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John 20:19-31

April 15, 2007


We are huddled together the Sunday after Easter and the doors are closed, not quite yet locked, and are we afraid yet? This second Sunday of Easter is notable in that the story of Thomas who desired to see the imprintings of the nails on Jesus’ hands and body in order to believe in the resurrection is told every year without failure. After the central event of Easter, the day that invented Christianity, we always discuss whether doubt is possible, probable, necessary or blasphemous and unthinkable.

Interesting isn’t it, that this week a number of magazines have unleashed reports and articles on the great doubts about religion. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens’ about to be released God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, along with Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and Michael Onfray’s In Defense of Atheism are meant to be required reading on every Doubting Thomas’ reading list. Maybe this will be the annual post-Easter theme of choice for major magazines. The Big Doubt issue. Mr. Hitchens and Dr. Dawkins will have to wait. We first must return to a locked room about which there never has been any doubt. Not a lot has been made of the locked door, but it is the door we most need to unlock.

This was not the way to celebrate the greatest day in the history of the world. Huddled together in a secret room with the door locked, afraid of the Jews coming in to finish them off. There has never been any evidence that the Romans or Jewish leaders were now pursuing the remaining Jesus gang. Saying that they were afraid of the Jews has fanned countless anti-Semitic acts of violence, though, a convenient group to blame. Paranoia strikes deep, into your hearts it will keep.

Maybe we haven’t figured this out yet, but this is Easter, the Third Day, and the first thing in the morning they get roused by a significant collection of very excited women who talk variously about an empty tomb and angels and directions from Jesus himself. Peter has immediately investigated and arrived at similar puzzling evidence. Could Jesus be resurrected, impossible as that sounds? It does fit a lot of what he had been telling us when we were paying attention. Why did they not go out looking for Jesus is a question seldom asked? Go out two by two and scour the city?

Instead, they worked their hardest at being afraid, closeting themselves in their darkened room. Afraid of their enemies or afraid of themselves? When the light is dim they would not be able to see each other clearly, see the guilt on their faces. They had all failed Jesus, run away, protected their own interests. Peter had denied Jesus three times and when the cock crowed, Jesus looked over at him from a distance square in the eyes.

The disciples wanted to keep the Jews out, sure. They wanted to keep their shame locked in, and very possible they wanted to keep Jesus out, if indeed he was really here again. Who can look Jesus in the face now?

Jesus did not have to break in, he simply entered and let’s not get into details. We want to protect ourselves from Jesus and history has shown he has a way of intruding into our hearts and unlocking our fears and paranoia and paralysis. Before they could breathe, he had breathed on them. No reprimands, no words of forgiveness, just “Peace be with you.” Where there is peace, fear melts away. Where there is peace, paranoia disintegrates. Where there is peace, doubt loses its reason to remain.

Jesus shows them his wounds to prove that this is physically the same person they have known and they have watched brutally executed. Then...they were glad when they saw the Lord, an odd bit of cognitive dissonance. No reprimands, but an awesome commission, “Even as the Father has sent me, so I send you, out of this room into that awful world.” Thomas, everyone remembers, was not there.

Thomas was not a cynic or doubter, for he had shown forthrightness and courage earlier that none of the other disciples could muster. He wanted truth, not mythology, prints of the wounds, not ecstatic ramblings from people who had taken a long time to be glad that Jesus was here. And still one week later, had they really changed, had they even left the room to go fulfill Jesus’ commission? They were all there, including Thomas - where had Thomas been last week we never hear - and the door is still locked. Jesus intrudes once more and Thomas is embarrassed by his words, for he has seen the truth and the truth has set him free. If that’s doubt, may you and I be filled to the brim with it. Our faith needs it.

The kind of doubt Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, Onfay, and certainly a boatload of others dispense is not Thomas’ dilemma either. It is fairly obvious that they would rather see religion eliminated, annihilated or have applied to it some weapon of mass spiritual destruction precisely because religion has done so many evil things and continues to do so today. People kill people righteously for the sake of the purity of religious faith. No doubt about it.

We don’t have to worry about any other religion than our own - Christianity has gone on crusades, practiced an inquisition, burned and drowned witches and heretics and books, excommunicated those who think, and been the philosophical backbone of every system of slavery, prejudice and hatred against people who are not the same as us. We have more than enough cause for shame that we should find that dark room and huddle there with the disciples for fear that others will come after us.

Hitchens and company, however, have not escaped religious thinking and tradition, even in their own arrogant, supposedly eminently independent minds. He holds to a number of rational humanistic ideals and morals about the way humanity honestly ought to conduct itself, not bad at all, pretty meritorious and virtuous, without apparently realizing that all of these ideas have their origins in one great religious tradition or another. I doubt Hitchins has done all his thinking.

And as for beauty and music and art, he seems to believe that you can disembody beauty away from a faith that imagines another possibility to the ugliness of this awful world. There is no hope in such kind of doubt of religion and they don’t seem to miss it. I wonder where love fits into his thinking; maybe I do not want to know. Religious moderates are worse than fundamentalists as far as they are concerned, because in an ironically naive way of thinking they cannot imagine that “faith being the substance of things hoped for” has any reality. I heard last night B. B. King and Dr. John sing a duet of “I Know There’s a Better World Somewhere” a blues song one cannot understand unless you have faith, hope, and love.

In fact, Hitchins and Dawkins are simply reverse fundamentalists. One of the primary operating principles of Christian fundamentalism at least is that the entire Bible has to be true, every last word, and if one word is proved contrary, then the whole house collapses, a tragically flawed way of looking at the real world. Fundamentalists will then twist logic so that it becomes illogical in order to retain the appearance of the inerrancy of the Bible.

Mr. Hitchins hunts down and kills every instance of religious faith that poisons humanity and the world to the point that he cannot allow Christianity, for instance, to have one single redeeming characteristic and practice. For Hitchins has locked the door of his mind, afraid that Christianity might actually be good and invade his space. He does Christianity and the other world religions a tragic disservice through the power of his intellect in abusing the prophetic role - a religious function at its best - so that no one hears the deep criticisms that need to be made against the way we practice Christianity poorly and unfaithfully.

I doubt Hitchins could comprehend this story related by Dirkie Smit of Stellenbosch University, South Africa - it’s too religious to be real. He tells how Nico Smith, a well-known South African theologian studied in the 1950’s and had the highest regard for the writings of Karl Barth. He also believed in and supported apartheid, writing a doctoral thesis defending the existence of separate ethnic churches. He was invited to join the Broederbond and called to the Stellenbosch Faculty to teach theology ahead of better candidates, in what was widely seen as a Broederbond-influenced appointment.

As a young minister, he organized a visit to Barth’s house in Switzerland for a personal interview. At the end of the interview, after all his questions to Barth, the old man asked whether he could also ask one question, and then he asked Nico Smith whether he was free to preach the gospel, even when it contradicts public opinion, ideology and policies. At first Nico did not understand the question, and assured Barth that it could never happen, because there was nothing wrong with public opinion and national policy. But Barth insisted, asking what would happen if one day, perhaps, he would find that the gospel was indeed critical of what everyone around him, including his friends and family, believe? He replied that he would of course be free to proclaim the gospel, in such a situation, but repeated that it was highly improbable – but Nico Smith left with a feeling of unease, he says, a feeling that stayed with him on the bus, and during the rest of his trip and in a way for the rest of his life.

The question never left him, and many years later, when he publicly resigned from the Broederbond and from the Faculty to become a township minister of the black Reformed Church in Africa, it was still Barth’s question about freedom to proclaim the gospel that haunted him, he often recounts:

Three times Barth had asked him, ‘Are you free?’ As he turned the conversation over in his mind Nico found himself thinking of the conversation Jesus had had with Simon Peter on the beach, after his resurrection.

Three times the cock crows and Peter denies. Three times Jesus asks Peter to feed his sheep and Peter agrees because he loves him. Three times Nico Smith is asked if he is free to preach the gospel while he supports apartheid. Three times three times, at least, you and I are asked to doubt so that we may know the truth that sets us free.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan