Transcript
Thomas Richmond’s First Baptist
April 12, 2026
The Second Sunday of Easter
John 20:19-31
Thomas said to them, “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.”
My brother, Billy, was born in the year I started college. I wasn’t there to see all the ways he changed and grew, but when he was three years old I remember watching him follow my mother around the kitchen as she cooked supper, asking all these questions: Why do cats have whiskers? Why does popcorn pop? Why is the sky blue? I listened as she tried to answer each one, but when she did he would ask a follow up question. My mother was highly intellectual and extremely patient, but at some point she would run out of answers and say,
“Because that’s the way God made it.”
I have often thought that’s where the first eleven chapters of Genesis came from—from three-year-olds following their parents around and asking: “Why do men have to work so hard? Why do women have pain in child birth? Why do we hate snakes so much?” Until finally, having run out of answers, their parents said, “Because that’s the way God made it.” The first eleven chapters of Genesis contain primitive answers to primitive questions by primitive people and if we were talking about anything other than the Bible we would have a word for that: mythology.
The indigenous people of the Arctic tell how the first man kicked his way out of a pea pod, dropped through a hole in the bottom, and went off to find something to eat. The Chinese story of “Phan Ku” describes a creating giant who burst forth from a
universe shaped like a chicken’s egg. The Blackfoot tribe in North America explains that the world was fashioned by an old man who walked from South to North, making things as he went. The ancient Babylonian epic, the Enuma Elish, describes the beginning of the world as the result of a fierce conflict between the gods. And finally (my favorite), the story told in Iceland of a frost giant named Imir, and how the first man and woman were sweated into existence from his armpit.i
As different as those stories are, they all have one thing in common: they all try to make sense of the world around us by describing how things might have come to be the way they are. This is what people do: they try to understand. Someone has said that it is this need to make sense out of nonsense that separates people from animals. Only people try to figure out what things mean. From the earliest times they have been doing just that, looking at the trees and sky and world around them and asking, “How do you make sense of all that? What can it mean?”
In a book called The Critical Years, Sharon Parks defines faith as “the ability to make meaning,” and by that definition almost everybody has some sort of faith, some way of making sense of the world. Even the atheist—who says that the only way to make sense of a world in which there is so much pain and suffering is to assume that there isn’t a good and loving God—can be said to have some sort of “faith.”
I’ve tried to explain it like this: that we all have a framework of understanding. If you walk outside and a bird flies by you say, “Ah, a flying bird. That makes sense.” But if you walk outside and a cat flies by, well, that’s different. It doesn’t make sense. There is no place on your framework of understanding to hang the experience of a flying cat. The definition of insanity is not doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, as I often hear, but rather losing the ability to make meaning. It’s when
our framework of understanding collapses and there’s no longer any way to make sense of our experience.
So where does that framework come from? Initially from our parents, or whoever it was that raised us. They are the ones who tell us how the world works and what various things mean. But at some point someone tells us something else and we have to decide: which voice will we listen to? Some people have said that this is how we grow up: by having to choose which voice will be—for us—the voice of authority.
I assume that when I asked my parents why the sky was blue they told me it was because that’s the way God made it. That’s what they told my brother, Billy. But as I grew up they told me more and more about God. They took me to church. They helped me memorize the Apostle’s Creed, which begins with the words: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” But then it turns its attention to Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, and insists that he not only suffered under Pontius Pilate, but “on the third day rose again from the dead.” For as long as I’ve been making sense of the world that’s the way I’ve been making sense of it. For some reason, belief in the Resurrection has never been hard for me, but you can see why it might be hard for some people.
Thomas, for instance.
The only way Thomas had known Jesus was as his living, breathing Lord. It’s hard to imagine what it was like for him to experience the nightmare of Jesus’s arrest, trial, condemnation, and crucifixion. He may have been one of those “standing at a distance,” watching Jesus die, or he may have found that he couldn’t bear to watch. I’ve often wondered why Thomas wasn’t with the others on that first Easter evening, when Jesus appeared. I’ve speculated that he may have been out buying groceries, but also that he
may have been so distraught over Jesus’s death that he needed to be alone. People grieve in different ways.
But when he did show up the other disciples told him they had seen the Lord and he couldn’t believe it. I don’t think it was because he wasn’t willing to believe; I think it was because he needed proof. He needed evidence. He needed something solid enough to build the rest of his life on. And that reminds me of C. S. Lewis, one of the most famous Christians who has ever lived.
I mentioned him last week when I was talking about fairy tales and how much his stories about the magical land of Narnia had meant to my faith. But as I looked further into his story I found that although he had grown up going to church and reciting the creeds, when he got to boarding school he gave up on those things. Not all at once. Somewhere, “he had gotten the idea that when you prayed you needed to mean what you said. When he said his evening prayers he was always analyzing whether they were said rightly. Inevitably, they were not sincere enough, so he would start again, and again, and again. He said that if he hadn’t stopped he would have gone crazy. This was the beginning of his ‘atheist’ phase.”ii
But he loved mythology. If you had asked him about the stories of Jesus’s death and resurrection he might have compared them with the Norse myths of dying gods, the Greek tales of sacrifice and transformation, or the strange, beautiful worlds where magic was real. But you can’t build a life on that, can you? Thomas may have been thinking the same thing, that he couldn’t build the rest of his life on some fairy tale. “You’re telling me that Jesus rose from the dead? That he’s alive again? I don’t believe it, and I won’t believe it unless I see it with my own eyes, unless I put my finger in the marks of the nails and put my hand into his side.” That’s not doubt—that’s fear—the fear that you
might once again build your life on something that would collapse beneath you. Thomas wasn’t taking that chance.
Last week I talked about J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings, who was a contemporary and close friend of C. S. Lewis, but I don’t think I realized what an important role he played in Lewis’s conversion. In my research I came across a version of that story that begins like this:
There was a time when C. S. Lewis did not believe in God. By his own account he had moved, as a young man, from a kind of childhood faith into a settled atheism. And yet, even in those years when he was most certain that the universe was cold and empty, he found himself pursued by something he could not quite shake.
It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t guilt. It was something stranger than that.
It was longing.
It would come to him unexpectedly—while reading an old Norse myth, or a line of poetry, or a story of some hero who gave his life to save others. In those moments he felt what he later called “Joy,” though it wasn’t exactly happiness. It was more like a sudden glimpse of something beautiful and distant, something he could almost see but never quite reach. And just as quickly as it came it would be gone again, leaving him with an ache for…he didn’t know what.
For a long time, Lewis concluded that these experiences only proved how easily human beings could be moved by fiction. Myths, he said, were “lies breathed through silver”—beautiful, yes, but ultimately untrue. And when he heard the story of Jesus, he placed it in the same category: one more dying-and-rising god, one more ancient tale that stirred the imagination but could not be taken as fact.
By then Lewis was a professor at Oxford—sharp-minded, widely read, and very good at defending his position. But even so, the longing never left him. It lingered
beneath the surface of his life, like a memory he couldn’t quite recover, or a homesickness for a place he had never been.
And then, in the providence of God, he became friends with J. R. R. Tolkien.
They were both scholars of literature, both lovers of story, and they spent long hours together talking about language and myth and meaning. Tolkien did not dismiss Lewis’s love of myth; he leaned into it. He took it seriously. And one evening in September of 1931, the two of them went for a walk along a quiet path at Magdalen College—Addison’s Walk—under a sky full of stars.
Lewis, still unconvinced, returned to his familiar argument: myths are powerful, yes, but they are not true.
Tolkien gently but firmly disagreed. He suggested that the very reason myths carry such power is not because they are false, but because they are rooted in something real. Human beings, he said, are not simply inventing these stories out of thin air. We are, in his words, “sub-creators,” made in the image of a Creator. And what we find in myths—those recurring patterns of sacrifice and redemption, death and rebirth—are not random inventions, but echoes. Fragments. Glimpses of a deeper truth that we only partially perceive.
And then Tolkien offered the thought that Lewis could not easily dismiss: what if the story of Christ is the place where all those echoes come together? Not a myth that never happened—but a truth so deep it has always been told in myth…until it finally happened in history. What if, in Jesus, he ventured, myth became fact?
Something in Lewis shifted that night. Not all at once, not in a flash of certainty, but quietly, inwardly. For the first time he began to consider that the longing he had felt for so many years—the ache awakened by story and song—might not be pointing him away from reality, but toward it. That the reason those stories felt so true was not
because they were clever inventions, but because they were, in some mysterious way, reflections of the truest story of all.
A few days later, Lewis took a trip to the zoo. He later wrote that when he got into the car that morning he did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. And when he got out, he did. He couldn’t explain the exact moment it happened. There was no thunderclap, no dramatic vision. Only the quiet realization that what he had once dismissed as myth was, in fact, reality—that the story his heart had always recognized had finally taken shape before his mind.
He would later describe himself, with a touch of humor, as “the most reluctant convert in all England.” But reluctant or not, he had come to believe.
And perhaps what makes his story so compelling is that Lewis did not come to faith by setting aside his love of myth, but by discovering its fulfillment. He did not have to stop loving those old stories of sacrifice and redemption (just as we do not have to give up the first eleven chapters of Genesis). He only had to see them differently—as signposts rather than destinations, as echoes rather than endings.iii
Which leaves us, perhaps, in a place not so far from Thomas. When Jesus appeared to his disciples a week later Thomas was there with them. And Jesus invited him to do just what he had asked: to put his finger into the mark of the nails and his hand into his side. But if you read the text carefully you will see that Thomas didn’t do that. One look at Jesus and he said, “My Lord and my God!” For him, seeing was enough, and there are skeptics out there, atheists, who might say, “Well, sure! It would be enough for me, too!” But what I learn from C. S. Lewis is that there are other ways to come to faith, and using his case as an example, not through sight but through recognition. Some of you have felt that: in a particular hymn, or in a hospital room, or on an early morning walk—that quiet, persistent sense that when we hear the story of
Jesus, something deep within us responds as if we have been waiting for it. As if, somehow, we have always known that this is how the story was meant to end. Or better yet—how it was meant to begin.
“Have you believed because you have seen me, Thomas?” Jesus asked. “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe.”
—Jim Somerville © 2026
