Materials

Gospel of John, #10


Seeing Is Believing
John 20:24-31
by R. Todd Bouldin


You thought it would never come. Matthew, Mark and Luke place it right at the center of their Gospels. Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” and it seems that all of heaven waits in silence for the answer to come. Then Peter makes that “great confession” that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God. And we hear a great crescendo of the music, the story kicks into high gear, and it then moves rapidly to its conclusion. But John never gives us such a story … not until the very end. Missing is that great moment at the very hinge point of the Gospel. In John’s Gospel, that moment comes at the very end when Thomas makes the confession that John wants all those who hear his Gospel to confess, “My Lord and my God!” But Jesus says that there is even a “greater” confession: “Blessed are those who believe without seeing.”

Prayer

Thomas was not your Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, or even Wizard of Oz kind of guy. Imagination wasn’t his strong suit. Thomas was a realist. He believed in what he could see, what he could prove, and what the empirical evidence could reveal. He was not one for fanciful dreams, imaginative stories or postmodern abstraction. Thomas is not a “John” kind of guy either. John’s metaphors and symbols would have driven the “just the facts” Thomas crazy. Mark was more of his kind of gospel writer. When Jesus spoke in parables, it drove Thomas crazy. You can just hear Thomas saying, “I wish Jesus would quit telling so many stories and just preach the Gospel. Why can’t He just say what He means?” At the Last Supper, Jesus told His disciples, “I go to prepare a place for you, and you know where I am going.” We can imagine most of the disciples trying to look thoughtful and nodding, “Yes, yes.” But not this disciple. Thomas, according to John’s Gospel, says, “Jesus, we don’t even know where you are going. How can we possibly know the way?” Leave it to Thomas to take Jesus literally.

The next day the way that Jesus was going became painfully obvious. Thomas now knew that the person he had known as Jesus was now crucified on a tree, and that His hands and feet were nailed to the cross, and His side was pierced. He knew that they had laid Jesus in the tomb. That’s what he knew. That’s what the evidence proved.

So when Thomas heard the Easter message that Jesus was raised from the dead, it was only natural that Thomas said, “What are you talking about? It must be another metaphor again. So you’re saying that somehow Jesus is symbolically raised, that He is somehow with us even though He is dead? Well, that could never happen. There is no way that a spiritual resurrected body could be the same physical body of Jesus. It just could not happen that the actual physical body of Jesus could die and be raised again. Unless I see the mark of the nails in His hands, and put my hand in His side, I will not believe.”

There it is. That statement of resolve in the absence of evidence. I will not believe. I do not believe when you say that the physical world is alive with the glory of the heavenly world. I do not believe I will ever be healthy. I do not believe that I will ever find a job. I do not believe that I will ever find someone to love me. I do not believe that I will be made well. I do not believe that we can save this marriage. I do not believe that peace can come to the Middle East. I do not believe in a resurrection I cannot see for myself. All of those are quite different stages and dimensions of believing, but they are all connected together by one essential thing: the choice to believe that your life consists of only the way in which you are set on seeing it. What if there is so much more? If you can believe that Christ was raised from the dead, then there is no limit to your believing that the power of God can cause all kinds of things to happen in your life.

Remember that there was a day when you didn’t believe, then your doubts were shattered. Remember the day that you said to yourself, “I do not believe that peace will ever come to Northern Ireland or Bosnia.” Well, it has. “I do not believe the Berlin Wall will ever fall.” Well it fell down. Some before said, “I don’t think that I will ever see the day when black and white children will attend the same schools.” Or “Human beings cannot walk on the moon.” Or “I can’t imagine watching a movie on my cell phone.” The world is constantly experiencing things previously thought unbelievable.

The problem is though that doubt is easy and belief requires a lot of work. You have to decide if you believe in a better future for yourself and for the world or not. If you are a non-believer and you doubt the future, if you believe that the world is on a spiral downward into a black hole or headed for a great destruction, then you won’t have to worry about much. Just turn on the television set, kick back and enjoy the ride downward. But if you choose to believe, then you will have to believe that the unbelievable really is possible. You will have to choose to believe that poverty isn’t inevitable, that abortions are not unavoidable, and that war isn’t predictable. You will have to choose to believe that your life can matter. You will have to work hard to believe that your children can find their way again, that your illness can be healed, or that you can even believe in God again. If you doubt, you can just give up trying and wrap yourself in comfortable despair, entertain yourself into a television coma, and live a boring life that is realistic and no longer dreams dreams.

Belief is hard work, and Thomas reminds us that belief has to have its reasons. If you are going to believe in change and work for that goal, then the basis of your belief has to be more than wishful thinking. It needs to be something concrete. And here it is: Jesus Christ has risen from the dead. To quote Paul from I Corinthians, “If Christ was not raised from the dead, then everything else we believe and proclaim is in vain.” (I Corinthians 1:14). If this did not happen, we might as well close the doors to the church and go home. We would have nothing to say to the world.

Why? Because the only basis for believing, the only reason to have hope, is that death is not the last word but that Christ is. Christ is alive, and therefore “the old is gone and a new creation has begun” (II Corinthians 5). He is working in the world by His Holy Spirit to create a world that looks like the Kingdom of God. He is not done with His work among the nations of the world, or with the poor, or with the lonely and the sick, and He is not done with His good work in your life either. So if you believe that, you have every reason to get up this morning and believe that because He is raised there still is a reason for you to believe, and a reason for you to get on with your life.

Resurrection is not a metaphor, nor is it just a good story. It is not a symbol of the rebirth of the human spirit, or the perseverance of hope. That wasn’t good enough for Thomas, and it should not be good enough for you. If we just believe that resurrection is a myth or a metaphor, we might as well join Pilate and just wash our hands of it all. But it’s a lot more than a metaphor. All four of the Gospel writers agree that Jesus physically, literally really rose from the dead. It was as real as the wound in His side and the nail marks in His hands. That is central to everything else the New Testament claims.

Jesus died and was raised so that your life might be characterized by purpose, hope and glory. Anyone who believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ should not find themselves awash in cynicism and despair or enslaved in boredom and paralysis. Jesus is alive, and therefore everything in your life is filled with sacred Presence and a hopeful promise. But you say, “I can’t see what Thomas saw, and I can’t see Jesus the way John did.” That’s right. We see only by faith. Faith not a proof or an explanation. No amount of evidence can give it to you. Neither is faith an emotion or a matter of the heart. Faith is a choice. It’s a matter of the will, a choice in the midst of doubts, a decision in spite of the doubts. It’s a choice open to all, but John says in chapter 1 that believing makes it possible for you to rediscover your true child of God self again, and that will redirect your whole life.

If you think about it, we never have proof of the things that really matter to us. As Frederick Buechner writes, “Can I prove that life is better than death, or that love is better than hate? Can I prove the greatness of the great, or the beauty of the beautiful? Can I prove the friendship of any friend? When I experience it, I don’t need to prove it, and when I don’t experience it, no proof will do.”

Have you ever made the mistake of trying to prove that you love someone? If you’re at that point, there is something already wrong with the love you are trying to have. If you feel that you have to prove to someone that you love them, it will drive you crazy and damage your relationship. You will drive them away too. Some things come only by a deep sense of knowing that isn’t something you can prove but you just know that it is. Some things come alive only by faith, and often those are the very best things of all. I think that is why Jesus told Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Not seeing with the eye permits us to see with faith. I recently was speaking with someone that said that they could not believe in Christ because they cannot see proof of Him. I told them that the irony is that they are now ready to believe because faith is only faith if it does not depend on seeing. Only faith can allow you to see the love of God at work in your life that is so much more than evidence can prove.

Seeing is believing. It was for Thomas. You may not can see the wounds, but if you have seen the work of the risen Christ in your life, then you can join the saints of all the ages who, beginning with Thomas, looked upon Jesus Christ and cried out, “My Lord and my God.” It all begins with doubting your doubts and getting on with your life. I take great hope that even Thomas came to believe, and that the one who doubted the most was the one who finally cried out with full conviction and awe the confession John most wants from us, the confession of one whose faith finally can see that heaven has touched earth, and now everything is ablaze with life.

Let us pray. (Ephesians 1:17-20)

      17 - I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know Him, 18 - so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which He has called you, what are the riches of His glorious inheritance among the saints, 19 - and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power for us who believe, according to the working of His great power. 20 - God* put this power to work in Christ when He raised Him from the dead




April 23, 2006

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