December 21, 2000
© 2000 Grant M. Gallup
Habakkuk 2:1-4 The just shall live by faith
Psalm 126 In convertendo
Hebrews 10:35-11:1 Faith is the assurance of things hoped for
John 20:24-29 Thomas said, "I will not believe."
Twelve years ago at Christmas time in Chicago I found myself with an unexpected house guest--a young Chinese student who was Dr. Louie Crew's official translator, assigned to him at the Second Institute of Language Studies in Beijing (then, Peking), where Louie taught English. Mr. Lee was quite surprised to find that I was both a Christian cleric and open minded enough to have read Marx and to believe in the theory of evolution. At Baylor, in Waco, Texas, his experience of Christians was that they were ignorant of Marx, believed the world was made in six days, and spent a great deal of time trying to convert him. I was surprised to find that Mr. Lee was not only an unbeliever in the Occidental faith of Christians, but that he also doubted the faith of Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse Tung--all the religion he had ever known, at 26 years of age. My house guest was a doubter. Īt's a great idea," he said of Marx and Communism, "but it doesn't work."
Over the evening, I discovered that my house guest was Thomas, Saint Thomas whose feast day is today--the classic Doubter. "Doubting Thomas" is our nicknme for one who expresses hesitancy about the commonly accepted faith statements of our culture. He was the one who was not present at the Lord's resurrection appearance to the apostles; John tells us he was over a week late in coming to belief. This is the apostle who had been the only one, earlier on, to urge Jesus on to the confrontation in Jerusalem: "Let's go! We'll all die together!" had been his cheer-leader's exhortation to the others. When it all ended in disaster at Calvary, Thomas thought their loss was irretreivable, that the Jesus thing was dead and gone forever. A disaster, with the disciples sitting about counting frayed ballots, picking off the chad from punch cards, to peek through them for a bit of light.
Eight days later, beyond ordinary time, when the doors were shut, beyond the weekdays of time, and with its clocks stopped, beyond chronology, Jesus stands among them. The doors were shut--the doors with which we lock out the world and assure our safety when our faith has come a cropper, like a fundamentalist locks out facts, like a doctrinaire Marxist locks out dissent. Yet Jesus stands there, with a blessing, greeting, hope upon his lips. Thomas is all of us who have wanted more evidence, a clear vision, some intimate and personal demonstration of the things we hve always believed in. His name, Teoma, in Aramaic, means The Twin. It has been thought by some that he was called that because he looked like Jesus enough to be taken for his twin. The theory would help to explain why Thomas had his doubts that the others had seen the Lord since Golgotha: he might assume that they had only had a glimpse of him and had taken him to be the rabboni. It was Thomas they saw, as they had so many times before, and mistook him for the Other.
The only way to prove that Jesus was alive was to get him into the same room with his look-alike, and see that one of them had wounds, and to put our fingers into the wounds and show once and for all that Jesus is the Kyrios, the Lord, the one sent from God, beyond the grave, from beyond torture and judicial murder, from beyond death and junkyard dogs and grave stones.
An odd time for a celebration of Easter, in these last days of Advent, when the world is trying to find its way to fit the baby Jesus into Christmas, to celebrate the ancient faith of Christians, that God has come to Bethlehem, to share our human life, to affirm the goodness and eternal value of the human race, to sing of peace on earth and good will amongst humankind.
And St. Thomas comes along with his dissent: "Unless I see. . . unless I feel."
Thomas calls us to a deeper faith than the inellectual, to a faith that has to do with the realities of flesh and blood: that is a Christmas faith. Jesus says what a blessing it is for those who can believe without seeing, whose faith is so wonderfully spiritual and intellectual that no evidence is needed. Happy are they. It's true. And discontent always are those who look for more than easy answers and common pieties. The quality of faith praised in the epistle to the Hebrews, too, is far too cerebral for Thomas: "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Wonderful phrase. INtellectual, spiritual, high-minded. But "Where's the Beef?"
My Chinese house guest, ideologically disillusioned with Mao and Marx, without any understanding of or hope that the western religion called Christianity might hve anything to offer an intelligent 26 year old Asian, went out to dinner with some of my household that night. On the way home we passed a group of homeless men standing on the corner, and a wino wandering the steets with his Night Train cheap wine in a bottle. At once Mr. Lee announced hat in China the neighborhood association would have come to the rescue of such a man, that the old women in the community would hve sought him out and shown their concern; they would have brought him to his senses and sobered him up and restored him to usefulness. Neighbors would give shelter and food to the homeless. Ah, I thought to myself: FAITH. Faith in a new kind of humanity was not dead after all. "Unless I see hands of suffering, fingers bloody from scrapes and falls and crucifixions. . . unless I can see some practical, visible, palpable evidence of new life breaking in and breaking out, I will not believe."
So Thomas, like my doubting friend from Beijing by way of Baylor, calls us to prove up our fancy words about religion, to get our hands joined to the world's bleeding hands, to get our fingers into the side of life where Christ's blood runs warm among us still. Then it really doesn't matter anymore that we might say, "I won't believe." That might after all be ony an intellectual response. But the eighth day comes beyond our clocks and time-keeping, and Christ enters our experience though we have locked the doors of intellect. Now comes the real test: can we put our hands out to feel the flesh around us, to recover faith? The homeless, the wino, the addict, the outcast, the person living with disaster or disease or danger. Jesus invites us as he did Thomas. It's a Christmas invitation too:
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