"Believing Thomas"

Second Sunday of Easter + Year A (RCL)

The Sunday after Easter is often called “Thomas Sunday” because we read the Gospel about so-called Doubting Thomas every year on this day. Thomas is a good example to us, because – whether we like to admit it or not – we all struggle with doubt from time to time.

Paul Tillich, the Lutheran theologian who fled Nazi Germany in 1940, helps us to put our doubts into proper perspective: 

Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith;
it’s an  element of faith.

So, I think we need to understand the proper role of doubt in our faith.

Thomas is held up to us every year as a kind of “bad example.” He wasn’t there when Jesus first appeared to his disciples after the Resurrection. They told him about it, but he didn’t believe them.

Does that mean that he didn’t hope they were telling the truth, that he didn’t want it to be true? Or does it mean that, in spite of wanting to believe, he was only human – he didn’t dare believe, to allow himself to think that Jesus wasn’t really dead?

If Tillich is right, if doubt is a part of faith, then we need to figure out where it fits.

The evangelist Dr Charles Stanley has identified three levels of faith.

He calls the first “struggling faith.”

It is characterized by the passage from Mark, chapter 9, in which a father brought his son, possessed by an evil spirit, to Jesus to be healed. When Jesus told the father that anything was possible to someone who truly believed, the father cried out, “I do believe! Help my unbelief!” All of us may echo these words from time to time.

Dr Stanley calls the second level of faith “reaching faith.”

He reminds us of the woman in Luke, chapter 8, who had been ill for 12 years. As she came near Jesus, she said to herself, “If I can only touch the hem of his garment, I'll be healed.” Like that woman, we sometimes seem to feel that if we can only do something, or think something, all will be well.

The last level of faith Stanley calls “resting faith” and it is described in Mark 11:24 – “anything you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and you will have it.”

I don’t have any problem with Dr Stanley defining this as the highest goal of faith, nor with trying our best to reach that point. Where I differ with him is that this is a goal that few ever attain – even the saints struggle with doubts. I won’t stand here and tell you that you can have certainty if you just try hard enough. That doesn’t work.

There must be a place for doubt in our believing, and this is what I think it is: 

To doubt is to admit that we are human, weak, sinful, incomplete – in other words, that we need God’s help.

The good news is that God gives us “signs and wonders” all the time. Like Thomas, we sometimes need to see in order to believe, or perhaps it’s just in order to know that we do believe. That’s why I believe we should call this apostle “Believing Thomas.” Doubt is a natural part of believing, not a failure to believe or a betrayal of the person in whom we believe.

C.S. Lewis expressed what I consider to be the reality of being a Christian: 

If ours is an examined faith,

we should be unafraid to doubt.

He pointed out that doubt may reveal that something was not worth believing, or it may confirm our faith and make it stronger. Either way, we grow in our faith, and doubt is a part of that growth process.

Let us show forth in our lives the fact that we believe in Jesus Christ, that we proclaim his resurrection and its promise to everyone, and let us accept our own doubts as proof that we are thinking beings who are still striving to live up to these promises.

Like Doubting Thomas, we dearly want to believe, but we also want to see. Until we get that proof, we continue to show forth in our lives that, even in the presence of doubts – perhaps especially in the presence of doubts – we have faith and we live that faith. Amen!