April 27, Easter 2C (John 20:19-31)
Why wasn’t Thomas with the others? Why did he eventually return?
For two decades I’ve been leading groups through a 12-week introduction to the biblical narrative using storytelling. Most recently, after the session when we heard the story of the first three kings of Israel, a church member pulled me aside and said, “I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I honestly thought David and Goliath was just a sports analogy. I had no idea it was in the Bible.” I wondered if they might say something similar when we got to the story of Doubting Thomas in the tenth week of the study. Oh, I just thought that was a generic name for a skeptic.
I knew about Thomas from an early age. Growing up in the 1970s in the British version of fundamentalist dispensationalism, I heard about him often as a cautionary tale. While I’m fairly certain the elders of my church could not have named the seven deadly sins, if I’d asked them I suspect they would have included doubt on their list. While not necessarily deadly, doubt was certainly dangerous. The bumper sticker slogan “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” would have been a good fit for our congregation. Every Sunday we were exhorted to “have faith,” to “just believe,” and to be wary should doubts arise, for doubt was the opposite of faith.
I left that church when I came to the United States more than 30 years ago. I was already leaving their theology before I boarded the plane. In time, I would come to believe that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. A friend introduced me to the writings of Frederick Buechner, and when I read, in Wishful Thinking, “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving,” any residual guilt that remained for my ongoing questioning of the version of the Christian faith I first experienced drifted away. For the certainty that I was told revealed a strong faith—and strong people—had come to feel fragile, as it had little to offer the pain and suffering I witnessed in others. The perennial problem of evil is not solved by doubling down on belief. At least it isn’t for me.
