Reasonable Doubt

Propers: The Second Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

No one believes that Jesus is Risen until they have seen and touched Him for themselves.

When the angels tell the women who have come to the tomb bearing myrrh that Jesus is Risen, they do not believe them. They weep and are afraid. Only when Jesus Himself appears to Mary Magdalene does she realize the power and reality of the Resurrection.

When the women return to the Apostles, telling them that the Lord is Risen and has appeared to Mary, the Apostles dismiss this as an idle tale. They are wondrous and afraid, but they dare not believe. Only when Christ appears to them in the flesh, revealing the scars of those fatal wounds inflicted upon Him, do they know for themselves that truly Christ is Risen.

Thomas is not with the other Apostles that first Easter morning. Unlike his fellows, he is out and about, risking death, braving a hostile city still hunting for followers of Jesus. Remember that Thomas has proven himself both loyal and bold, proclaiming to the disciples on the way to Jerusalem, “Let us go also, that we may die with Him.” Thomas is no coward, and no fool. Upon hearing that Jesus is Risen, he simply cannot believe it. No one does. The memories are too fresh, the wounds too raw. They all saw Jesus tortured, humiliated, murdered upon the Cross. Who could believe that Christ had simply stood up and walked out after some 40 hours in the grave?

And who are we to blame him as Doubting Thomas, when in fact he asks for no more proof than that given to Mary, given to Peter, given to all the other Apostles who would not believe until they had seen and touched the Lord for themselves? A week later—the second Sunday of Easter—the Risen Christ again appears amidst the gathered Apostles, and Thomas, now included amongst those who have witnessed the Resurrection for themselves, is the first to fall upon his knees and explicitly proclaim Christ as “my Lord and my God!” There is no hesitation in him now.

“Have you believed because you have seen Me?” Jesus queries. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” This is the Gospel of the Lord.

Now, what do you suppose is the lesson that we are to take away from this witness to the Resurrected Christ—that blind faith is a virtue, and doubt is not? This seems facile to me, and flatly contradicts the historic witness of the Church. Contrary to popular belief, the Church is not an institution which insists upon blind faith, but in fact has always offered us a reasonable faith—a faith that stands up to questioning, to inquiry, to logical investigation. Faith is to be tested, not as a quiz or a school exam, but tested as metal tried by fire to insure its purity and strength.

Faith can go beyond reason, for there is only so much that the human mind can encompass, but faith cannot go against reason, for God made both the rational world and the human mind capable of comprehending it. It is no coincidence that the modern scientific method of empirical inquiry arose amongst the relatively backward states of Christian Europe rather than the comparatively advanced empires of Islam or China, which had so many centuries’ head start.

I am a scientist myself by training. I’ve a degree in genetics, and used to work in a cancer lab. Science, inquiry, reason: these are not the enemies of faith but the tools of faith. Who could deny that the dramatic medical and technological advancements of the last century have been anything less than gifts from God?—when we aren’t misusing them to blow each other up, mind you.

Once, back when I was a hospital chaplain, an elderly woman approaching the end of her life confessed to me, with much anxiety, that she had her doubts about God, about religion. And these doubts terrified her, made her fear for her salvation. I told her what Luther taught us: that doubts are not the opposite of faith, but are in fact the very signs of faith. If this woman did not believe in Jesus Christ, she would have no worries at all. She would dismiss the whole affair out of hand. But that her doubts assailed her—this proved how important was her relationship to God. We do not fear losing that which we do not love.

It’s okay to have doubts. Everyone has doubts. Sarah laughed at the promises of God, while Abraham looked for loopholes. Moses doubted his calling, while Jonah fled from his to the ends of the earth. The very name given to the people of God, Israel, means “he who wrestles with God,” who strives and struggles with God. The Psalms, when we sing them, give to us a beautiful vocabulary of questions, of struggles, of doubts and fears and anguish. They give us permission to accuse God, to demand an accounting, all the while abiding in faith and love and pain. It takes a great deal of faith to question God, and even more to know that His love for us is greater than our presumptions.

Christianity has always been an intellectually robust religion. We have spent millennia in dialogue with philosophy and science, with ancient faiths and new discoveries. As your pastor, I don’t want your faith to be blind; I want your faith to be real! Don’t believe in Jesus just because I say so. Believe in Jesus because you know and love and trust Him, because you’ve encountered Him for yourselves and in your lives.

Now, you may ask how, exactly, we are to do that. Not many of us are graced with miraculous visions or prophetic dreams. We do not have the benefit of the Risen Christ regularly popping up at our worship, as Thomas and Mary and the Apostles had for those astonishing 40 days between the Resurrection and the Ascension. But Christ is still here. He is still Risen, still alive, and still at work in this world! We can still see Him and touch Him; we can still encounter Him for ourselves.

In all the Resurrection appearances of Jesus recorded in the Gospels, Jesus goes unrecognized even by those who knew and loved Him best in life, until He makes Himself known to them by calling out their names, by breaking bread with them, by opening the Scriptures to them. And these are still the ways in which we encounter the Risen Christ today.

He calls us by name in our Baptism; He breaks for us the Bread of Life when we gather in the Eucharist; and His own Holy Spirit opens to us the Scriptures, that we might encounter the living Word of God through the written Word of God. We are the Body of Christ now, all of us together, sharing His Spirit and His life, His Body and His Blood. And we are sent out so that others might know Jesus, might see and touch and hold Jesus, through us. This is what St Paul means when he proclaims, “It is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me.”

And then there are the wounds. The Risen Christ has kept His scars. Deep scars, that one might fit a finger into the wounds at His wrists, a hand into His pierced side. It is no coincidence, I think, that Thomas cannot know that Christ is Risen until He has touched the reality of His wounds, until Thomas has placed himself, quite literally, within the wounds of Christ. We are all of us born of that wounded side.

It is by His wounds, His suffering, His sacrifice that God is made known to us. The Cross is the ultimate revelation that God is love—for to love is to give of oneself, to suffer, for another, for the beloved. On the Cross, God gives all the He is to you. And so it is by encountering people in their wounds, and by revealing our own wounds to others, that a broken world comes to know the God who broke Himself upon the Cross to make us whole, to give us life, to bring us home in Him.

And so, dear Christians, in this season of the Resurrection, be brave like Thomas. Be brave to doubt, be brave to suffer, be brave to love. For you are Israel, the one who struggles and wrestles with God! You are the Church, the beloved Body and Bride of Christ! Be not blind in your faith, but be real in your faith.

For Christ is Risen—alleluia!—and He is Risen today in you.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.