Thank God for Doubting Thomas
John 20:24-29
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Poor Doubting Thomas. When I was growing up in church, that was how we told this story, anyway. Poor Doubting Thomas: he didn’t have enough faith, and so Jesus had to show up and scold him. Poor Doubting Thomas: How humiliated he must have felt! Proved wrong in front of everyone. Doomed forever to be a Sunday School object lesson. A cautionary tale: don’t doubt Jesus, or he might scold you too! Poor Doubting Thomas!
In this era of deconstruction and reclaiming of doubt, it is not entirely novel to take a second look at the story of Doubting Thomas. In many circles, doubt and questioning do not have the negative reputation they once did. But as someone whose faith journey has been marked deeply by doubt, I hold Thomas near to my heart. His story is a deeply human one, a story of grief and a story of the precarity of hope. As a pastor, I return to Thomas’s story year after year, putting myself in his sandals and wanting to look at the resurrection through his eyes.
Thomas was a man who had just watched one of his best friends die a horrible death. Thomas was traumatized, in shock, afraid. Thomas was a man in mourning. His friends came to him and said, “We have seen the Lord!” and he wanted more than anything for it to be true, and yet… Well, how could it? How could it be true? Thomas had seen the body, barely recognizable as his Lord until the women cleaned the dried blood out of his forever open eyes. The hands that had once healed the sick and fed the hungry, were now ripped open, horrible gaping holes at the wrist. The feet that had once traveled from village to village preaching good news to the poor and liberation for the prisoner, were mangled and torn.
Hazy from grief, eyes blurry from crying, Thomas hasn’t slept well the past three days, and his broken sleep has been littered with nightmares. You know the kind: the ones you have after someone dies, where they’re back and it was all a mistake! Some sort of joke or mix-up. Jesus isn’t dead! No, he’s standing here in your living room! Oh, thank God! And then...the alarm goes off. And you wake up, and the grief hits you like a freight train all over again. It was just a dream. Your friend is still dead. Back to the real world.
Here’s Thomas on Easter Sunday hearing his other friends shout “We have seen the Lord!” and thinking, “This is another one of these dreams.” He pinches himself but doesn’t wake up. He’s disoriented and confused, but he’s had this dream before. He knows that you wake up eventually. He’s not going to fall for it this time. He’s not going to let the grief catch him off guard when he wakes up and so he resists. He wears his doubts like armor: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” His cynicism doesn’t keep him safe. The grief hits him anyway, knocking him off his feet. But at least he tried.
I’ve been Thomas. I’ve been envious of people who seemed to believe so easily. Who seemed to trust so strongly, while I remained the “ye of little faith.” Easter is this strange story, both ugly and beautiful, both utterly human and mystifyingly divine. I hear this weird, mixed-up story and even after a life growing up in church, even after years of pastoring, I still sometimes think, “I’m supposed to just accept that this is true? I’m supposed to just believe this, no questions asked? A dead body got up and walked around? A hunk of rotting, stinking flesh healed itself and became a living thing? You mean to tell me Jesus opened his eyes, swatted away the confused flies that were trying to feast on skin that was suddenly no longer putrid, stood up, folded his grave clothes, and walked out of the tomb? And I’m just supposed to shrug and say, “He is risen, indeed!”
Sometimes, that’s not enough for me. Sometimes I want proof. I want that new body. I want the friends I’ve lost to death to get up and walk. I want to see the nail scars in his hands. I want to feel something! I want to touch something! I want Jesus to put my hand in his side so I can know that Easter isn’t just some cruel dream that I’ll one day have to wake up to. During those times, I wanted the same thing Thomas did, “God, give me a sign. If Jesus is the first fruit of the resurrection, well, then where is the rest of the harvest? We are rotting on the vine! Show me the nail scars in your hand!”
During those times I look at the spring flowers just starting to bloom and I am tempted to settle for a metaphor. Maybe resurrection is just about the way flowers come up after winter, or the caterpillars change into butterflies. It’s very satisfying, to settle for metaphor. But it’s better than a God that talks big and never shows up. It’s better than that gut-punch feeling you get when you wake up from one of Those dreams. It seems safer some days to be a doubting Thomas.
But there’s something about Thomas that many people forget to talk about. Thomas may have doubted. But Jesus didn’t push him away for it. On the contrary, Jesus drew him closer than anyone before. Because he dared to doubt; because he was willing to be the person who asked the questions everyone else was thinking, because he demanded more of Jesus’s presence, Thomas became more physically close to and intimate with Jesus than almost anyone in the gospel story. The only person who can claim a deeper intimacy with Jesus is Mary, the God-bearer whose womb incubated the body of Christ.
No one else got to touch Jesus like "Doubting" Thomas did. He knows things about Jesus we never can or will. To feel a part of Jesus usually concealed by flesh, to find one’s self inside the risen Christ. To stroke the knotted scar tissue and to penetrate the still-healing wounds of a dead and risen God. Jesus does not push Thomas away for doubting; he draws Thomas closer. Closer than the True Believers ever got. Only Thomas put his hand in Jesus’s side and exclaimed “My Lord and my God!”
The gospel tells us, in verse 26, “Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them.” Jesus saw beyond Thomas’s doubts. He saw that Thomas’s refusal to believe was just another kind of locked door, a way of protecting himself, walling himself off from a grief that was too much to bear. Jesus didn’t kick down the doors. Jesus didn’t rip apart Thomas’s questions with self-assured apologetics. Jesus simply showed up, though the doors were locked, and pulled Thomas to his side.
The resurrection is true, whether we believe it or not. God’s victory over death does not rise or fall on our belief. Our locked doors won’t stop the resurrection from being true. And our locked doors won’t stop Jesus from revealing himself to us, showing up, offering us his body. Just look at one of the most important gifts Jesus gave the church: the communion table. Just as Jesus offered the scars on his body to Thomas, Jesus offers his body and blood to us, that we might believe. Jesus knows how hard it is for us to believe something so amazing, and so he gives us something to see, touch, taste, and smell. His body and his blood in bread and wine.
Blessed (literally happy) are those who have not seen and yet believe. But there’s hope for the rest of us too, and maybe there are better things than being blessed/happy. Touching broken, holy flesh, and the memory of that touch living forever in your connective tissue and muscle memory, for instance. Or the smell of freshly baked communion bread, still warm in my hands as I break off a piece for each worshiper: Christ’s body broken for you and for you and for you, to touch and taste and chew slowly and pick out of your molars with your tongue as you make your way back to your pew, the yeasty aftertaste lingering even as you leave the sanctuary to face a world of death and grief, a world so cruel it makes the idea of the resurrection seem like a mean joke.
I would not trade anything for that aftertaste, for that chance to touch and smell and see the body of Christ. On the other side of doubt, there is a deep and intimate knowledge of the Divine that I would not trade for anything in this broken world. Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe. For the rest of us, there are other blessings. Thank God for Doubting Thomas.
Rev. Sarah Moon is a pastor and ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. While a
student at Methodist Theological School in Ohio, they specialized in Ecotheology and Biblical
Languages, and they continue to pursue these interests in their day job as a pastor in Las
Vegas, Nevada. While off the clock, Rev. Moon enjoys long walks in the desert, collecting
bones, and watching horror films.