It is the day of Jesus’ resurrection. A tearful Mary Magdalene has just embraced Him, after realizing who he is. He goes to his disciples so they can see and be overjoyed too.
“Peace be with you!” Jesus tells his followers, showing them his wounded hands and side. He “breathed on them,” and gives them the Holy Spirit. He is a sight for sore eyes, a holy, wounded warrior standing in front of His stunned disciples.
“I have seen the Lord!” Mary Magdalene had cried.
Almost everyone who saw him that week cried out with joy, except one: Thomas.
“Unless,” says Thomas, “I see the nail marks on his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” It is now a week later, and he tells the other disciples his criteria for believing it to be actually Him.
Doubting Thomas: the man of intellectual fact, scientific observation, and objective truth. The doubting Thomas that is every evolutionary atheist. The doubting Thomas that is every deconstructionist. The doubting Thomas that is the very Enlightenment. And the doubting Thomas that is me, and that is you.
I used to respect the figure of Thomas and his intellectual consistency. The pure, unadulterated belief of Mary and the disciples seemed almost corny, but when it was followed with an interrogation by cold, hard reasoning – that was impressive. That meant it was actually Jesus, and Thomas had proved it.
Not exactly. The figure of Thomas now breaks my heart: what does Thomas trust? It seems to be nothing, and that makes me very sad.
Some have it worse than others – this intense need for external accuracy and scientific rationality. To the Doubting Thomas, the world must make sense for him to be okay— to have some peace about things. Because the Doubting Thomas’ heart is so unsure, he tends to blow where the wind takes them, factually speaking, leaning into what sounds the best or seems the truest, based on other things they have found to be true their whole life. So he is left to figure out the world on his own, mining through facts and figures, processing data sheets, restlessly craving an endless supply of research and facts. And after everything is said and done, the doubting Thomas trusts nothing and no one, because nothing is to be trusted, not without evidence.
Unfortunately, this goes for even God. God, the giver of intellect, becomes the object of doubt for Thomas, and every other soul like him, who has decided to trust himself, instead of anything else. The heart of Thomas disturbs me even more – acting like a kind of stubborn bull, pushing and railing his huge head into the siding of something, again and again, until his head finds something it understands. If only the doubting Thomas could humble his inflated self down to a level that could accept an “I don’t know.” Just like a stubborn bull knocking his head, Thomas is scared, too. Scared of getting it wrong, messing up, and losing everything he has fought for.
But God doesn’t test for correct answers. He gives faith to hold onto when you have found absolutely none.
Why does the Doubting Thomas do this? Perhaps life has taught him to build barriers between him and everyone else. Maybe he has felt alone for too long, and trust of himself is all he knows how to do. Either way, he has learned to rely on himself, resulting in distrust of everything else. Thomas, a disciple and loved one of Jesus Christ, relied upon his own methods of verification. He would not put Christ’s assurance first – he just wouldn’t.
Thomas doubted — he doubted so much in the things that said he loved. I think he lacked trust, pure and simple trust. The unhesitant trust that moved Mary Magdalene to tears and the disciples to be immediately overjoyed. It was missing in Thomas.
What is the thing that truly moves a person? I’ve learned it is not a good hike or a beautiful melody. I know it is not a sunny day or being affirmed by someone. It is nothing that superficial. The soul is only actually moved by its attachment or trust in something else.
Trust fills you up, rather than affirming you. It cuts you to your deepest core and understands you, knows you, challenges you with a loving sense of who you are. It’s the same love that makes babies and breeds families and makes the world go round. It is also the stuff of God. Without it, nothing else will motivate your core.
True love is trust, and trust is true love. Its an attachment, a deep bond that you are more than okay with. Its more than an affirmation that you are doing okay. It cuts away the need to be liked and aims right for the hole in you that just wants to be known.
For some, the world has been more cruel, and many of those decide to turn inward and make their lives one big defense. They learn to distrust the things people say about who they are and what they plan to do. They only trust their own perception of things — what they have found to be true. Start with doubt, is the mantra running through their hearts. Block that up; keep that hidden. The world is not safe. And neither is God.
So there is no deep bond in Thomas. No stable, unrelenting reliance he has on anything outside of himself. Left to find his own truth about things, even the supposed “peaceful” truth that comes from God.
Lee Strobel found a lot of truth. A journalist for the Chicago Tribune, Strobel set out to gather a factual “Case for Christ.” He argued that the veracity of Christianity lies upon the truth of the Resurrection. Even though he gathered a lot of evidence to verify the Resurrection, I still think he is wrong in this presumption. Belief does not require a set amount of data points. It is faith — a pure, risk-taking, believing trust in something outside of yourself. Why would it be called faith, if it was not just that? Even Strobel had to face the facts, ironically, standing back and looking at every piece of cloth, historical fact, and expert opinion he gathered. He realized he could do research on the data of the Case for Christ till he died, and even then, he still wouldn’t have a conclusive answer. You cannot prove God. You can say it is reasonable to believe, but even then, where does it end?
“Lovers don’t want explanations. They want presence,” Strobel wrote, quoting a conversation he had with Peter Kreeft, Boston College Theology professor.
He goes on, “Sure, I’d like to understand more about why. But Kreeft’s conclusion was right — the ultimate answer is Jesus’ presence. That sounds sappy, I know. But just wait — when your world is rocked, you don’t want philosophy or theology as much as you want the reality of Christ. He was the answer for me.”
It does sound sappy, in the eyes of a cynical – and quite frankly, jealous – outsider. All we want is to trust something, even those who have been taught not to. They’re miserable fending for themselves. What a relief it is to hand over the reins, to stop ramming your head into the wall, to be okay with not understanding! The stakes were never that high. Our restless hearts can stop fighting and settle into their places in God.
It happened to Strobel. It happened for Mary Magdalene, for the Canaanite woman whose daughter’s demon possession Jesus took away, for the paralytic man who Jesus told “get up and walk,” and for the widow to whom Jesus told “not to weep” as he rose her husband from his coffin. From all of his people, Jesus received a look of shock, a “how could this be possible?” kind of confusion. It is a moment of disbelief in which the human mind must admit: I give up. This does not make sense.
This stunned confusion seems to consistently retrieve the faithful and barricade the distrustful. Meanwhile, Jesus attempts to rid these people of their normal sense, giving them two options: since you do not understand, let yourself simply believe, or, because you do not understand, force yourself to doubt further.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, chose the former, and in a heartbeat, too. “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” was her confused reply to the Angel Gabriel. But she followed with a sincere response of her heart: “I am the bondslave of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Just like that, she needed no convincing. She did not understand, but it seemed not to matter.
What if the Doubting Thomas passage took a turn for the worse, and Thomas was unsatisfied with Jesus’ wounds? What if the blood was too thick or his hands looked too fake, and it just wasn’t enough evidence for him to believe? It would be shame, really – a shame that Thomas thought himself too wise to believe. Too wise to trust God.
I want to be able to say, at the end of my life, that I trust God. That I do not know everything (though I want to know things) and that I think I did the best I could (even though I sin) and that, even if I’m wrong about those things, it will be okay because I know God, and I trust Him, and I know he will do what is right.
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets seem to come to this same conclusion in its final quartet, “Little Gidding.” His verses go:
If you came this way, Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more Than an order of words, the conscious occupation Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.”
Belief is not something that happens upon you, but an act of the will – a decisive kneeling of the body, and of the heart. And when it comes to God, nothing will ever make sense until you, yourself, choose to believe. Once you choose it, it is the layer of truth you fall back on, again and again, because it is the one stable thing in you. Your belief in God is the one thing you have — the one safe thing.
I have found trust to be the most beautiful and restful part of my relationship with God.
***
To humor him, Jesus ends up showing Thomas his wounds. “Put your finger here,” he says.
“My Lord and my God!” is Thomas’ reply.
But Jesus isn’t finished.
“Because you have seen me, you have believed,” Jesus tells Thomas. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
“Stop doubting,” he told Thomas earlier, “and believe.”
