Disbelief

John 20:19-31

Think about something you don’t believe.

That the Moon is made of cheese, maybe.

Some things seem so self-evidently untrue – at least by the time we’ve steered imagination into adulthood – that you almost can’t imagine anyone believing them. These ideas become an easy cultural reference for things no one believes.

Or maybe you don’t believe that, say: 

any gecko lizards actually speak English and have preferred auto insurance companies. 

that “reality TV” is a completely unscripted documentary.

That a handful of kids and some flying bikes can and will get an extra-terrestrial being home again (or, if your formative movie years were different from mine, maybe that ruby slippers will get you home, or that broomsticks fly and school is magic).

Some things we don’t actually believe, but enjoy by suspending our disbelief. And maybe some of these are things that you would love to believe, even though you’re sure they aren’t real. (I’m not entirely immune to the temptations of time travel myself).

Then there are the other unbeliefs:

Some bitter disbeliefs – like when you don’t believe that a news outlet, government office, or friend is telling you the truth. 

Some very practical disbeliefs – like not believing it’s safe to eat a picnic in the middle of Route 73. 

Some disbeliefs that keep us from achieving dreams – ways that we don’t believe in our own capacity to grow or learn or do important things, or don’t believe you can trust others to help make your dreams happen.

And some disbeliefs that keep us out of trouble – like not believing that I can break every law and get away with it, or that I can wave my hand and cure cancer or bring the dead back to life.

So if someone told you that a beloved friend, maybe the most important person in your life, had gotten up out of their grave and come back for a visit, I think it’s more sensible to ask which kind of disbelief you’re feeling, rather than whether you believe it. At least right at first.

Maybe it’s a very practical disbelief – protecting you from additional grief, or the possibility of losing your sense of reality. Maybe it’s the confident, self-evident disbelief of the cheesy moon – where you don’t believe the person telling you this could even imagine it’s true. It’s self-evidently a joke.

Maybe it’s that kind of yearning disbelief – the thing you know isn’t true but oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if it could be, even just for a moment.

Everyone who appears in our gospel story this morning has had to experience this. (Well, everyone but Jesus.)

Every one of the disciples in this story, just like you and me, first hears that Jesus is alive, again, from someone else. Thomas hears from the excited or stunned reports of the whole group who greeted him with “hey, while you were gone, we have seen the Lord.”  And that whole group had heard the same unbelievable thing from Mary Magdalene, earlier that same day. And I suspect few, if any, of them believed this resurrection was real, physical, and undoubtable, even if they believed Mary had seen something improbable., and probably didn’t believe it when they heard it.

Because it’s impossible.

Talking geckos, flying bikes, cheesy moons have nothing on this story of a person you have seen and known to be dead coming back to life.

Of that experience revealing something divine. Something nobody seems to be able to put into specific words – until Thomas says it – but which John keeps trying to show us anyway.

John doesn’t tell us anything about how the general group of disciples responded when they first heard the impossible news from Mary, John focuses in, instead, to tell us just how Thomas responded.

That Thomas, hearing good and glorious news that’s both impossible and improbable, demands to experience it for himself.  To know and believe by the direct experience of his senses.

He could be the precursor of the scientific thinker who needs replicable experiments before accepting conclusions.

But I suspect that Thomas’s clearly stated demand for experience to believe is not an expression of skepticism or resistance to belief. I suspect it’s the demand of someone who deeply, urgently wants to believe. 

To have not only an intellectual acceptance that his friends are telling him the truth as best they can describe it, but to believe with his whole heart, soul, and body, to live this impossible possibility with the same unconscious certainty that you and I have in gravity – the certainty that your foot will come down on the earth again when you pick it up, and that you won’t be left hanging in midair. 

I’ve felt something like that before – that deep aching yearning to experience the powerful connection, the confidence in God’s promises, the absolute bedrock reality of Jesus’ love that I’ve seen in someone else’s life or story. Maybe you have, too.

And so, when Thomas has this experience – when Jesus brings him exactly the tactile certainty that takes belief out of the realm of mind and thought and into the very pores of your body – I hear elation and relief and homecoming, I hear profound fulfillment, in his response naming Jesus as God. My God.

And I believe that that’s what Jesus and John both want for us – for you and me, each time we encounter this story.

Some of us come to this story secure in our own belief. Hear it with a heart-rooted certainty of Jesus’ reality, divinity, and resurrection. For that some of us, this story is a reminder of just how extraordinary that certainty is, and a chance to renew the elation of that belief.

I suspect, though, that many of us come to this story, this week, with some kind of disbelief.
Maybe the cheesy moon kind of disbelief – a sense that resurrection is so unreasonable it doesn’t even matter what Thomas, or the other disciples, doubted.

Maybe a protective disbelief, the kind that keeps you from being disappointed that something this miraculous doesn’t happen to you, or that keeps you from having to consider all kinds of impossible things as possible, once you accept this one.

Maybe the suspended disbelief that lets you fully enter a story, but not expect it to have a real impact on your own life.

All of those are ways to let the story go on, a chance to look for the gifts of God, a relationship with Jesus, in other ways.

But I think John tells us this story, I think Jesus intentionally returns to Thomas, because they are inviting us to share that yearning for belief. Inviting us to set free our own – often suppressed – longing for the impossible reality of resurrection, the personal assurance of God’s power for me. I suspect that Jesus would be delighted to see you and me demand to experience resurrection and to know for real, to believe in ways that change the center of gravity in our lives. 

Because to do that is, already, to believe.

To act as if the impossible is real, and we can share it, too, is believing already.

To long for and even demand that deep tangible certainty of what we’ve heard is happening, and want to be true, is an act of faith, a leap of trust.

To reach our own physical hands toward the impossible physical reality of wounded, divine, resurrected Jesus is, in itself, an act of belief. Insistent, faithful belief in what we have not yet seen. 

With that hope, that reach for what we so wish to find true, Jesus can look at you and me, saying, “blessed are we who have not seen and yet, now, yearningly, insistently, believe.”