The Agony of Doubt

Listen or read the following transcript from The Gospel Coalition as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of doubt from John 20:24-31.

He was all bubbly and warmth and charm. He was one of these straight-laced intellectual types. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone just quite like him. He’d come in every Saturday night with his list of questions on a little sheet of paper. “Well tonight, Don, I’d like to ask you this. Number one …” So I’d try to give some Christian explanation. “Well okay, number two …” Then when he got through the list, then we could get on to talking about who was winning in football and how University of British Columbia was coping and so forth.

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Next Saturday, he’d come along again. “Well, Don, this is my question list.” He’d pull it out of his pocket. “Number one …” This went on week after week after week. Then finally, he got to the end of his list one night. He said, “All right, Don, I’m ready to become a Christian.” Let me tell you, that’s not been the way it normally works.

Most people don’t come to Christ in exactly that kind of way, but here was a chap who had all kinds of questions that needed to be asked. He had honest intellectual questions. He just didn’t know anything. His doubt always sprang from a kind of ignorance, but the ignorance cleared up, and he became a Christian. It happens. That’s one element.

Sometimes doubt is grounded in systematic moral choice. Consider the candor of the famous atheist Aldous Huxley, writing in his book Ends and Means in 1937. I’m quoting him now.

“For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. We objected to the polical and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (the Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was an admirably simple method of confusing these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt. We would deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.”

Well, at least he’s an honest man. Recently I was reading through the works of Michel Foucault, famous French postmodernist, now recently deceased. There’s a lovely paragraph in him that says exactly the same thing: that the heart of his postmodern commitments are his desire for sexual liberation. That’s his words, not mine. So sometimes, in other words, there can be a kind of moral choice, a systematic moral choice, that shapes all kinds of epistemological judgments (that is, judgments of how you come to know something or think that you come to know something).

Sometimes doubt is fostered not so much by deliberate philosophical and systematic choices as by deliberate atomistic choices. There’s a sense in which you may be walking in the sort of inherited Christian structures of your parents, for some of you. Then you come here, and you make certain kinds of moral choices. You start cheating on exams, or you start enjoying getting drunk on weekends or whatever. Somehow, the moral stance of your parents seems a little distant, a little square, and a little old fashioned. It’s not that you’ve taken a huge moral, philosophical, moral judgment. You’re just having fun at a lot of parties, but it does affect how you look at a lot of other things.

What we have to see is that human beings are complex, and all of our judgments, orientations, and values intertwine; so that when it comes, likewise, to the matter of religious knowledge and religious belief, it’s not just a question of me giving you information or something like that. We are complex beings in all of our culture, our interactions, our commitments, our value judgments, and our preferences. They all intertwine, and unless you see that both your commitments and your doubts are bound up with such intertwinings, you won’t come to terms with what the Bible says.

Doubt may be fostered by sleep deprivation. It’s as simple as that. Sometimes I tell students the godliest thing they can do in the entire universe is go to bed, not stay up all night praying. Go to bed. I know my own signs. I get by with less sleep than a lot of people, but the first sign that I got too little sleep is I start barking at my kids.

Next sign is I start barking at my wife. That costs me a little more. Third sign is that I start viewing the whole world very cynically. Everything that happens that’s a little bit off, I’ve got a smart-mouth response for it. Then the next sign is I don’t want anything to do with prayer, or God, or anybody else. I just want to sock it. I have a really in-your-face attitude.

Somewhere along the line, the alarm bells start ringing, and I say, “Sorry, folks, I apologize. I’m going to bed.” Then a couple of good nights’ sleep later, I’ve got my sense of humor back. If you don’t do that, you crack up; that’s what you do. That’s the onset of a breakdown, and some of you aren’t all that far from it somewhere into this semester. I know that.

It can affect what you do in the religious domain and coming to faith and all. There’s no way I want one of you making a profession of faith because you’ve been pushed right to the end of sleep deprivation, and now (out of almost a sort of a desperate lunge for something to hang onto) you say, “All right, I’ll have Jesus.” That’s not faith; it’s sleep deprivation.

Sometimes doubt is the byproduct of a massive, faulty worldview. I told a story in a group of post-grads yesterday. I haven’t said it to anyone else, so let me just pass this one on. I only heard about it from a young woman in England in January. It’s a lovely story.

She was a recent graduate from history, English, or something or other and had to go and teach in a boys’ school in a rough part of Belfast, Northern Ireland. She was given this class of 13- and 14-year-old boys, and it was a tough bunch, where every third or fourth word was either vulgar or profane. Reading was not on the top of their priorities, and thinking even farther down the list.

She was told by the head that she had to teach RE (religious education). It was mandated by the government, and they didn’t have any specialist in the area, and certainly nobody else on the teaching staff wanted to teach it. So although she was trained in history (or whatever it was), she found herself teaching RE to 13- or 14-year-old toughs.

Needless to say, her first three or four weeks were pretty hellish. Then, in a moment of inspiration, she brought in a large bag of flour and some salt, brought in some water, and had them make some sort of makeshift plaster of Paris to start creating their own beings. They could make little figures that looked like human beings, or they could make them looking pretty ghastly with any number of arms and legs. Whatever they wanted, they could make their own little people. That night, she cooked them so they got hard. Baked them in the oven.

The next day she wanted them to paint them, give them names, give them personalities, start making story lines about them; so they were busy and involved in this. Then she wanted them to start making stories about their origins: where they came from, what their personalities were like, what their names were like.

She got two or three desks together here and two or three desks together there (she started to make worlds for them, you know?) so that now you get several of these little creatures interacting. “Make your world so that they have a little lake here, with some trees and so on. Then over here, maybe some little mountains and roads or so …”

They began to get into this. This is a whole world they’re making, you see? There’s a story going on in these worlds that these boys are working out. Then she comes in, and she says, “Now I want you to make rules for them. You’ve got your world. You’ve got these people, but there are some dangers out there. What kind of rules do you want for them?”

Well, they started making their rules. Don’t go in the lake; you’ll dissolve. Don’t fall off the edge of the desk; you’ll crumble into a thousand little pieces of powder. Don’t fight so badly that limbs come off. They began to make their little rules. Then she said, “Boil these down. You have 15 to 17 rules now. Boil these down. Can you sort of get it all narrowed down into one or two, so that you make sense without all sorts of rules?” They argued it out. Finally they came up with two or three rules. Number one: Always do what I say. A couple of other little rules like that.

Then the next day she came in, and she said, “All right, I’ve been thinking about this.” She said, “Supposing one of these little critters sort of popped up on the desk and said to you, ‘From now on this is my world. I don’t need you. I mean, this is my world. This is where I live. You don’t live here. You go home at night. This is my world. I’m not going to follow your rules; I’ll do it my own way. You know, what right do you have to impose your will on me in any case? I’m an independent being! You don’t have the right to tell me what to do.’ ” Before she got further in this, one of the little boys broke out: “I’d break his bloody legs!”

Now guess where she went next. You see, she was trying to get across a worldview question which, if we don’t understand, we’re not going to understand the New Testament either. The worldview question is this: Are we independent, autonomous beings, who determine our own future, or do we owe God?

He made us. He’s given us everything we have, surrounded us with the right rules and security, cares for us, and shapes us. Our whole orientation, our best life, our purpose, our satisfaction, our delight is in knowing our Maker; and we turn around and say, “Hey! You don’t belong here; this is my world.” And we’re a bit surprised when he says to us, “I’ll break your bloody leg!”

The Bible insists (not using quite that language, you understand) that that’s about what God does say. Not because he’s personally ticked. It’s more than that. It’s because he is God, and he cares about justice and integrity. It is a massive affront to who he is for his creatures, utterly dependent upon him, to shake their puny fists in his face, pretend he doesn’t exist, and defy what he says. Defying what he says is not only stupid, not only painful for us in the long haul, but it’s massively vulgar. It’s a defiance of him. It’s profane in the sense of common, cheap.

So a person can start listening to the Christian message, you see, and if they don’t have that sort of worldview structure in place, they hear about Jesus dying on the cross to pay for our sins and reconcile us to God … The whole thing doesn’t make sense unless you realize that we’ve offended this God. It doesn’t make sense.

You have to get those worldviews in place. You have to see that that is what the Bible says. That’s what God insists is the case, and we’re so bound up in our own little worldviews, we can’t even hear him. We can be so lost inside our own little stories we can’t see the bigger picture. All we can see is our little corner on the desk.

Now in the account before us that was read for us (John, chapter 20), several forms of doubt intertwine. Let me set the stage for you so that you grasp the context in which this passage occurs. Jesus, by this point, has been crucified. We’ve looked at quite a number of the accounts that lead up to his death. He has been buried.

Quite frankly, his disciples had not expected this to happen. We’ve seen in earlier talks some of the reasons why. They expected a messianic figure, a kingly figure, a victorious figure who would turf out the Romans and win. They didn’t expect someone who would end up crucified in the disgusting, ignominious, shameful, odious death of a crucifixion. They didn’t expect that. They certainly didn’t expect him to come back from the dead. They didn’t expect that either, so they’re locked in a room in a little huddle, frightened. They sank rather desultorily into a despairing, somewhat fearful gloom.

We’re told in the preceding verses to the ones that were laid out before you in the bulletin, on the evening on that first day of the week, after Jesus had already wonderfully risen from the dead, after the tomb had been shown to be empty, after he’d already displayed himself to some women … Now we read on the evening of that first Easter Sunday, when Jesus came back from the dead (we’re told), when the disciples were together with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish authorities, Jesus came and stood among them.

Now after this we’re told he showed them his hands and his feet because they still had the scars in them. Of course. Not only so, elsewhere we’re told that he actually ate some things. It wasn’t sort of a mass hallucination. When you start working through the accounts of the resurrection, there have been all kinds of people over the years that have tried to say, “It’s a nice myth, but it doesn’t really stand up. The evidences don’t work out.”

Well, in all fairness, I think that’s just far too cynical. There were just too many eyewitnesses under too many different circumstances. It wasn’t as if this was a hacked-up group just waiting to be deluded. This was a group endued with massive cynicism and skepticism about the whole business. Nor was this some sort of glorified, glorious image (in a kind of misty sense) that didn’t deal with reality. On the one hand the tomb was empty, demonstrably empty; and on the other hand, the One that appeared to them had marks in his hands.

I have a friend. He’s gone now; he’s dead, but when he was a young man and serving at a church, he was greeting people at the door one day; and a young man came out to him. My friend said to him, “Hi, good morning. How are you? Who are you?” He said, “Oh, I’m Jesus Christ.” My friend, quick as a flash (he’s much smarter than I am), he said to him, “Show me your hands.” (Isn’t that good?) “My Jesus has the marks in his hands.”

Then you can’t really say either that they went to the wrong tomb; they made a mistake. Well, there are a lot of people that went to the tomb under different circumstances. They all make the mistake? In any case, all that the Jewish authorities had to do to quell this pernicious superstition (which is what it was from their point of view) was to produce the body, show the people the right tomb. They couldn’t do it.

Oh no, the evidence was far too good. Yet, although Jesus’ body had all of these contacts with the old body, yet it was different. It was different. It was what Paul (20 years later) would call a resurrection body. Transformed in some ways. Not quite like the body we’ve got today. That’s already hinted at by this strange way of saying things.

They’re together with the doors locked for fear of the authorities, and Jesus came and stood among them. Don’t ask me what that means. Paul calls it a spiritual body. He insists that it’s physical enough for Jesus to eat. He insists that there’s connection with the old body. Not only was the tomb empty, but there are scars in his hands. Yet at the same time, he can do some very odd things like appear in a locked room. It’s a new body, a resurrected body, a transformed body.

That’s the way it’s presented, and it’s presented in a hundred different ways along these lines in the various Scripture passages. But on the evening of that first resurrection Sunday, when Jesus showed up, Thomas wasn’t there. So now we turn to our text, and it may be useful to follow it in three points.

First, the cry of a disappointed skeptic. “Now Thomas (called Didymus) …” (Didymus simply means the twin, so probably he had a brother somewhere.) “Now Thomas … one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord!’ But he said to them, ‘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 it.’ ”

Now understand this kind of skepticism well. This is not the skepticism of the committed philosophical materialist. It’s not that. After all, he’s been a follower of Jesus all along. He knows that there’s a God who exists. He’s seen Jesus’ rather spectacular miracles. He’s not a philosophical materialist who says, “Look, there is no category for rising from the dead. It’s just inconceivable flat out. I rule that out of court. There’s always got to be some other kind of explanation. No matter how much evidence you would use, it will never convince me, and it’s a matter of philosophical commitment.”

He’s not that kind of skeptic, but it is a skepticism of one who wishes to distinguish between faith and gullibility. That is the good part of this skepticism. There are some other parts that are not quite so good, but that component is surely good. I like Thomas. When he shows up in other parts of the New Testament, every time he gets to the point of something. He sees the heart of an issue and identifies it right away.

In this case, he just doesn’t want to distinguish between faith and gullibility. Probably what he thinks is, “My dear old friends here are a bit stressed, and they’re believing what they want to believe. Why, I’d like to believe it, but give me a break. This is a bit much.” Notice what he says, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side …” That last bit needs some explaining.

Yesterday I explained what crucifixion looked like. It wasn’t pretty. You hung on the cross, and you push with your legs, and you pull with your arms to keep your chest cavity open so you could breathe. Your body would be wracked with muscle spasms, so you’d collapse, try to get some relaxation to the muscles. Then you couldn’t breathe, so you pulled, and you pushed. Then you could breathe. Then you’d collapse. This could go on for hours and hours and days in some cases, a horrible death.

But if there were some reason why the authorities wanted to end the death (in this case because they were in the Jerusalem area, and the high feast was coming on, and they wanted to get the bodies off the cross before the feast was in full swing), then what the authorities used to do in the ancient world (it’s well known from the ancient sources), they’d come along with a stiff pipe or the like; and they’d just come up to the person on the cross and Bang! Bang! on his shins. Then he could no longer push with his legs any more. Legs were broken, so he’d die of suffocation in just a few minutes.

When they got to Jesus (we’re told in another passage) they discovered he was already dead, so instead of breaking his legs, they just took the sharp end of the short javelin up through his chest cavity into his heart. It says that there was blood and water that came out, and everybody knew it. Thomas says, “Unless I put my fingers in the nail wounds and my hand inside of the scar, I just won’t believe.” There is something commendable about not running off into cheap, gullible pursuit of faith. Except it’s not faith, not in any biblical sense.

There was an American faith healer a number of years ago, but the improbable name of Popoff. (That was his name. It was Peter Popoff, in fact.) Popoff had a certain kind of faith-healing stunt that he did. He’d pack these large assemblies; then he would say something like, “The Lord has told me that a woman (row C, seat 12) has back pain. The Lord has commanded you to be healed. Come down here and be healed.” Sure enough, there would be a woman up there in that seat with a lot of back pain, and she’d come forward.

He would do this night after night after night, and he’d never get it wrong. It was so impressive that people thought, “Well, maybe the Lord is speaking because he’s really good.” Now Popoff had a hearing aid. Exactly what a faith healer is doing with a hearing aid I’m not quite sure, but we’ll let that one pass.

But one of the major American television companies had a suspicion, so without telling him, they went in there with a radio scanner. Now for those of you in arts courses, a radio scanner just goes … Anyway, they were just trying to pull in this signal that was strongest in the local environment.

They went in there, and it turned out (once the whole story was unwrapped) that Mrs. Popoff, as people were coming into the meeting, was collecting cards they were filling out about prayer requests, pains, and so on. She’d be shuffling through them, and if she spotted one for back pain (as opposed to terminal cancer), or if she spotted one in the psychosomatic realm, then she’d note carefully where the person sat. Then she’d write it on the card. Then once everybody got in and the meeting got going, she would radio down a little microphone to his ostensible ear amplifier. Of course it wasn’t; it was a radio receiver.

So what ABC did (that’s not Australian Broadcasting Company, but American Broadcasting Company) … What they did was play this on national television, showed him doing it. Then they played it again, and they dubbed in, this time, what she had been saying to him in between. “Oh Peter, Peter, try the woman in row J, number three. I mean, she has … let’s see here … back pain.” Then he’d come up with this whole stuff. Of course, when this was exposed on national television, Peter Popoff popped off.

Now the sad thing is, it has to be said that there were some Christians taken in by this; but this isn’t faith. This is gullibility. It’s idiocy. My only regret was that it was ABC that exposed him instead of one of our guys. Christians have no truck with that kind of idiocy, not if they’re thinking at all. Biblical faith does not turn on idiocy or gullibility.

There’s a sense here, you see, in which this man’s desire to be well grounded (he doesn’t want to believe in a Jesus that is just somebody’s hallucination) is honorable. It is also the skepticism of someone who has been through massive religious disappointment and doesn’t want to be snookered again. He really thought Jesus was the Messiah, and he also thought that messiahs don’t die; messiahs win.

He didn’t as yet have a category for a Messiah who would die as a sufferer to pay for our sin so that his triumph would precisely be in his death. He still hadn’t grasped that. He did not yet understand the events through which he had passed, so what he asks for is the most personal and concrete demonstration that this ostensible resurrected apparition could possibly give him. He wanted to see some genuine physical continuity with the Jesus who was put in the tomb, and so this is what he says. Here’s the cry of a disappointed skeptic.

There’s another element in all of this that we need to think about. It’s gleaned from comparing this with another account of another unbeliever in the New Testament. His name at the time was Saul. He more commonly used his Roman-citizen name later, which was Paul, Paulus. We call him Paul, the apostle Paul; but of course, in the first century it was Mr. Paul. Paul was his family name, but we’ll call him Paul (so long as, from now on, you call me Carson). No, no, no, I’m just … Well, you see the point.

He was Paul, but he also had a Jewish name because he was a Jew. He was called Saul, and he didn’t believe in Jesus at all because he was absolutely convinced the Jewish Messiah … If a messiah came along, and he was Jewish, he had to win. To be put on the cross and die is ridiculous, especially since the cross was associated for two reasons with so much shame. In the context of Roman law (which we briefly looked at), to be executed in this way was associated in the public mind with massive shame.

It’s hard for us to understand that today, because today we have crosses on our buildings; we have men and women hanging crosses from their ears; we have crosses dangling from chains around our necks. Our bishops love them, but in the first century that was inconceivable. It would be like hanging around your neck a little picture of Auschwitz or a little picture of Hiroshima. What is culturally disgusting and repulsive to you, something like that … That’s what crucifixion was in the first century.

A German scholar by the name of Martin Hengel wrote a book called Crucifixion in which he works through all the ancient sources on crucifixion; and without exception, they’re all associated with immense shame and defeat and abomination. A Jewish messiah on a cross? Besides, Saul’s own Bible (our Old Testament) actually says, “Cursed (damned) is anyone who is hanged on a tree.” It was a way of saying that the person was really evil and, executed for that evil, is under the curse of God as well.

From Saul’s point of view, Jesus was not only an imposter; he was a damned imposter. I don’t mean that in a vulgar sense. I mean damned, under the curse of God. I doubt that Thomas, at this point, is much further on in his thinking either. At one level, Jesus is the man he knew, loved, and respected. He was so powerful, and he did so much good, and then God doesn’t intervene to save him from the cross. He’s a damned man. What do you do with that? He’s got no category for it.

This brings us now to the adoration of an astonished skeptic. Verse 26 and following: “A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.’ Thomas said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ ”

So now we’re one week later. Similar circumstances. Doors shut. Jesus appears, and he says, “Peace be with you.” Now this may simply be a rendering of the ancient Jewish greeting shalom, which is still used in the Arabic world, salaam. It means roughly peace or well-being; but in John’s writing it carries something heavier. It is saying, “Now, this side of the cross, peace with God is opened. Well-being, not only in this life but in the life to come, is opened.” The greeting itself begins to take on a wider dimension. It is tied with other themes in John’s gospel.

He comes amongst them, and he gives the greeting, but it’s pregnant with an overlay of other hope. Then he turns to Thomas. Though he had not physically been present when Thomas had made his demand, obviously Jesus knows about it. He turns to him and says, “Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Then comes Thomas’ astonishing comment: “My Lord and my God.” What does that mean?

Well, in the first place, you really should discount the interpretation of it that is advanced by some people. I don’t see how to explain it without mentioning names, so I will. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a very sincere bunch, but they hold very strongly that whatever else Jesus is, he’s not the one God. He’s not to be associated with him. At best he’s a sort of two-tier God. Because here Thomas is confessing Jesus, “My Lord and my God,” they have to say that what he’s really saying is … He saw Jesus, saw he wasn’t … “My Lord! My God!” I kid you not; that’s the defended view.

Well, in the first place, it’s not very likely that a first-century Jew will start off by confessing a miracle by a batch of blasphemies, which is the way it would have to be construed. Do you see? It’s not very likely. In any case, that doesn’t handle the and very well. I mean, you could imagine, I suppose, if you stretched your imagination enough, that he … “My Lord! My God!” You can’t imagine him saying “My Lord! And my God!” It just doesn’t fly very well. I don’t think it means that.

In the second place, it does embrace or presupposes that Thomas accepts Jesus’ resurrection now. He really realizes who this Jesus in front of him is, but it goes beyond that point. In other words, he doesn’t merely say, “Jesus, you are alive!” Now he’s saying at least that. He’s presupposing that, but he’s saying more than that. He’s not simply saying, “Huh, he really has come back from the dead,” although he’s presupposing that. But he’s saying more than that. He’s saying …

God keeps promising that He will raise up a Messiah, a Christ. He will raise up a king who will actually come from the line of David (this line that had ruled Israel half a millennium, a millennium before) that had ruled the Jewish nation. He would raise up another king like that, a better one, a more transcendent one; and he would set things to right in the nation.

Then there’s another line that comes through from these Old Testament books. God beginning to say things like “I myself will visit the people; I myself will come upon them; I myself will bear my arm; and I will save them” and so on. These two themes begin to cross and intertwine. Some of them we know about from Christmas passages.

Now if you’re entirely outside Christian circles, the passage I’m going to cite you won’t know about. But if you have any association with Christian circles at Christmas, then you’ve heard of Isaiah chapter 9, which (though it was written seven centuries before Jesus) pictures someone who is coming who would come from the line of David. He will sit on the throne of his father David, we’re told.

He will exercise the kingdom, and yet he will also be called the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace. That is the two streams of hope you see are beginning to come together. In Ezekiel 34, in a passage where (six centuries before Jesus) God says regarding some of the religious leaders in the day who were corrupting the people and doing fare more damage than good …

Religious leaders are often doing that sort of thing; let’s be quite frank. He says to them: “These are the shepherds of Israel that are destroying the flock. They’re fleecing the sheep. They’re not interested in the sheep; they’re merely interested in themselves. But I will come, and I will be the shepherd of my people Israel.”

Then for about 25 verses he says this sort of thing again and again and again with various twists on the metaphor. “I will nurture my flock. I will feed them. I will lead them in green pastures. I will water them. I will be their Shepherd. I will do … I will … I will … I will …” Then he comes to the end, and he says, “And I will send my servant David to be their shepherd.”

You get enough of these passages intertwining, and you start wondering just what it is God is going to do. It took some time for the Christians to work it out, but they came to insist rightly (in line with Scripture) that Jesus, though he was a man (a mortal man who could die and who did die on a bloody cross), was the very manifestation of God himself.

God himself came and visited us and took on human form, not such that God was exhausted thereby, for Jesus still prayed to his Father. It’s not as if God sort of left heaven as it were, came down, and became a man. It’s not like that. That is what has introduced some complexities into what the Bible says about God. God is one. There is only one God, but God is a complex One, and God himself visited us in the person of his Son, Jesus.

Thomas, I doubt, has all of these things put together; but has this Old Testament. He’s begun to think about these things. He’s had a week now to turn these things over. Supposing it’s true. Supposing Jesus really is risen from the dead. Here he sees him, and he falls before him and he says, “My Lord and my God.” I suspect he sees something else too. It’s not laid out explicitly here, but it’s exactly what Paul sees.

You see, if Paul understands that Jesus couldn’t possibly be the Jewish Messiah because, at the end of the day, Jewish messiahs don’t die, and to die on the cross meant you were cursed, you were damned, you were evil, you were condemned; then suddenly, for Paul to come across the resurrected Jesus (which is what happened to him, too), Jesus vindicated, Jesus alive, Jesus not damned, Jesus not condemned, alive, vindicated … it blew all his categories.

Then you have to think, “Well then, why was he on the cross?” If he wasn’t on the cross because he was condemned, why was he on the cross? Then it re-jiggered his whole understanding of ancient Scripture. Then he understood that Jesus didn’t die for his own sin. Jesus didn’t sin. He was rather more like the lambs in the Old Testament that were offered up as a sacrifice for our sins; only Jesus is the ultimate Lamb.

He bore our sin. He died on the cross not because he was to be condemned but because we were to be condemned. He died for us and then rose from the dead, vindicated, having paid for us. How much of this Thomas understood right on the spot it’s hard to know. “The themes Jesus has been teaching all through the book, I see that. They’re spelled out very clearly by other Christian writers through the New Testament.” The penny is dropping. It’s coming together.

Then there’s one more thing that you should note here too. He does not simply say “Our Lord and our God,” a kind of liturgical our. You know how you hear clerics every once in a while if you go to Christmas service? “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ …” If you’re really cynical, you say, “Well, speak for yourself, father.”

This sort of corporate our that sort of brings people in, this sort of vaguely comforting … That’s not where Thomas is anymore. “My Lord and my God.” When you do get genuine Christians together, it is right and good to say, “Our Lord and our God”; but sooner or later, it’s a matter of a personal faith, a personal repentance, and a personal trust.

Then finally, the example of a converted skeptic. Here I’m only going to say one or two things. Verse 29, Jesus says, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Jesus is not saying that the gullible who have not seen are blessed. He’s not saying that.

What he’s saying is the nature of Jesus’ resurrection was that it was at a certain point in time, space, and history; and there were witnesses, lots of accumulating witnesses. Beyond those witnesses, we can’t have access to those first events the way they could. At the end of the day, we hear the witnesses; we hear what they say; we read what they say; we can evaluate what they say and be constrained by what they say, but we can’t see the resurrected Jesus today.

So Jesus, almost as if the confession of Thomas has triggered in him reflection on where this whole thing is going at this point, says, “You have seen me; you have believed; but blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” That’s people like you and me who hear the ancient records, read them afresh, come to know other Christians who have been transformed by this same resurrected Jesus, and they come to the same solid faith.

You see, Christian faith is not a matter of personal preference. That’s the way faith operates in a lot of Western society. There are facts over here, and faith is more or less personal preference. But in the New Testament, faith is only as good as its object. If Jesus did not rise from the dead (Paul writes a little later), then all of Christian faith is a sham. It’s ridiculous. Write the whole thing off.

Because, for him, faith is not a matter of personal preference. It’s a matter of coming to grips with the truth (why Jesus died) and then trusting this Jesus, depending upon him, relying upon him, submitting to him because he really did bear our sins. That what he was doing on the cross. That’s why he did die, and he rose from the dead and was vindicated.

Here, I insist, is the hope of our race. This is how you fix a broken world. Men and women transformed, changed, rightly restored to a proper relationship with their Creator because Jesus died.

Long have I pondered the pain of the cross,

Wood soaked in blood, washed in tears, drenched in sweat,

Whips, cruel nails, crown of thorns. At a loss,

I can’t explain why this death is a threat.

Cascades of suffering and love shrink my pride:

Silent, I’m hushed by his spear-riven side.

Long have I pondered the shame of the cross:

Jeered by the troops, by authorities scorned.

Mocked by a brigand, society’s dross—

Christ is abandoned, rejected, ignored.

How can I focus on triumphs and things?

Here writhes my Master, Redeemer, and King.

Long have I pondered the curse of the cross:

Sinless, the Christ bears my guilt and my pain.

Thundering silence, a measureless cost—

God in his heaven lets Christ cry in vain.

Now I can glimpse sin’s bleak horror, and worse:

Christ dies and bears the unbearable curse.

Long have I pondered the Christ of the cross:

Gone is the boasting when I’m next to him.

Loving the rebel, redeeming the lost,

Jesus’ pure goodness exposes my sin.

Self is cut down by this triumph of grace:

Christ’s bloody cross is the hope of our race.

If this is where you are, pray with me now as I pray.

Dear God, I know that I am not worthy to be accepted by you. I don’t deserve your gift of eternal life. I am guilty of rebelling against you and ignoring you. I need forgiveness. Thank you for sending your Son to die for me that I may be forgiven. Thank you that he rose from the dead to give me new life. Please forgive me and change me that I may live with Jesus as my ruler. Amen.