Believing without Doubt
Isn’t it easy to misjudge people? Something they say, some reaction they give, an attitude they display can so easily cause us to put them down in our estimation, even when we know better of them generally. And, of course, we don’t know—or at least, not fully—what is happening in the background of their lives. A Sioux proverb says: Before I judge my neighbour, let me walk a mile in his moccasins. I think Thomas (called Didymus) is someone in the Gospels we have tended to misjudge, don’t you? The term ‘Doubting Thomas’ is a phrase used in many walks of life of people who raise questions, seemingly to dampen others’ enthusiasm. And it all stems from poor Thomas, the apostle. As Don Carson comments: Thomas gets a lot of bad press.
We tend to question WHY wasn’t Thomas present with the others that first Sunday evening, as though his devotion had slipped and thus he doubted that Jesus had risen from the dead. But might there not have been a perfectly valid reason for his absence, and anyway is it entirely obvious that any of the others would have fared any better if they had been absent on that day?
There are insights earlier in John’s Gospel that indicate that Thomas did not lack courage
(11:16), when he was well aware of the dangers in the Jerusalem area. Nor was he afraid to clarify matters with Jesus, when the other disciples hung back (14:5).
But now here in ch 20, after perhaps being caught out by his absence, at the second appearance of the resurrected Jesus to the apostles Thomas responds to Jesus’ personal invitation to him to examine his wounds with what has been described as one of the great christological confessions of the New Testament: “My Lord and my God!” 20:28. And Jesus’ comment that ‘blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed’ has been the great encouragement down the centuries for all who would seek him. Their faith is not inferior to his, who saw and believed. Indeed, as Carson points out, in the peculiar providence of God, the report of Thomas’s experience is one of the things the Spirit of God would use to bring them to faith. Jesus graciously provides the visual and tangible evidence to the one, so that the written report of Thomas’s faith and confession will spur to conversion those who have access only to text.
Are you one who has believed in that way? Then you and I, along with Thomas and all his successors have life in Jesus’ name (ch20:31)
Steve Piggott
Elder
April 2012
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