Think Twice
John 20:19-31

April 3, 2005

I have no doubts about the situation on that Easter Sunday evening. Squirreled away behind locked door, these Galilean outsiders and strangers, erstwhile disciples of a brutalized Messiah, felt terrorized by the Judean religious establishment who must surely be looking for them. It takes little imagination to know that they were not just being paranoid.

Perhaps they were in that same upper room where they had eaten for the last time only three nights before, a single candle dimly hinting at their shapes, if they wanted to remember what each other looked like. What conversation were they having? What were Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, and the beloved disciple no less, saying about the events of that morning? Surreal. Why shouldn’t they doubt everything?

Jesus just appears, right there in the middle of the room. They see the ugliest scars and they know it is him. “Peace be with you.” And also with you. We sophisticated readers of all four gospels check our calendars and realize that on that same evening Jesus had walked to Emmaus and had dinner with Cleopas and another non-Big Twelve disciple. Never matter, the Gospel of Luke is a different world.

Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit upon them and they see a new world, full of light. Thomas was not there for some reason, and when they told him about it the next day or so, he had criteria to fill. Why should he believe Peter who had made all those braggadocio declarations and backed down on each one of them?

The Gospel never uses the word “doubt” to refer to Thomas. He had a way with words, and a directness the others probably both admired and cringed at. His fingers in His wounds, he insisted. At any rate, it was a full week again before any of these disciples had contact with Jesus. Tonight they gathered again in their secret lodge, and this time Thomas was present. Still terrified, locked doors yet. No way to live in the Resurrection.

Again, Jesus is just there, and like the other half of an inside joke, shows his wounds to Thomas, who embarrassed now really doesn’t need or want to see them. “My Lord and my God” became his immediate creed. Nothing more needed to be said. A person could not say more.

Thomas was not the Doubter, but the Thinker of the disciples and apostles. That Thomas is portrayed as a bungling fool who finally comes around to the right way is a sign of the poverty and fear of thinking in many places. Doubt has been painted the opposite of faith by Christians who believe thinking is no longer helpful to their positions in their church and in society. Thinking twice, thinking too much about the Christian faith, is held up as the foible of non-Christians and some new Christians as well whose faith is not secure or sincere.

Thinking, however, involves assessing what is presented for evidence of its truthfulness, and whether it can find a practical application. Thinking is not complete until it travels with the ideas to see where they are leading and what effect they may have. And despite what the possibilities claimed out there for computers, real thinking is only practiced by real people.

Thinking usually requires “Thinking No” at some juncture. Castigate it as doubt, but if there is no doubt, then so-called faith is only parroting ideas it believes people want to hear Ð a religious Yes-man or woman. Faith takes courage, to be sure. Thinking always demands that faith be faithful.

Real thinking, nevertheless, is more than rational discourse; it is much more than science, and logic, plain facts and common sense. Real thinking necessarily involves every human emotion and experience, as well as your intuition and imagination. Human beings do not operate according to a single faculty. God is not transcribed into your spirit, mind, and body in only one alphabet. When your whole being is mobilized in one moment, then you are thinking, then you are full of faith.

How do you think along with Thomas, how do you think as a Christian? No one thinks from a clean slate with no prejudices. Our thinking is grounded in the narratives, poetry and correspondence of the Bible. That has been our strength and our weakness throughout the millennia. The Church has invested itself in reading these diverse books and straining to be obedient to their calling. Yet, the Church has never been able to conquer and subdue the Scriptures, though in many times and places it arrogantly has claimed it has.

The Bible has frustrated us with its patriarchal bias and militaristic tendencies, to name only a couple human stumbling blocks; and still its sublimities entice us towards a deeper encounter with the deep. These books have required us to think with them and against them with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength - and occasionally by the grace of God we catch a glimpse of the backside of God moving by us.

I have come to realize the way in which I think faithfully. A sermon is a ride on the wild horse of the Gospel, and I make no apologies for this. I am reading the Scripture along with you in order to see where it is going to take me and leave me off, and to see what it makes me do and become. Despite persistent complaints ancient and modern, the Bible is not a conservative collection of archaic texts -- some of its readers and interpreters have attempted to make sure it acts that way. Consistently, the Bible shocks and upsets you and me, shatters your comfortable assumptions, and summons you ever on to an encounter with the holy, loving God.

So, as far as I am concerned, Biblical illiteracy is no excuse in this pulpit; you have to come along for the journey. God knows where we are going!

Thomas was not going to allow himself to be sucked into a mystical fairy tale, told by disciples who had been just as cowardly as he had been. They had all said they would die with Jesus, and except for Judas, they were still all alive. He was not going to be part of something so desperate and infantile, not after all that Jesus had been and meant to him and the multitudes unnamed. Thomas had participated in a life so rich and rewarding and profound that it would be a profanity to pretend that it had all been a bad dream.

Thomas insisted upon reality, so when he did see Jesus, his demands for touching his wounds melted into rhetorical flourish. He would settle for nothing less than the truth, for that is why he had joined Jesus in the first place. Jesus showed him the way, the truth, the life, God personified, a life worth dying for. Only by thinking No, doubting if you insist, was he able to keep faith.

Jesus responds to Thomas with a new beatitude: “Blessed are those who have not seen me and yet have come to believe.” The people hearing John’s Gospel at the turning of the first century almost certainly would not have physically seen Jesus, and all the rest of us after that. But in an important way, we have seen Jesus through the chain of lives, one by one, congregation by congregation, who have felt and been affected by the way Jesus lived and taught. This is the true and continuing sense of apostolic succession, the living Gospel being passed down through flesh and blood.

With Thomas we begin by thinking the faith, then professing and confessing the faith, and finally doing the faith. Think twice about it.

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