Transcript
Practice Resurrection: Doubt
First Baptist Richmond, April 27, 2025
Second Sunday of Easter
John 20:19-31
Jesus said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”
Today we continue an Easter Season sermon series called “Practice Resurrection.” The title comes from Wendell Berry’s poem: “Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” And on this Sunday, when we are honoring God’s creation, these lines from the poem stand out:
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
The words forest, and leaves, and humus stand out for me as I think about the earth I love and what I love most about it. But in today’s Gospel lesson the word that stands out is doubt. I know some people believe that doubt is a sin, but I don’t. I don’t believe that it’s the opposite of faith. I believe that doubt is a tool
that can help us dig down deep into the humus of our past experience and plant a seed that will bloom and grow. I believe it can be a way of practicing resurrection. But as the old saying goes, “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.”
In a book called The Sin of Certainty Peter Enns describes a crisis of faith he experienced some years ago as he was flying home from an academic conference on the west coast. At the time he was a professor at a conservative Midwestern seminary where part of his job was teaching students what they should believe about God. But he was tired. It had been a long trip. He decided to rest his brain by watching a Disney movie called Bridge to Terebithia, a coming-of-age story about a fifth-grade boy named Jess who befriends a free-spirited girl named Leslie. Things started off well enough, but then came the crisis, which Enns describes like this:
“In one scene,” he writes, “Jess and Leslie, along with Jess’s spunky little sister May Belle, are in the back of the family pickup truck on the way home from church. Jess had invited Leslie, who seems to have spent her entire life insulated from the kind of world Jess takes for granted.
“For Leslie going to church is another opportunity for an adventure into the unknown. She is glad she came along, despite the hellfire-and-brimstone preaching, and declares, ‘That whole Jesus thing. It’s really interesting.’
“May Belle is absolutely shocked and corrects Leslie: ‘It’s not interesting. It’s scary. It’s nailing holes through your hand. It’s because we’re all vile sinners that God made Jesus die.’
“Leslie looks at May Belle like she had just told her she believed babies were delivered by storks. ‘Do you really think that’s true?’
“Not only do they believe it, but Jess tells her they have to because ‘it’s in the Bible.’ May Belle dutifully adds that if you don’t believe in the Bible, ‘God will damn you to hell when you die.’
“Leslie will have none of it. ‘I seriously do not think God goes around damning people to hell. He’s too busy running all this,’ she says, pointing to the sky and trees overhead.
“And with that,” writes Peter Enns, “I was nostril deep in a faith crisis,” because what went through his mind in that unguarded moment was the idea that Leslie was right, and he—a “professional Christian,” a seminary professor paid to think right thoughts about God and to tell others about them—was wrong. “The idea that the Creator of heaven and Earth, with all their beauty, wonder, and mystery, was at the same time a super-sized Bible thumping preacher, obsessed with whether our thoughts were all in place and ready to condemn us to hell for eternity if they weren’t, made no sense, and yet it had never crossed my mind. My belief system wouldn’t allow it. Good Christians don’t question their faith.”i
It reminded me of something another “professional Christian” had written. In a book called Meeting Jesus again for the First Time Marcus Borg confesses that in his early teens he had doubts about the existence of God. “It was an experience filled with anxiety, guilt, and fear,” he writes. “I still believed enough to be afraid of going to hell because of my doubts. I felt that they were wrong, and in my prayers I would ask for forgiveness…. Every night, for several years, I prayed with considerable anguish, ‘Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.’”ii
As he reflected on that experience in a later book he wrote: “The most common understanding of the word ‘faith’ in modern Western Christianity, is that it means holding a certain set of beliefs, believing that certain things are true. For
example: it means believing that there is a God, believing that the Bible is the revelation of God, and believing that Jesus is the Son of God and that he died for our sins.
“For some Christians, the list would be longer,” he continues: “believing that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, believing in Genesis rather than evolution; believing that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he walked on water and raised the dead, that he himself was raised from the dead in a physical bodily form, and that he will come again someday. Sometimes the beliefs become very specific; believing in infant baptism instead of adult baptism (or vice versa), believing in the ‘rapture,’ or believing (or not believing) in purgatory.”
The problem with thinking of faith as a set of beliefs, however, is that it turns it into a matter of the head rather than the heart. As Borg puts it, “Faith becomes primarily a matter of whether you believe the right set of claims to be true.”iii But as he points out later in the book, there are at least four Latin words that have been used through the centuries to describe faith. Only one of them—assensus—has to do with the things we believe: the theological propositions to which we give our intellectual assent. The other words have to do with our faithfulness to God (fidelitas), a faithful way of looking at the world (visio), and an understanding of faith as “radical trust,” of believing in God even when you aren’t sure what to believe about God (fiducia). And this is where Peter Enns eventually came down. The subtitle of his book is: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Belief.
I told someone just last week that some people seem to approach faith as if they were going to an ornithological museum, where every specimen is stuffed and labeled (“Great Blue Heron,” “Cedar Waxwing,” “Ruby-Throated
Hummingbird”), but other people approach it like bird-watching, where you take your binoculars and see if you can spot a Summer Tanager. You might not see nearly as many birds as you would at the museum, and you might not know what all of them are, but bird-watching is a living, dynamic experience, and the people I know who do it, love it. Enns might say it is the difference between faith—which is also living and dynamic—and beliefs which can be as fixed and unmoving as stuffed birds. Beliefs are not wrong. We all need to have some. But they are not what faith is all about.
One of our beliefs, as Christians, is that Jesus rose from the dead. And when we come to the story of Thomas we often think, “Poor Thomas. He was a doubter. He didn’t believe in the Resurrection.” But have you noticed? None of the disciples believed in the Resurrection, not at first! In Mark’s Gospel the women run screaming from the tomb and say nothing to anyone because they are so afraid. In Matthew’s Gospel the disciples meet Jesus in Galilee and worship him, “though some doubted,” Matthew adds (why do we never talk about them?). In Luke’s Gospel Jesus invites his disciples to “handle” him, to feel his flesh and bones so they will know that he’s not a ghost. When that doesn’t work he eats a piece of broiled fish in front of them. And in John’s Gospel he shows them the holes in his hands and the wound in his side. “Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord,” John writes.
They had an experience that Thomas hadn’t had, yet, and that’s all he was asking for—an experience exactly like theirs. And maybe it wasn’t because he needed proof that dead people could come back to life (he had been there for the raising of Lazarus, after all); maybe he needed proof that this particular person was Jesus. Because Thomas had another nickname. He wasn’t only called “the
Doubter,” he was also called “the Twin.” Most people assume it was because he had an actual twin, but some people have wondered if it was because he looked so much like Jesus, as if the two of them could have been twins.
Those same people have speculated that maybe it wasn’t Jesus who was crucified, but Thomas, and if so it would explain how Jesus could appear to his disciples three days later, alive and well. What it doesn’t explain is why he would show them the holes in his hands and the wound in his side. That seems to be his way of proving not only that he is now alive, but also that he is the same person who died on the cross.
And that seems to be Thomas’s concern.
Listen to what he says: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” We often assume that he means, “I will not believe that dead people can come back to life.” But what if he means, “I will not believe that it is Jesus.” Maybe as a twin he knew how easy it is to be mistaken for someone else. Maybe he didn’t want to be mistaken about this. And maybe there’s a good reason for that.
We’ve gotten so used to calling him “Doubting Thomas” we almost overlook his love and loyalty to Jesus. The first time we meet him in John’s Gospel Jesus has decided to go to back to Judea to raise Lazarus from the dead and the other disciples are trying to talk him out of it. “Rabbi,” they say, “the religious authorities were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” But Thomas says, “Let us go also, that we may die with him.” Not with Lazarus, mind you, but with Jesus. Thomas is ready to risk his life for the Lord.
And then in John 14, when Jesus says, “Don’t let your hearts be troubled. You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas is one of those with a
troubled heart. He says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” I get the feeling Thomas wants to know the way. I get the feeling he wants to follow Jesus even if he has to take up his cross to do so. And that’s when Jesus says, “I am the Way,” as if he meant, “If you really get to know me, Thomas, if you really come to love me, you will always be with me.” But suppose Thomas did. Suppose he knew and loved Jesus like few of the other disciples ever could. And suppose for a moment that that’s why he wasn’t with the others when Jesus first appeared to them—because he was in the Garden of Gethsemane, or somewhere, crying his eyes out.
People grieve in different ways.
So, it’s not that he needs to be convinced that dead people can come back to life; he needs to be convinced that the one who came back to life is Jesus. Think about it: what if your husband died and three days later somebody brought you his twin brother. “Here,” they would say. “Looks just like him.” But you would say, “It’s not him. We haven’t shared our life together. He doesn’t know me and love me like his brother did.” And so for Thomas, it can’t be a convincing lookalike: it has to be Jesus. And maybe that’s why Jesus came back.
He didn’t have to. He’d already appeared to the others. He’d already breathed on them and told them to receive the Holy Spirit. He’d already sent them into the world as the Father had sent him. But he came back anyway, and I think he did it for Thomas. “Here,” he says, “put your finger in the mark of the nails, put your hand in my side. Don’t be a doubter any longer; be a believer.” I had to look up that line in my Greek New Testament and I noticed that Jesus uses the usual word for belief—pistis. But the other word, the word for doubt, is apistis. It’s the same word but with that little “a” on the front that turns it into its
opposite. For Jesus, then, doubting is the opposite of believing, and if you want to know what he’s asking Thomas not to do, you kind of need to know what he’s asking him to do. He’s asking him to believe—not to believe things about him, but to believe in him. And what does Thomas say? “My Lord and my God.” Those are relational words. They describe Thomas’s resurrected relationship with Jesus: he is now, once again, his Lord and his God.
Marcus Borg claims that in the early days the verb believe did not mean believing unbelievable things. Rather, it came from the same root as the word belove. “To believe,” he says, “was to belove.”iv And maybe that’s what this story is all about: not that a dead person came back to life, but that the one Thomas loved came back to life, the one he could call, “My Lord and my God.” What about you? What do you believe? Or, rather, whom do you belove? That’s not the kind of faith that gets shaky when someone challenges your beliefs. It’s a matter of the heart and not the head. It’s the kind of faith that has endured in this world for nearly two thousand years now. So, thank you, Thomas, for doubting the things that are hard to believe, but believing, always,
in Jesus.
—Jim Somerville © 2025
