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The Witness of Doubt
John 20:19-31
April 15, 2007
2nd Sunday of
Easter
Paul Simpson Duke
It’s
the season in the church to say “Christ is risen!” The usual response is “He is risen
indeed. Alleluia.” But there can be another response: “Christ is
risen!” – “I don’t think so.” On Easter
Sunday we repeatedly, loudly, sing the first response: “Alleluia!” The second response isn’t heard. There’s no solo called “I Doubt that My
Redeemer Liveth.” The service doesn’t
conclude with the “I Don’t Think So Chorus.”
But the connection between “Alleluia” and “I doubt it” is closer than we
might think.
That’s
true, at least, in the New Testament.
Not one Gospel tells the resurrection story without including a report
of doubt. In Mark the women at the empty
tomb are told to go tell the news, but they don’t, in part at least because
they know very well that no one will believe it. According to Luke, the disciples called their
report “an idle tale.” Matthew says that
when the risen Christ appeared, the disciples worshiped him, “but some
doubted.” Then there is the Gospel of
John with the story of Thomas. His
friends tell him they have seen the risen Christ. He says: I
don’t buy it – not for a minute! But
I’ll make you a deal: I’ll believe it on the day I can touch the torn flesh on
him, put my fingers into the gashes of a crucified dead man standing in front
of me alive.
You’d
think the Gospels would present a pure celebration of a risen Christ. It would be in their interest to describe the
event as powerfully persuasive for his people.
But not one Gospel tells it that way.
Incidentally, all these doubts are expressed by people who have believed
in him. He appears to no one but his
followers. It’s from his own people
that comes the response: This is absurd! That theme of not-buying-it is in
every Gospel.
To
me, this is a good thing. It’s as it has
to be and ought to be. It’s altogether
appropriate that many of us have doubted news of a risen Christ and doubted a God
who’d be behind it. Such doubting may
sometimes be worthy, I think, as it’s rooted in realism about the great pain of
the world. To face the fact of
unthinkable evils and massive suffering is to face the prospect of the deepest
and truest doubt.
There
are many kinds of doubt, and most of them have little to do with pain. There is developmental doubt, when a young
person may need to differ from the faith of parents and other authorities. There is intellectual-philosophical doubt, in
which cultivated reason finds the idea of God simply untenable. There is reactive doubt, born of disgust with
religion that is idiotic and dangerous.
And there is what might be called recreational doubt, a cavalier mocking
of faith because it’s the thing to do.
Deeper
and more serious than any of these is anguished doubt – the painful loss of
faith, or the struggle for it, because of the monstrous evils pervading the
world, the massive, indiscriminant suffering of the innocent, the smug
supremacy of injustice, and the random, horrible senselessness of it all. To face these realities honestly and
seriously is to be horrified. The grim
facts of evil and suffering raise painful questions to faith.
The
novelist Peter De Vries had a daughter who died of leukemia when she was ten
years old. Before her death he wrote a
letter to his friend J. D. Salinger and said, “One trip through a children’s
ward and if your faith isn’t shaken, you’re not the type who deserves any faith…. I too have moments
of faith . . . . In the morning I’m capable of hearing the music of the spheres
– it’s when the stars come out that I first hear the howling of eternal
nothingness.”
1
I
think that this is where doubt must have its place within the story of the
resurrection. Because the news that Christ
is risen is not a story about life after death.
It’s a story claiming that the power of evil in this world is actually
overcome. God has overcome it, and the
raising of the crucified Christ from the dead marks the beginning of a new age
in the world. Evil’s power is
broken. Now as Christ is alive, the
power of God, the love and the peace of God have triumphed in the world. It’s a new day.
Really? Look around you – really?! Read the paper, watch the news, consult your
own life – really?!
God has intervened in this world to overcome
evil? Everything is changed? I can’t see it – can you? Alleluia?
I don’t think so.
Unless. Unless I am assured that what’s hideous and
unjust and unbearably wrong is carried deeply, painfully, and lethally by God,
just as it’s carried by a ruined world.
If the news isn’t that God has – pffft!
– swept evil away, but that evil is taken fully and terribly into God’s own
heart and God’s heart dies of it, then rises again to overcome it by bearing it
always into light – that would be
something worth believing in.
It’s
what dear Thomas is getting at: I won’t believe in somebody’s cheery vision of
a happily-ever-after Christ. I don’t
want a sweet-dream religion, I refuse a pleasant resolution, and do not try to sell me on a metaphor! Here’s what is real: the world is
monstrous. It crucifies millions and
crucified Jesus. If God was in that man,
if God is in some resurrection of him saying that all is new, there will have
to be marks of divine agony and divine death, ghastly wounds, so terribly real
that a hand can touch them.
On
the Sunday after Easter, with others in the room, Thomas sees Christ alive,
moving toward him. And what he sees sets
him trembling. A ripping in the hands, a
tearing open in the side – wounds more horrible, I think, and more real than he had imagined. Jesus tells him: You can touch. Thomas doesn’t. He sinks to his knees. He says, “My Lord! My God!”
Jesus
tells him, “You believe because you see.
How blessed are those who believe without seeing.” I guess that would include us. We cannot see the wounded Christ. What we see is a very badly wounded world. Some of us, looking at people we dearly love,
looking also at ourselves, can see badly wounded lives. What we cannot see is that within it all is
standing a wounded Christ – is standing God, eternally bearing all these
wounds, bearing them into light.
Since
we cannot see it, you may doubt that it’s true.
If this doubt is honest, it bears witness. It bears witness to how horribly real is the
world’s devastation. And it bears
witness to the need for a God of incomprehensible suffering love. These impossibilities may justify a struggle
over faith. But that need not be the end
of it. Doubt can become a prayer. Prayer can become a heart looking deeply to
see what the eyes can never see: the wounds of the world suffered and overcome,
forever carried and lifted into light.
How blessed are those who, sensing this, can say, “My Lord! My God!”
Christ
is risen. And we answer, sometimes with
tears, Alleluia! |
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