What didn’t Thomas believe?
The risen Jesus had appeared to the disciples, but Thomas wasn’t there; apparently he didn’t read his church newsletter that week, so he didn’t know what was going on, and when the disciples came together, he was absent.
So they had to tell him about what happened, and when they did, Thomas didn’t believe.
What didn’t he believe?
The Bible doesn’t say.
We talk about not believing as if it’s always a bad thing. Well, ten days ago, Google announced that it had developed a new phone app that could translate animal sounds into human language.
A friend of mine believed it. At first. Then he looked at the calendar, saw that it was April 1, and then he started to doubt. Good for him.
What we don’t believe is often as important as what we do believe. Which is why I want to know: What didn’t Thomas believe?
Did he not believe the testimony of the disciples? They told him that Jesus has stood there among them, that the flesh and blood of Jesus was in their midst. Or, maybe, that “flesh and blood” part was Thomas’ own assumption. But Jesus had passed through a locked door; flesh and blood can’t do that…. Maybe it was the physics that Thomas doubted.
More important than what Thomas believed or didn’t believe, however, is what you believe or don’t believe…. Some of the resurrection stories in scripture describe Jesus’ risen body as being flesh and blood, just like his body before the resurrection. Other passages describe his body as being different, transformed; a spiritual body of some sort.
What are we to believe?
Sometimes people will tell me that they don’t believe in God. I often wonder what it is that they don’t believe about God. I think that, probably, I don’t believe those things about God, either. A lot of what is said about God, I find hard to believe. At Chapman University, Marcus Borg said that when he meets someone who says they don’t believe in God, he asks them to describe the God they don’t believe in, because quite often, he says, he doesn’t believe in that God either. I think next time, I’ll try that.
Some people think if they question God, or if they question what they’ve been taught about God, they’re not good Christians. Hogwash. Too often, the God we believe in is a God we have created in our own image. For many Christians, the God they have created is male, white, and a member of the same political party as they are. It is a God who is always in favor of the home team, our team, no matter what. It is a God who condemns those people who we feel uncomfortable around. It is a God who blesses the righteous and curses the unrighteous, and since we live in the most blessed nation on earth, we must therefore be the most righteous of all the earth’s people.
I question that portrayal of God. I have my doubts about a God described like that. I certainly don’t claim to know all there is to know about God, but I am pretty sure that God is far greater than any human image of God. In fact, the Bible has a name for human images of God: human images of God are idols. Idols can be made out of wood or metal, but they can also exist in our minds.
Jesus told Thomas to believe. “Believe and do not doubt.” I don’t think Jesus meant that Thomas needed to believe in the how or why, in the logistics of just how Jesus had risen from the dead, how he was able to pass through locked doors, or whether his new life was a physical life or something beyond that, something greater. I don’t think he meant that Thomas needed to believe all these things about him. Rather, I think he meant that Thomas needed to believe in him.
If you read the materials that accompanied our Easter Special offering, you saw a story about a teachers’ pep rally for the Dallas Public School system. In the middle of that pep rally, a twelve year-old student named Dalton Sherman asked the teachers, “Do you believe in me?.” He was challenging the teachers to believe in him. He told the teachers that if they believed in him, then he could “do anything.”
That’s the kind of belief that I think Jesus asks of us. Dalton knew that if the teachers believed in him, he could do anything. Well, Jesus believes in you. And if you believe in Jesus, then you, too, can do anything.
Now, I can believe in Jesus, and still have doubts about what his body was like after the resurrection. I can believe in new life, and not understand exactly what form new life will take. I don’t need to make the same mistake that the literalist Nicodemus made, and think that new life means I must emerge once again from my mother’s womb. I can believe in the stories of scripture, and still have doubts about whether or not they actually happened the way scripture says they happened. Because whether or not they actually happened, I can believe that they are true.
Sometimes we may not be sure what to believe about Jesus, but I’m more concerned about our lack of belief in Jesus. I’m more concerned about the doubts we have regarding the good news of the kingdom he proclaimed.
Jesus’ primary message was for people to turn to a new way of living, to start living in the kingdom of God, a kingdom that is now at hand.
In the kingdom Jesus proclaimed, people care for one another. In the kingdom Jesus proclaimed, people work for peace with one another. In the kingdom Jesus proclaimed, people share with one another so that no one is in need.
In the kingdom of God, people find blessing for themselves and for their neighbors. It is the beloved community dreamed by Martin Luther King, Jr. It is the new world envisioned by the ancient prophets. It is what we pray for every time we say, “Thy kingdom come … on earth as in heaven.”
And yet, do we really believe in it? We’re still searching for happiness and kingdom blessings in all the wrong places. Last week, a person who stood in line to be one of the first to buy the new Apple iPad sent out a tweet just a few hours after making the big purchase. He said: “I need help from fellow iPad owners: I’m still no happier as a person. Anyone else having that problem?” Apparently, he thought his iPad was broken because it didn’t bring him the happiness that all the hype promised him.
We laugh and chuckle because we know better. And yet, the lines to buy iPads far exceeded the lines to get a good seat in church, even on Easter morning. We spend far more time, energy, and money acquiring the things that we think will make us happy, and far less time learning about what Jesus says will make us happy; and we spend far less money helping to make the kingdom Jesus proclaimed a reality here on earth. Globally, almost one trillion dollars is spent annually on electronics. Nearly twice that amount is spent annually on military expenditures. The amount that Americans spend on their pets is, of course, a tiny fraction of all that, and yet spending on pets is still more than what Americans give to the church. Americans also spend more on weight loss than they give to the church.
Americans clearly have their doubts about the importance of the kingdom of God.
Our church is currently working to bring God’s kingdom on earth, as it is in heaven. We are, through global ministries, digging wells in the Machaze district of Ethiopia. Do you know that women and even young girls there spend eight hours a day, every single day of the year, walking back and forth from their homes to the mudholes that serve as their only water source, and then carrying that water, 50 pounds at a time, back to their villages? Do you know that, as precious as that water is, it is often dangerously unhealthy? Do you know that, somewhere in the world, a child dies every 15 seconds due to a lack of clean water? That’s over three million children a year.
Americans spend $60 billion each year on soft drinks. That’s enough to build five wells providing clean water to every single one of those 3.3 million children. Of course, every child doesn’t need a well, just every village. But we believe in the easy accessibility of soft drinks more than we do in providing clean water to children in Ethiopia.
Jesus knows that if we work to make life better for the least of these, the poorest of God’s children, we will reap blessings for ourselves and we will find greater happiness. For ourselves! But we don’t believe that. If we did, then we’d do what he’s told us to do. We’d make it a priority. But instead, this work is what we do after we take care of our own wants. After we buy our electronics, after we take our expensive vacations, after we agonize about what clothes to get rid of because there’s no more room in our closets for the new clothes we just bought; then we’ll see if there is any time, energy, or money left over to devote to building the kingdom of God.
Do you believe in Jesus? Do you believe in the kingdom he proclaimed?
Marcus Borg said that to truly believe in someone or something means that you be-love that someone or something. It means that that someone or something is your passion. It means that it is your heart’s desire. Young Dalton Shermon was challenging those teachers to make him and the other children their passion. He was challenging them to match their actions to the faith in their students that they claimed.
That challenge to believe, to be-love, is our challenge as well. To believe in Jesus doesn’t mean you need to have absolute certainty about the circumstances regarding how he was born, how he died, or how he came back to life. To believe in Jesus means to be-love him, to follow him with your whole heart, to put your whole being into making real the kingdom he proclaimed.
After all, Jesus believed in you; believed in you enough to make you his passion; believed in you enough to give his life in order to make you whole.
Do you believe in him?
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