Belief

John 20:19-31

It was evening on Easter Day, the first day of the week, when a friend sent me a link to an interview in The New York Times with the Reverend Dr. Serene Jones, President of Union Theological Seminary. 

It appears that Nicholas Kristof of the Times makes a habit of asking religious figures about what’s necessary for Christian faith. For Easter this year, he brought his problems with “the literal flesh-and-blood resurrection” of Jesus to this interview, asked for approval to disbelieve it, and succeeded in getting a respected Christian teacher to appear to deny the literal truth of resurrection, call the doctrine of the Virgin Birth bizarre, and suggest that love is all you need.

A bit of experience on the interview side of articles about Ash Wednesday has left me generally as skeptical about the perspectives and unconscious biases of religion reporters as Kristof could ever be about the literal resurrection. I suspect there’s more nuance and heft to both the faith of the interviewee and the content of the interview itself than actually appears in print.

The result, though, was an Easter Sunday article that dismisses and diminishes concerns about the reality of Easter itself. This has been a popular approach to the most dramatic claims of the gospels for about a generation in liberal Christian circles: Don’t worry about it if you don’t believe in resurrection. Something happened, but you don’t have to imagine an actual dead person was physically alive again. Look for the love and don’t strain your logic. 

That’s been a comfort to many people who love their faith and don’t want to feel credulous and gullible. To people who want miracles to be possible without leaving the security of science and logic; who want to believe in Jesus but not in dubious fiction. To people like Nicholas Kristof, and many of us, who live in a world that tells us that belief is intellectually dangerous. Belief in God is okay. But not literal resurrection. Believing in something that can’t possibly be factual makes us gullible, stupid, and ridiculous. Or closed-minded and intolerant. (Cardinal sins.)

An understanding of the resurrection of Jesus that says “Something happened, but real dead people don’t really return to supernatural life,” is appealing to people who want their faith to be safe from their doubts, and has been popular for years. It’s no surprise to me that it appeared in The New York Times on Easter Day.

But don’t ever confuse that kind of faith and doubt with Thomas, called the Twin. Don’t confuse the New York Times kind of questions about the “reality” of resurrection with the passionate demands of Thomas, one of Jesus’ closest disciples.

Unlike the modern doubter who wants faith to be safe from the ridiculous and impossible, Thomas wants to throw himself into the impossible, improbable physical reality of resurrection. He wants to get his fingers messy with the literal truth of the ridiculous claim his friends are making. He wants to believe not with his brain alone, but with his whole body.

 “Until I see the marks, until I jam my finger into the nail holes and the wound in his side, I will never believe this,” he says when his friends tell him they’ve seen Jesus, alive after death. It’s strong, active language. He’s not intellectually unsure if this is possible, or worried about a mass hallucination among his friends. He’s demanding a visceral, active share in the reality that’s about to change the world. 

I’m sure he already believes that “something happened” when his friends tell him “We have seen the Lord.” I’m sure he can see the change in their faces, hear in their voices that Jesus’ promises of resurrection have become real for them. He’s just unwilling to commit his whole self to anything less than the full, vital, messy, powerful experience of resurrection face to face. He doesn’t want to be convincied, he wants to be commited.  He wants transformation of life; a commitment of wholehearted, whole-being trust.

And he gets it. We know he gets it when we hear his response to the sight of the wounded, dead and living, impossibly physical Jesus.

“My Lord and my God!” he says.

From the beginning, everyone knows that Jesus is close with God, but Thomas is the only one in John’s story who says out loud without any hesitation that Jesus IS GOD. 

My Lord; my God, he says, claiming this for himself. And that’s it. That’s his commitment of entire trust. That’s belief. 

And that’s what Jesus came for, actually. Why he came to Thomas that one day in Jerusalem; why he came among us in the first place. From very early in his ministry and teaching, Jesus has been telling us – telling anyone who will listen – that he is come so that everyone may believe, and, believing, have life.

Jesus teaches his disciples, and us, that he comes not to convince us of facts about God, but to invite us to stake our whole trust on the living reality of God. And that kind of believing – the whole-self experience of God’s real presence, and the natural upwelling of awe and trust and commitment in response – that kind of believing is, in and of itself, the experience of eternal life. Here and now and always. 

Because when you experience the reality of God with your whole self, death cannot separate you from God. You can’t fear death anymore, because death can’t threaten you. You can’t fall victim to the fear and prejudice that shoot up synagogues and mosques and bomb or burn churches; evil and hate have a harder time getting hold of your heart. You can’t fear doubt anymore, either, because this belief is trust that comes from being loved beyond our ability to imagine, and doubt simply can’t get any traction on that freedom. Not even when you’re perfectly convinced that virgin birth is a logical impossibility and that dead people will never walk up to you and invite you to feel their bloody hands.

It does worry me, sometimes that I don’t know how to explain it; that I’m not sure how to describe to you today the experiential nature of belief, the way commitment is truer than logic, that being loved infinitely is eternal life in the here and now.
It worries me because I want this same experience of belief for you, and I am very sure that Jesus wants this for you, too.

So I spent a lot of time this week trying to think of when it was in my life that I encountered this reality of God – when it was that I had Thomas’ experience of vivid, visceral, personal encounter with God – so I could share it with you. 

And I can’t remember one. I don’t have a story about anything that I myself have seen and touched, to offer for you to see and touch.

Maybe you have had that experience. But all I have is Thomas’ story. 

This story, Thomas’ story, the whole Jesus story, has been written, John tells us, so that we who don’t have the chance to stick our personal fingers in the side of the physical Jesus can have belief. That we who only hear the story can also have the life-giving, life-itself trust in the truth and power and presence and doubt-resistant reality of God that Thomas has.

“Blessed are they who have not seen, and have come to believe,” Jesus says to Thomas, and he’s talking about us. About you and me. 

Blessed are they, we, in Moorestown, in South Jersey, around the globe, who are miles and centuries removed from the chance to see and touch this real resurrection, blessed by Jesus’ insistence that we too, reading this story, really do get to trust the real presence of God deep in our guts, even if we never touch the wounds. 

That we, too, get to have the life-giving commitment Thomas gives voice to: My Lord and my God – the awe and trust and commitment that embrace and delight in the genuine reality of something that can’t physically be real. 

Belief so deep it can’t be tricked or gulled by a skeptical world,
so complete it can’t be closed or intolerant, 

so joyful it can’t be hurt by ridicule or dimmed by our own equally real questions and doubts.

So no, Nicholas Kristof, you don’t have to believe in the “literal flesh-and-blood resurrection”. 

But why wouldn’t you want to? 

It’s the only belief that doubt can’t hurt, and death can’t defeat, that is life itself. I know I want that. Don’t you?