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Poor Thomas gets a bad rap. This is the apostle we call “Doubting Thomas” because he wasn’t ready to believe the news that Jesus, his brutally executed teacher, was alive again and walking the earth. Can you blame him?
All of the apostles doubted. They revealed the limits of their faith when they bolted as a group to leave Jesus to the authorities (Matthew 26:56). After Jesus rose from the dead and stood before them, some of them were still doubting (Matthew 28:17). “Doubting Thomas” was at least “Convincible Thomas,” because he was true to his word. He said he would believe if he saw the evidence, and later, when the risen Jesus came to show him this, he did. Chapter 20 of John’s gospel tells the story.
Ours is a God of material reality. He creates material reality, and he came into the reality we perceive. The most fundamental premise of the way of Christ—the fact that Jesus rose from the dead—is not only an audacious claim, but also a humbly testable one. God does not remain aloof in the heavens or in myth, but entered into linear history to meet us where we are. He therefore does not ask us to ignore any of the evidence we see or hear. He does not ask you to close off the capacity to reason that he himself gave you. He asks you instead to open your mind and think a new way. Specifically, God calls each one of us to stop giving our worship to things that are too small and petty to deserve the obedience.
All of us worship. We all give our reverential submission to something, usually many somethings, whether we choose to view this as worship or not. However, to worship any group, habit, person, worry, or self-image is to limit ourselves, because these small gods and idols trap us in a box. Consciously or not, we have to limit our own mind and our own reasoning in order to persuade ourselves that what little we have accepted for ourselves is satisfying and makes sense.
As a result, what we call “logic” often is not that. There is a heady reward for submitting to and ratifying the views that self-identified voices of reason label as correct. Testifying to the allegedly “logical” view is a way to give these voices worship, in return for the flattery of getting to wear the label of intelligent ourselves. I have made this transaction many times. But Jesus said, “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” The conclusions we proclaim are products of the heart as much as the mind—and ultimately it is the heart, with its fears and desires, that determines what we allow our minds to accept.
Thomas had to see and feel the evidence first. That’s fine. Jesus let him touch the open wounds that his regenerated body still bears. But Jesus also told him that people will be blessed if they believe without seeing the evidence (John 20:29). Indeed, the first step on the way of Christ, according to Romans 10:9, is to believe in your heart that Jesus rose from the dead. Give your heart to the fully infinite God first, and your mind has room to expand. Once your heart does begin to grow with belief, there is plenty of evidence to see.
God became a mortal man who died and rose from the dead. One of the challenges of this idea is that it was a one-time event. It is not a recurring event that happens from time to time in history, nor is it a repeatable and predictable event that happens according to scientific laws. It is instead the transcendence of these things. By definition, you have to believe in a God who is bigger than science and history before you can believe that God entered into science and history.
And yet part of the difficulty with the belief that Jesus of Nazareth did not rise from the dead is to explain what happened instead. Something did. Something caught fire. Around 30 A.D., in a backwater of the Roman Empire, a tiny mustard seed of a movement exploded to become lush fields of belief that overran and outlasted the Roman Empire itself. Something ignited all of this flourishing.
Here are a few of the details out of that time that particularly captivate me:
● The original deniers of the resurrection are interesting for what they did not say. They didn’t argue that Jesus went to his grave and stayed there like any other Roman execution victim. Rather, they advanced alternative explanations for why the tomb was found empty. In other words, the empty tomb was apparently a well-known and established fact that couldn’t be disputed.
● The Bible cites the various witnesses who saw the resurrected Jesus. It says that a crowd of at least 500 saw him as well. These claims were published and circulated while many of those witnesses, if not the majority of them, were still alive. If the resurrection was a hoax, then it would have been easy to disprove these assertions, and it would have been ludicrous for the hoaxers to include them.
● The hoaxers also went to a lot of trouble just to give themselves pain. If Jesus’ followers were corrupt enough that they would advance such a hoax, then why weren’t they corrupt enough to prop up their own power? They could have written the hoax to set themselves up with special privileges. Instead, the gospels portray Jesus’ inner circle as faithless, corruptible, and foolish. The gospels also make it clear that apostles are humble servants instead of rulers, and that no one needs an apostle or anyone else in order to come before God. Nevertheless, the apostles were so convinced of the truth of what had happened—that Jesus rose from the grave, showing definitively that there is something bigger than the material world going on—that they were willing to suffer poverty, torture, and execution within this world for the sake of what they now knew.
All of the apostles doubted. They revealed the limits of their faith when they bolted as a group to leave Jesus to the authorities (Matthew 26:56). After Jesus rose from the dead and stood before them, some of them were still doubting (Matthew 28:17). “Doubting Thomas” was at least “Convincible Thomas,” because he was true to his word. He said he would believe if he saw the evidence, and later, when the risen Jesus came to show him this, he did. Chapter 20 of John’s gospel tells the story.
Ours is a God of material reality. He creates material reality, and he came into the reality we perceive. The most fundamental premise of the way of Christ—the fact that Jesus rose from the dead—is not only an audacious claim, but also a humbly testable one. God does not remain aloof in the heavens or in myth, but entered into linear history to meet us where we are. He therefore does not ask us to ignore any of the evidence we see or hear. He does not ask you to close off the capacity to reason that he himself gave you. He asks you instead to open your mind and think a new way. Specifically, God calls each one of us to stop giving our worship to things that are too small and petty to deserve the obedience.
All of us worship. We all give our reverential submission to something, usually many somethings, whether we choose to view this as worship or not. However, to worship any group, habit, person, worry, or self-image is to limit ourselves, because these small gods and idols trap us in a box. Consciously or not, we have to limit our own mind and our own reasoning in order to persuade ourselves that what little we have accepted for ourselves is satisfying and makes sense.
As a result, what we call “logic” often is not that. There is a heady reward for submitting to and ratifying the views that self-identified voices of reason label as correct. Testifying to the allegedly “logical” view is a way to give these voices worship, in return for the flattery of getting to wear the label of intelligent ourselves. I have made this transaction many times. But Jesus said, “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” The conclusions we proclaim are products of the heart as much as the mind—and ultimately it is the heart, with its fears and desires, that determines what we allow our minds to accept.
Thomas had to see and feel the evidence first. That’s fine. Jesus let him touch the open wounds that his regenerated body still bears. But Jesus also told him that people will be blessed if they believe without seeing the evidence (John 20:29). Indeed, the first step on the way of Christ, according to Romans 10:9, is to believe in your heart that Jesus rose from the dead. Give your heart to the fully infinite God first, and your mind has room to expand. Once your heart does begin to grow with belief, there is plenty of evidence to see.
God became a mortal man who died and rose from the dead. One of the challenges of this idea is that it was a one-time event. It is not a recurring event that happens from time to time in history, nor is it a repeatable and predictable event that happens according to scientific laws. It is instead the transcendence of these things. By definition, you have to believe in a God who is bigger than science and history before you can believe that God entered into science and history.
And yet part of the difficulty with the belief that Jesus of Nazareth did not rise from the dead is to explain what happened instead. Something did. Something caught fire. Around 30 A.D., in a backwater of the Roman Empire, a tiny mustard seed of a movement exploded to become lush fields of belief that overran and outlasted the Roman Empire itself. Something ignited all of this flourishing.
Here are a few of the details out of that time that particularly captivate me:
● The original deniers of the resurrection are interesting for what they did not say. They didn’t argue that Jesus went to his grave and stayed there like any other Roman execution victim. Rather, they advanced alternative explanations for why the tomb was found empty. In other words, the empty tomb was apparently a well-known and established fact that couldn’t be disputed.
● The Bible cites the various witnesses who saw the resurrected Jesus. It says that a crowd of at least 500 saw him as well. These claims were published and circulated while many of those witnesses, if not the majority of them, were still alive. If the resurrection was a hoax, then it would have been easy to disprove these assertions, and it would have been ludicrous for the hoaxers to include them.
● The hoaxers also went to a lot of trouble just to give themselves pain. If Jesus’ followers were corrupt enough that they would advance such a hoax, then why weren’t they corrupt enough to prop up their own power? They could have written the hoax to set themselves up with special privileges. Instead, the gospels portray Jesus’ inner circle as faithless, corruptible, and foolish. The gospels also make it clear that apostles are humble servants instead of rulers, and that no one needs an apostle or anyone else in order to come before God. Nevertheless, the apostles were so convinced of the truth of what had happened—that Jesus rose from the grave, showing definitively that there is something bigger than the material world going on—that they were willing to suffer poverty, torture, and execution within this world for the sake of what they now knew.
