—is not—enough.
Jesus commissions His followers to, in the words of His brother James in
his own letter in the New Testament, to be doers of the Word, not merely
hearers.
And
to be a doer of the Word, belief is only part of the recipe. One must have faith as well. After all, belief at its core is merely an
intellectual assent to reality. I
believe the sky is blue, or that the Royals will win another World Series title
(reality, right?!).
That
is why, whenever I baptize someone, I do not just ask for a statement of belief—the
“Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, the Son of God” part, but
also for an affirmative action of faith—“and do you accept Him as your Savior?”
Faith
is acting on those beliefs, and that is where I think Christianity sometimes
misses the forest for the trees. We care
so much about right doctrine that we lose sight of right faith and right
action.
That
tendency is on full display in what we label today’s passage as: it’s the story
of who? Doubting Thomas. Except that isn’t who Thomas is. The Greek word that John uses—and while Greek
is clearly a second language for John, he is also able to adroitly use it to
create humor, double meanings, and other literary motifs that can be easily
lost in translation—is apistos, which
doesn’t mean “doubt,” but “unbelief.”
Okay,
why does this matter, though? What’s the
difference between doubt and unbelief?
Well…that’s like asking, what’s the difference between belief and faith?
Jesus
tries to parallel Thomas in His words in verse 27—which reflect Thomas’s own in
verse 25—such that He is trying to create a mirror antithesis for Thomas rather
than simply an opposing view. He is
trying to bounce Thomas’s words back to him, so that Thomas can move 180
degrees.
Why
does this distinction even matter, though?
To borrow from John scholar Gail O’Day:
Jesus offers Thomas
everything he asked for, so that Thomas can move from unbelief to belief…This
story is not about Thomas’s doubt and skepticism, but about the abundant grace
of Jesus who meets Thomas’s demands point for point in order to move him to
faith. Notice that John does not narrate
that Thomas actually puts his finger in Jesus’s hands or side. The story moves directly from Jesus’s
invitation to Thomas’s confession of faith.
It’s
a very simple pivot-point story: Thomas starts at one end, is guided to the
other end by Jesus, and reacts accordingly, exclaiming, “My Lord and my God,”
and worshiping Jesus.
Thomas
is able to move spiritually from one to the other despite not actually using
what was put in front of him—the very wounds of Jesus. He is, then, a little bit like those pilots
of yesteryear who moved from one place to another without all the navigational
tools we place in front of ourselves.
They each moved, from our modern perspective, on a considerable amount
of faith.
Thomas,
then, really does get a bad rap for “doubting.”
He had enough cojones to actually voice his doubts in the first place
when he alone was the dissenting opinion by this point (although it was because
the other disciples had already encountered the risen Christ previously, with
Thomas absent for some reason—maybe he was working on his skee-ball game. We’ll never really know for sure).
But
this is a story that should reflect well upon Thomas, because it is in Thomas
that John’s audience—us—is meant to find itself. We are that person lost in apistos, in unbelief, not doubt, but
simply an absence of belief, and to whom Jesus reaches out to and speaks to in
order to invite us once more into faith.
The
title of this sermon series, “Help in Unbelief,” comes from the series’ final
story from Mark 9, when the father of a stricken child hears Jesus say to him,
“All things can be done for someone who believes,” and cries out in response,
“I believe, help me in my unbelief!”
We
begin this series, then, with an instance of such help, and such grace, from
Jesus to one of His followers, Thomas. Thomas,
I think, wants to believe. Nowhere does
John say that he does not, and if Thomas were some halfheartedly committed,
fairweather follower, he would have probably jumped ship long ago, because in
John, the opponents of Jesus—the chief priests, the scribes, and the teachers
of the law—are out for him from the start as a result of John’s placement of
the cleansing of the temple at the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry rather
than at the very end like in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Thomas
has seen and believed, as Jesus says, and he has seen it all: the betrayal, the
arrest, and now the resurrection.
Blessed is he who has seen and believed, indeed.
But
so too, Jesus says, is the person who did not see and live through the
Passion. Blessed is the person who has
not seen, Jesus says, yet still believes.
I
wasn’t there, in first century Jerusalem, for the Passover. I know of no one else who has. I haven’t been there, I have seen those sites
now, but not then. But like Thomas, I long
to believe.
And
so, John says, these things have been written so that a latter-day Thomas can
believe. So that someone like me can
believe. So that someone like you can
believe.
Even
if you do not entirely know in which direction your life is going. Even if you cannot completely see where you
are going next.
Thomas,
were he one of our early pilots, would finally have seen the light flickering
out from one of the towering beacons, lighting the arrow showing the way
forward.
Maybe
that is what we need as well, a giant arrow pointing the way forward for us.
It
would certainly make a lot of things much easier.
But
even with those arrows, the pilots still faced a huge challenge.
Knowing
the way forward doesn’t mean the path is walked for you. It only means that you have faith that the
path should be walked.
May
that faith you have in your hearts and in your souls be renewed, then, in this
story of one disciple caught in the throes of unbelief named Thomas.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
April
3, 2016
