A tryst with Thomas

If I had walked into that room late Sunday night, I'd have reacted in the same way. All he had done was step out---just for a few moments. Who could blame him, after spending that entire fearful day sequestered in the crowded, stuffy upper room? Nervous bodies, sweating bodies. With the pungent odor of fear hanging heavy in the air, I'd have left too. With a pounding head. And so, he had to get away.

But he came back, after gulping in the fresh night air on a lonely walk through the shadows of the back alleyways. Heartbroken, confused, afraid, embittered, and lonely over the death of his Master, he came tiptoeing back up the creaky stairs to the upper room, still crammed with men scared witless that the police who had arrested their Leader last Thursday night would soon be pounding down the door for them this Sunday night.

And so I suppose I'd have reacted the same way that Thomas did when, at last, late that evening he returned. He knocked. Silence inside. He knocked again. More silence. Leaning up to the crack in the door, he hissed his identity. Still more silence. In frustration he raised his voice from stage whisper to shout! And now the heavy wooden bar slid across the inside of the door. A crack of orange light like a CAT scan slice spilled onto his agitated face. "Open up!" The door flew open, a hand pulled him in, and with a slam door and bar were in place again. The room broke into bedlam. Everybody started yelling at Thomas at once. Pounding him on the back, tugging at his beard, holding his bewildered face in their hands as they laughed and cried the stunning news of what had happened just moments ago. "While you were out, Thomas..." Jesus had been there! In a daze Thomas shook his head. But ten other heads nodded in unison. "It's true, Thomas. He's alive!"

The hurt of the skeptic

I can hardly blame Thomas as he broke away from their near hysterical joy. Look into his dark eyes. We ministers know very well what we see. We see what we have felt often enough angered hurt, wounded pride, and the pain of rejection, perhaps even a touch of doubt.

Because Thomas understood that Jesus could have waited until he was back in the room, couldn't He have? Of course. And did not he, Thomas, love Him as much as the others? Did he not follow Him as faithfully as they? If Jesus were really alive, then He could have waited until Thomas was back. Unless He loved the others more... ? Unless perhaps He'd known Thomas' struggling heart and purposely left him out of such a revelation ... ?

Such a notion was simply too painful for Thomas. Which left him but one remaining response. To cover his pain, he wrapped himself in the levelheaded, cool-thinking, quick-calculating reserve of a skeptic.

It's that way with nearly every skeptic, isn't it? In their book, How to Respond to a Skeptic, Lewis Drummond and Paul Baxter have sought to psychoanalyze the mind-set of a skeptic. They reviewed the lives of some of history's most well-known skeptics and identified a common thread, a unifying catalyst that seems to explain skepticism. Drummond and Baxter have concluded that the primary catalyst for a skeptic's original doubts and formative questionings can usually be traced to a significant negative experience. Something, somewhere, went wrong. A hope was dashed. A heart was hurt. A love was rejected. And out of it, a skeptic was born.

Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, unabashedly declares it so. In his book Night, he openly hints that his surviving witness of the Holocaust in the Buchenwald and Auschwitz death camps stripped away his childhood faith as a Jew. It was God, he came to believe, who hung on the gallows and died in the Holocaust. Out of personal pain, skepticism is often created.

It would be interesting to find the source of our skepticism, to trace it back to the original cause. Where would it take us? For Thomas, as for so many others, it was a skepticism born of a wounded pride and a sense of rejection.

"But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, 'We have seen the Lord.' But he 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' " (John 20:24,25, NRSV).

What else shall a wounded pride do? What else can rationalism, born of that wounding, demand? Staring into ten jubilant faces, the skeptic draws his own private line in the sand.

Awhile back I was visiting with a physician. Though not a Christian, he's a religious man. He knew I was a pastor, and so our conversation turned to religion. We talked of death, because both our professions have their share of that reality. And when I asked him what he believed about death and its beyond, he replied: "How can we know? For we have never been there. For me life beyond death simply means my life will be lived on in the lives of my children and grandchildren. That is the meaning of life after death for me."

For Thomas, it had all been similarly reduced. How can we know, if we haven't been there. So he said, "I shall not believe it until I behold it, feel it, touch it!" Period.

Skepticism has changed little over the millennia. You and I are not so different from Thomas and maybe my physician friend. This is because we all live in a world where the untestable rapidly becomes the untenable. Science has taught us well: If you can't prove it---don't press it.

In an anonymous letter to the editor in the Atlanta Journal, a writer, living in the so-called "Bible Belt," attacked creationism: "What is distressing is that such absurd beliefs persist as we near the 21st century. It may be viewed, however, if looked at it objectively, as a twitch in the death throes of an outdated and nearly defunct theology.... It is unfortunate, but man has always tended to mysticize everything he does not under stand. Until the susceptibility is weeded out through further evolutionary advance this medieval idiocy will hang around our necks like an albatross. But be sure, the day will come when the doors of the last church will close forever. The last Bible will be shipped off to some museum where it will gather dust along with the implements of other medicine men and shamans who, for a time, controlled men's minds. Some future archeologists may look through this silly book and be amused that his ancestors were so gullible." ¹

This sort of skepticism has become fashionable. Once the hallmark of infidelity, skepticism is now the shining star of intelligence. In some circles the more cynical the mind, the more evident its obvious intellectual prowess.

But Thomas's "seeing is believing," if taken to its logical conclusions, makes belief in the American Declaration of Independence (for example) a most uncritical kind of faith, does it not? After all, you and I have no way of verifying its authenticity. I've never seen Thomas Jefferson. I have no way of knowing with absolute certainty that July 4, 1776, happened the way history and tradition say it did (actually some historians even argue that the date of its signing wasn't exactly on the 4th).

Oh, sure, I've stood in line at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to gaze for a few fleeting moments on the yellowed document proported to be the original Declaration of Independence. And yes, I saw what is claimed to be Thomas Jefferson's signature on it. But how do I know that the document is real? Or that the signature was really Jefferson's? Couldn't the whole thing be a sinister concoction? Thomas's "seeing is believing" means I can't believe in Thomas Jefferson either, since I've never seen him. All I can do is believe the testimony of those who were there that day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. All I have is the testimony that has been handed down from generation to generation, testimony that I really can't verify is accurate.

Which means that skepticism is a choice: Whom shall I believe? If you believe in only what you see, then you are left with no history at all.

The heart of the skeptic

And so this Easter I declare that I believe in Thomas---Thomas Jefferson, yes. And even Thomas, the skeptic, who seven days later became a believer in the only way a skeptic can ever come to believe.

They were all there, Thomas included, in the same upper room a week after the resurrection. The upstairs doors still barred, the second-story windows still shuttered. And they were still scared, their bodies still nervously sweating, the room still stuffy. And it was night again. When suddenly He appeared. At first without a word. He simply appeared. Out of nowhere, standing there among them. Dressed in His humble Galilean garb, the mantle draping over His head and across His bare chest. Somebody gasped. They all whirled around toward the center of the room. And Jesus spoke," 'Peace be with you' " (John 20:26).

Before anyone could breathe a response, Jesus slowly turned and stepped toward ashen-faced, wide-eyed, gaping Thomas.

And here is born the greatest truth in all the world for every struggling skeptic who hasn't quite given up yet. A truth born when Jesus quotes the seven-day-old words of Thomas. "Then he 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' " (John 20:27). Touch Me, Thomas, go ahead and touch Me if you must. Now, Jesus has not been seen by the other ten since the week before. Hence, no one has been able to report to Him the misgivings of Thomas. Which means that during Thomas's darkest hours of doubt, Jesus has been with him, though Thomas had not known it. Proof enough that the resurrected Christ is Companion of the skeptic, as well as the believer. Thomas thought he was all alone in his suffering. But he was wrong. The risen Jesus had been with him through it all.

"Put your finger here." But Thomas never did. Not that night. For in his heart he had all the evidence he needed that the risen Christ had been with him, unseen, invisible, all along. The realilty he had rejected had been standing beside him, even when he didn't believe. All that was left for the doubting one was the cry from bended knee, '"My Lord and my God!'" (John 20:28). For how can you not help but embrace the God who was still your companion when you chose not to believe?

The hope of the empiricist

And so the heart of the skeptic turns from hurt to hope so much hope, in fact, that Thomas would one day die for his risen Master, a spear thrust through his back.

On a mountaintop south of Madras, India, I stood on the spot where legend declares that the doubting disciple died a conquering martyr for Christ. Mt. St. Thomas indeed. The blood of a once-upon-a-time cynic spilled crimson upon what was for him a foreign soil. And that blood became a witness for the living Christ.

Nobody dies for a conjecture. Thomas died for the Companion who had never abandoned him, even at the time his faith was darkest. He died for the Companion who was wise and patient and skillful enough to lead him, despite his struggles, to one of the greatest statements of faith in all time, "My Lord and my God."

So, if such a doubter can believe, then hope exists for us too. And in seasons to come, when we bury our dead our parishioners, our parents, our spouses, our children, our strangers, our friends let us look into each other's tear-brimmed eyes and covenant to believe in the Christ of Thomas, who declared, "Because I live, you also will live. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe" (John 14:19; 20:29).

I have not seen. But because Thomas believed, I, too, have come to believe. Therein lies the Easter hope of the skeptic.