In an inspired move, or possibly a very bad idea, Pastor John Hamer has asked me to give a sermon.
I am scheduled to preach via livestream in October for Beyond the Walls, an inclusive online service affiliated with Community of Christ. Though I’m agnostic, I feel this is a church where I can speak openly and sincerely. Plus, they’ve assigned me the perfect topic: doubting Thomas!
The scriptural text for my sermon will be from the New Testament: John 20:19-29. You can read the KJV here; or if you prefer something more readable, I recommend the NRSV translation. As I whittle down my draft to focus and clarify the message (and get to the recommended word count), I’ve been cutting things I’d still like to say somewhere. So…!
Here are some snipped snippets regarding the Bible’s doubting Thomas account:
- To understand Thomas’s experience of doubting and then witnessing the resurrected Jesus, we must keep in mind the specifics of Mary Magdalene’s visitation. She sees the resurrected Lord first. Before receiving her special witness, Mary sees the emptied tomb. Far from doubting the resurrection, Mary actively believes Jesus is still dead.
- Much is made of the implied familiarity and intimacy between Jesus and Mary, because she attempts to embrace him. He forbids her because he has not yet ascended to his Father. Also interesting, when Mary realizes she is in the presence of the risen Jesus, she addresses him with a formal title: “‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).” This wording is from the NRSVUE.
- The writer of John’s Gospel neglects to tell us how the disciples react to Mary’s testimony. This annoys me. How did the disciples react? Did they believe Mary? Because if they doubted her at all, they are no better than Thomas.
- All the author tells us when Jesus appears to the disciples after Mary, sans Thomas, is that they rejoice! No mention is made of them touching Jesus’s wounds.
- When comparing Mary Magdalene’s and Thomas’s meetings with the resurrected Jesus, I see evidence for this being a carefully crafted story (as opposed to literal history). In their parallel encounters, both Mary and Thomas address the risen Jesus with formal titles rather than familiar greetings. Mary uses the non-deific “Rabbouni!” Thomas addresses Jesus as, “My Lord and my God!”
- Thomas is the first person recorded as touching the resurrected Savior, which brings me back to Mary’s encounter. Especially since Mary disappears from the narrative after witnessing Jesus, her inclusion in Chapter 20 seems to be primarily a plot device. The author needs to establish that Jesus is resurrected but has not yet returned to Heaven. This sets up Thomas’s encounter as the climactic moment of the chapter.
In my sermon, I intend to treat Thomas as the protagonist of Chapter 20, rather than Jesus. This is for teaching purposes and will lead to contemplation on the tension between belief and knowing. I feel like the sermon is coming together, but only time and a reliable internet connection will tell. If all goes well, my sermon will take place live at 12 PM Eastern on October 12 on the YouTube Centre Place channel. Wheat & Tares readers are of course invited to watch the live broadcast, or on replay during the 6 PM Late Edition.
Questions for Discussion
What do you think of my observations about Mary Magdalene and Thomas? How do you regard their separate witnesses? More generally, what are your thoughts on the Gospel According to John?
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Wheat & Tares 
I approach the story from a faithful perspective, and a human perspective.
I do not criticize Thomas. Rather, it seems to me that his love for Jesus, and his grief at his death, was real. I think his inability to accept the news of the resurrection before seeing for himself was emotional self-protection.
There is another example in the scriptures: when Jacob (Israel) heard from his other sons that Joseph was alive in Egypt, Jacob would not believe — his grief has been real, and giving in to a hope that might later be shattered would be too painful, so he could not believe. Then, when he saw the wagons sent from Egypt, Jacob finally took hope and believed, and said, “It is enough — I will go see my son before I die.”
Likewise with Thomas. To me, Thomas is a good man who loved and who grieved. He was not a skeptic or non-believer. When finally he saw, he could finally hope and believe again and his wound, his grief was healed.
Many Christians (including many Latter-day Saints) look on Thomas as a weak man. I do not — I see him as a kind and loving man who experienced real grief. I appreciate the tenderness of the story.
I realize my perspective differs from many others. I see Thomas as a real man in a real story showing real and human emotion. I do not see him as a plot device in a contrived fabrication. I wish more Christians (and Latter-day Saints) would approach the story with a little more charity, which I think was intended by the writer of the gospel.
ji, thank you so much for this comment! The parallel with Jacob and Joseph in the Old Testament had never occurred to me. What a great thing to consider. For other readers, here are links to Genesis 45:25-28:
NRSVUE: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2045&version=NRSVUE
KJV: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/ot/gen/45?lang=eng&id=p25-p28#p25
“Thomas Merton says, “The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not actually a man of faith.”
Thomas may be the most maligned apostle of all time, ascribed the moniker of “doubting Thomas”, we speak of him as weak because he asks for precisely the same evidence the reporting apostles received.
Thomas gets a bad wrap for requesting evidence, and then we as Christians gladly quote the words of James, “Faith without works is dead”, to describe a faithless disciple whose faith does not show evidence.
To read the episode with Thomas as an indictment against doubt is to equate faith with an assent to miraculous truth claims. Faith as believing supernatural events as literal comes with zero personal cost. I can believe the story of Noah’s ark, the garden of Eden, Jesus miraculous healings, the resurrection, or Joseph Smith seeing God and Jesus in a grove, all as literal, but this is essentially cheap faith, the kind that equates to a self-righteousness and lip service without having to take seriously the actual teachings of Jesus.
James, the brother of Jesus, famously challenges this most prevalent human tendency when he says, faith without works is dead. Faith is a relational commitment whether the person is physically present or not. Faith is NOT merely a willingness to accept any claim without evidence. Faith serves as a countervailing antidote to an otherwise unpredictable world. Uncertainty shows up as the myriad of life’s storms, and faith is a way of living that provides an inner stillness set against the backdrop of a raging tempest. Must our souls rest depend on external circumstances lining up perfectly? It’s a serious question that deserves serious consideration.
Often times doubt is positioned as faith’s mortal enemy, but life is inherently unpredictable. Doubt is really just the presence of uncertainty, and to deny it does not make it so. The biggest threat to relaxing into faith is the neurosis caused by certainty. Certainty crushes faith by pretending doubt is avoidable.
Faith, rather than finding its strength in certainty, it bravely proclaims that it does not have the answers. Faith happens at the end of your own power, when you finally realize that whatever I profess to be true is only a tiny particle of every possibility. Faith is how we rise everyday and boldly go where we have never been. The fact is, every day is a mystery, a walk into the unknown. Filled with Grace, the unpredictable nature of each day loses its paralyzing grip. Fear recedes as the hope we behold on the Christ-soaked horizon animates our whole souls to act as though something is already true.
We all want evidence! We all doubt! we all struggle to exercise faith! Rather than play a game of “hide our shadow”, I think Jesus’ plea for “wholeness” is to bring our “whole” selves, doubts and fears and warts and sins, and have weakness be the inflection point for our greatest strength.
I appreciate ji’s and toddsmithson’s input. I do not see Thomas as a literary device, a fiction, to make some point. I have no problem with there having been a real, literal Thomas. I do not see a need to allegorize here. Thanks, ji, for reminding us that Jacob wanted to believe but could not, or would not allow himself to, until he saw Pharoah’s wagons. I think of Job, who had a lot that he wanted to say to God, and when he got the chance he shut his mouth. God did not condemn Job, who could not understand and who spoke in confusion, but he did condemn the three friends who spoke words without wisdom. Job had faith, and he stayed true to it in troubled times, although it was a tortuous journey for him. I do not think that Jesus condemned Thomas, nor did John. Rather, Mary, Thomas, the two believers on the road to Emmaus, and John and Peter running to the tomb are all examples of how different believers responded differently to the news. None of them acted wrongly, I don’t think. All of them believed, or wanted to believe. Thomas might be like the man who wanted to believe and tried to do so, and begged the Lord to help him believe in his unbelief. He was not a bad man. Thomas, I think, wanted to believe, but could not allow it, for the hurt would have been too great had it later been proved wrong. I agree with toddsmithson that faith is not mere belief: faith necessarily incorporates doing. As for those who do, but who do not have faith, Jesus spoke in the Sermon in the Mount about those people who would do much good, but who would be rejected. Best wishes to Jake C. in his upcoming endeavor. This is a rich and complex subject that is too easy to simplify or to reduce to make a point.
Hugh Nibley said that Thomas was the only one of the disciples who really believed. And I think he meant it in the sense that he knew it was the resurrected Lord immediately–whereas the others doubted when they first saw him–as per Luke 24–believing that he was a ghost. Of course, we know that Thomas heard the witness of the other apostles vis-a-vis the Lord’s resurrection before he actually saw him. And even though he didn’t accept their witness initially–my guess is that it still prepared him to receive the truth more readily than he would have otherwise when the Lord appeared to him.
But here’s the kicker — and you know me: I am a 100% optimist when it comes to the restored church — the story about Thomas in the book of John makes him “every man” so to speak. Like Thomas we are the ones who haven’t seen–and have nothing but the words of the Lord’s servants to rely on vis-a-vis his living reality. And that’s why the Lord goes on to say–after he appears to Thomas: “because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
Re: “hold me not”: some Latter-day Saint scholars believe the KJV translation is a very poor rendering of the Greek–and that the Savior was gently telling Mary, who was in the act of embracing him, that he needed to go. I remember years ago thinking that perhaps he couldn’t be physically touched (for some reason that I didn’t understand) until the Father had received him personally. But now I believe what happened there was, perhaps, nothing more than a sweet momentary embrace between Mary and the Lord–and that he simply had other things to do.
We like to believe that we are closer aligned with the heroes in scripture, like Nephi or the believing disciples in the NT resurrection story. I think we all have more in common with those that we malign, like Laman, Lemuel, denying Peter and doubting Thomas. We are unkind to their memory and probably miss the mark when we work harder to throw them under the bus when they are supposed to be archetypes of the things in us that we should improve.
So often we become divisive. In current day of course we are divisive, just look at the state of Christian Nationalism. I guess we do the same thing with historical and/or scriptural writings. Very easy to throw people under the bus when instead we should be spending our time in introspection.