The Rev. Virginia W. Nagel
Ephphatha Parish of the Deaf
Episcopal Diocese of Central NY
Today's Gospel reading is the well-loved story of Thomas and his lack of belief.
Perhaps Thomas could be counted as one of the first scientists, or maybe one of the first lawyers! Until about 500 years ago, most people had no doubts whatsoever that things could happen which could not be understood or explained by human minds. It would not have occurred to most people to demand proof for the apostles' statement that We have seen the Lord. In the same way, most people would unquestioningly accept such ideas as angels, fairies and ghosts, miracles and signs from heaven. People simply did not have any reason to doubt or question another person's word. The other person might be wrong, but everyone was quite sure that the universe was not limited to things that could be measured and proven. Some things you just had to accept whether or not you understood them.
Thomas, however, wanted to see for himself. He wanted proof. Scientists want proof, and lawyers want proof. That's why I said that perhaps Thomas was the first scientist or the first lawyer.
Then came the Age of Reason, from around 1450 to the present, and all of a sudden everyone was demanding proof for everything. And with that change in thinking, it became difficult for many people to believe in God, miracles, or religion in general, because you cannot touch God, you cannot measure God, and you cannot prove how miracles take place. We became science-minded and then technology-minded, and we want proof, we want measurements, we want data. And that began a different way of thinking: people began to say, Yes, of course I believe in God, but they did not think of God as a proven fact any more. We began to put religion in a separate part of our mind from things that we can see, measure and explain. Religion became a not-quite-real thing to many people, and belief in miracles, angels and God started to decrease.
Well, we can understand how Thomas felt, because we are like Thomas, ourselves. We want proof. We want solid data. We won't believe things just because somebody tells those things to us. Yes, we understand Thomas.
However, one thing that isn't made clear in today's Gospel, because nobody ever thought there was any question about it, is that there is a difference between believing and faith. They are not the same thing at all, although most people think they mean the same.
What we believe is what we think is true. We are often wrong in our beliefs. For many years, and even today, people believed that the world was flat. People have also believed that going out in cold weather gives you a cold, and that thirteen is bad luck, and that if you step on a crack in the sidewalk you'll break your mother's back, and that if you knock on wood you will prevent bad things from happening. Most of us know that these beliefs are not true. They have been disproved over and over, but people still believe them.
Faith means to act on what you believe, whether or not you can prove it. We have seen this happen many times. In World War 2, most of the population of Germany acted on the belief (which was NOT true) that only blond people with white skin and blue eyes were acceptable. And so we saw the Holocaust, when millions of Jews, dark-skinned people, and people of various religions such as Catholicism and Orthodoxy were murdered.
Now if you pay close attention to the Gospel for today, you will see that Thomas did not know what to believe. His mind told him that dead people don't get up and walk around and live again. But his close friends told them that they had seen Jesus alive...the same Jesus whom they had watched die on the cross, the same Jesus they had helped to bury. But then, Thomas and the others had seen this same Jesus raise dead people to life...the son of the widow in the town of Nain, Lazarus, the little daughter of the man who had come asking for his help. So Thomas did not know what to believe. Dead men don't rise and live again. But Jesus had raised dead people to life! What was Thomas supposed to think?
What was he supposed to believe?
We need to notice carefully that Thomas had not lost his faith. Faith, you remember, means to act on what we believe, whether or not we can prove it. And Thomas, for all his doubts, was still meeting with the other apostles, still loving Jesus, still living according to Jesus' teachings and ways. He had faith, but he was not sure what he believed.
And so...Jesus gave strength and confirmation to Thomas' belief. Jesus helped Thomas to make his faith and his belief fit together again.
Many of us feel that way.
We may doubt the stories in the Bible about miracles. We may doubt or wonder if Jesus really rose from the dead. We may wonder how we can be sure about God and religion when there are so many things we cannot prove. We have trouble with our beliefs.
But we go on living in faith. We keep our promises. We help the needy. We try to be honest and to resist temptation. We take our children to Sunday School and see that they learn good values. We still have faith, even if we cannot explain how our faith is based on our beliefs. We can be unsure about our beliefs but still live lives of faith.
What it really boils down to is the psalm that Peter quoted in the sermon he preached, the one we read in today's Epistle. Remember what he said? He quoted a psalm: I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand so that I shall not be shaken; therefore my heart was glad and my tongue rejoiced;
moreover, my flesh will still live in hope. That's it in a nutshell. We live according to God's ways because that is the way we find it good to live. We cannot prove that God exists, we cannot understand how God raised Jesus from the dead, we don't understand how miracles are done...and we don't really need to understand, prove and measure these things. We just need to live according to what we have been taught about God, what we have found out about Jesus for ourselves, in fact, live in faith. We don't need to bother our heads with proofs and measurements and try to change our beliefs to agree with them. We just need to live in faith, the faith that God loves us and that Jesus' death was for our good and for our eternal salvation. Amen.
