Days of faith and doubt
Preacher: Revd Dr Isabelle Hamley, Principal, Ridley Hall, Cambridge
Readings: John 20:19-31; Revelation 1:4-8
Good morning.
I wonder what the best, most exciting event of the last decade has been for you and your closest friends? Was it a celebration, a wedding, a party, a festival, a sports final? Now, imagine that this amazing thing happened, and you missed it! That for some reason, the time was changed, or your friends were all out for a meal and this celebrity you all love just walked by and chatted – but you got caught in traffic and missed the boat. Then your friends are all talking about it, and bigging it up, and you’re like. Yeah right. You met this famous dude. Did he really sit down with you? Did he really buy you a drink? I won’t believe it unless I see the selfies.
That’s pretty much what happened to Thomas. Together with the other disciples, they spent three years with Jesus, following him, learning from him, witnessing miracles, and, maybe, even basking in the aura of the master. Then the unthinkable happened. The man they had loved and followed and believed in was put to death in the most gruesome way and their world was shattered.
And yet – there were rumours. Rumours of resurrection. Women said they had seen the Lord, but the men weren’t so sure. Men had seen the empty tomb, but what did that mean? The body was absent, but what do you make of that?
And finally, Jesus appears to the dispirited and confused disciples, behind closed doors, and shows them his hands and his side and they see him, and believe. Well, most of them, that is. Thomas wasn’t there. Biggest event of the year, of the century, of all times, and he manages to miss it.
So he’s a bit grumpy, and you can see why! In his head, he is where everybody else was several hours before. Left with nothing but other people’s word that the Lord is risen. Is that good enough? Can he trust them? Should you believe second-hand testimony?
Thomas has had an unfair press over the centuries. He has often been called doubting Thomas. We don’t do that to the other disciples, we don’t talk about denying Peter, or runaway naked Mark. Somehow we reduce Thomas to this one story, or even this one moment in the story. None of us want to be reduced to our worst moment.
Thomas does doubt, or at least, struggles with faith. He doesn’t want faith, he wants proof, and proof on his own terms. He wants to design the experiment, witness the results, then make up his mind. Maybe we should call him scientific Thomas. We have this running argument in my household, when I tell my husband, if you try and cook this vegetable this way, it won’t work. He is not a cook. But he never just believes me. He has to try and do it himself first, and end up with burnt courgette or floppy wet cabbage. And I almost always say, why can’t you just believe me? And he says, because I’m a scientist. I have to observe and understand. It isn’t so much that he doesn’t trust me, but somehow for something to become fact, he has to submit it to independent verification.
The problem is, for Thomas, that faith exists in this in between place, where there are signs, but no certainty. Faith would not be faith if there was no room for doubt. Faith would not be faith if all the proofs were there. It would simply be fact, or certainty. Faith demands a step of trust, a step in the unknown. Faith means we can’t be in control.
It is easy to think the disciples, who had the privilege of walking with Jesus in person must have had it easy. That faith would have been straightforward. But it wasn’t. And neither is it today – it doesn’t matter whether you have a Christian for 50 years of 5 minutes, or are wondering whether you believe at all. Faith and doubt walk side-by-side. Many of the great Christian writers and mystics, from St John of the Cross to Mother Teresa, say that they have struggled with faith. They have struggled because the reality of our world is that it is a broken world, a world where God often seems absent, where God’s presence is often seen only in glimpses, in passing, in unexpected places. To live the life of faith means to hang on to these glimpses, to trust in the testimony of lives changed, of the church, and, often, to rage against the appearance of God’s absence.
God is OK with people doubting that he is there, or doubting that he is good. The Bible has lots of books, like Psalms or Job, full of the prayers of those struggling with faith, struggling to see where God is. When we doubt, we’re in good company. Fortunately, doubt is not the opposite of faith. It is its indispensable companion. Doubt arises when we are truthful about the state of the world, and the state of our own souls. Doubt pushes us to seek understanding, to consider the complexity of the world and our own lives. Doubt helps articulate the reality of faith as a difficult step into the unknown, an invitation from a God too big, too huge, too different, for us to be able to understand, or explain, or tame. Which is just as well. If you and I could explain God, prove God, God wouldn’t be God, He would be cut down to our size. And our challenge is always how we might see and share a glimpse of this God without ever, ever, stuffing him into a little box of our own.
This immeasurable God, in many ways, is who Thomas encounters. When he sees Jesus, he no longer needs to touch. He simply believes. Faith did not require the proofs he thought it did.
Jesus, meanwhile, does not rebuke Thomas, or even refuse to let him touch him. Jesus invites Thomas to take a step towards him, treats him with kindness, compassion and understanding. Jesus makes room for Thomas’ full humanity, his struggles, as well as his confession of faith. Thomas is first to say, ‘my Lord and my God’. Having said this, lack of experience was not a good enough reason for a continuing lack of faith. Jesus challenges those who come after Thomas not to let doubt and the need for proof stand in the way of faith. They will have to allow faith and doubt to co-exist, to propel them into conversation with the God they are seeking to follow. You do not dispel doubt with arguments and proofs; you challenge doubt by taking a step towards Jesus, trying out the life of faith, and keeping putting one foot in front of the other.
And so for us here today, disciples and wanderers, the question is, what do we do with your own doubts and questions? And how do we make a hospitable space for the doubts and questions of others, a space where we can wrestle with God and the world and where faith and doubt, faith and questions can lead us deeper towards God?
None of us are faith experts, who give all the answers, but we can all model faith, model the humility and provisionality of being human, unsure, without all the answers, yet still taking steps to walk towards Jesus. As a church of people who walk this road together, we are called to draw on the deep riches of Scripture and of the Church, to tell and retell the story of the signs of God’s presence over time and space, even in places where God might seem absent. We are called to come alongside one another, and discern where God is at work. We are called to walk together and with one another as we worship, share lives, share bread and wine as signs of God’s ongoing presence with us. We are called to form communities of truth, where faith can be explored, people loved as they are and Jesus welcomed. And as we muddle through the ups and downs of life and faith, the days of faith and the days of doubts, days of dust and days of glory, may we, just like Thomas, find ourselves transformed by the God who can do immeasurably more than we can imagine, and is always ready to surprise us with his unexpected presence.