by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, March 28, 2004
The biblical story that we know as the story of Doubting Thomas shows up only in one of the four gospels of the Christian scriptures, the gospel of John. John's gospel is the last one written of the four that are now the canon, and it's the one that puts the most emphasis on the divinity of Jesus. In this particular story, the writer recounts an evening in which the disciples of Jesus had gathered together for dinner right after the discovery that the tomb was empty.
The risen Jesus had appeared to Mary and a few of the disciples, but the others were still confused and bewildered. They were in shock and grief and still trying to imagine what would come next for their bedraggled little band after the disaster of the crucifixion. And then suddenly, as they sat there at the supper table, Jesus appeared among them. He showed them the wounds in his hands and his side, blessed them and told them to carry on his work.
The story goes on: "But Thomas wasn't with the rest of them when Jesus came, so the other disciples told him, 'We have seen the Lord.' But he said to them, 'Unless I …put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.' A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them…Jesus came and stood among them and said 'Peace be with you'.
Then he said to Thomas, 'Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.' Thomas answered him, 'My Lord and my God.' Jesus said to him, 'Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.'"
All of the gospels were written with a certain agenda in mind, which was conversion. John's gospel in particular was written from the perspective of those who had become convinced that Jesus was not simply a prophet or teacher but was God incarnate, so the gospel is trying to support that teaching. In that context, the story we now call Doubting Thomas serves a clear purpose, which is summed up in the mild rebuke, "Have you believed because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe". It was supposed to be a kind of pre-emptive answer to the natural doubt many would have toward the resurrection. It was a way of praising the faith of all the generations born after Jesus, who never had the chance to see with their own eyes or touch with their own hands and yet believed.
In general, Unitarian Universalists are people who feel a lot of sympathy for Thomas. If it were up to us to put a name on the story, we wouldn't call him "Doubting Thomas", with its connotations of pitying rebuke. We would call him "Sensible Thomas", for challenging his friends when they made a claim that just didn't jive with the world he knew.
Unitarian Universalists don't usually designate people as saints. If those who are called saints lived so long ago that we don't know much about them, we tend to doubt their existence. If they lived more recently, we can find lots of reasons to doubt their saintliness. But if we were to someday entertain the idea of saints, we'd probably be drawn to Thomas as one to make our very own.
He's someone we recognize in ourselves. Like Thomas, we have a lot of trust our own reason and experience to tell us what's true. Like Thomas, we want to touch and see and know for ourselves, and we are very resistant to the notion that something has to be taken simply on faith. Thomas is the saint of the rationalists -- the saint for those who need some evidence, some proof, some indication that a truth claim fits in with all we know about the ways of our world. For us, doubt is not a deficit; we don't mind being defined by our skepticism, because doubt is an essential ingredient in our faith.
What we most strive to be is not a community of certainty but a community of religious seekers. What we're after is a deeper understanding of truth, but not with any sense that there can be a final answer. Just as we now know that the cosmos truly is infinite, at least in the sense that no edges can be discovered, so is the cosmos of inner truth: there will always be something more to find.
I know you're all familiar with the Christian bumper-sticker that says, "Jesus is the answer". I am not offended by those who believe in that short declaration of faith. But for a community of seekers, our orientation to the questions is different. We aren't so much looking for an answer as we are using the questions in a quest for wisdom: and wisdom is something that keeps on growing among us forever, if we're open to it. That's why doubt is so important to us: it keeps the questions alive.
The questions are legion. Some of them can be asked in either a religious or a scientific search -- like, What is the nature of this universe? What is the place of humanity in it, and how are we connected to everything else? Some of them are questions science can't touch, such as, What is the meaning of my life? What am I most called to do with my talents and preferences? How shall I understand the suffering I see in the world? Others are questions that are the traditional ones of religion: What sort of God do I believe in? What do my beliefs require of me? How can I understand evil, in myself and in the world, and where do I look for redemption?
As a community of seekers, we expect that the answers to all these questions will be partial, fluid and continuous. None of the answers will be short enough to fit on a bumper-sticker. Both the questions we ask and the answers we settle on will change as we mature or shift in our thinking or level of understanding. But it's the questioning itself that is constant, and it is our doubt about final truth that keeps us asking. It's also our doubt that lets us see differences of belief as a strength rather than a threat. It is our doubt about any final or supreme religious truth that pushes us relentlessly toward tolerance. If one of the central tenets of our faith is that religious truth is always unfolding, then we have to maintain within ourselves a certain kind of alert interest toward the religious truths of everybody else.
I think we sometimes forget what a momentous thing that mandate toward tolerance really is. In a world in which so much anger and violence are built on fundamentalism -- both religious and political -- it is an extraordinary and radical act to resist fundamentalisms of our own. It is no small thing to offer so strong an antidote to the tribalisms of our world. This is one of the most powerful messages of our faith: that every religion, every orientation toward truth, should be considered with an open and curious mind. Fragments of truth can be lurking anywhere.
In my days as a Christian fundamentalist, this possibility could really not be entertained. I was an adolescent convert to the Jesus movement in the early 1970's. In those days, and in that community, whenever I or someone else asked too many questions or started to follow a thread of contrary logic too persistently, we were sometimes rebuked with the words, "that's the devil talking to you!" In my defense, at least that close-minded certainty made me uneasy! Fundamentalism of all kinds shares the characteristics of passion, simplicity and absolute certainty. One of the things that makes it frightening to us is that there can be no dialogue with that kind of certainty. We will always be told, in one language or another, that it's the devil talking to us.
Unitarian Universalists wouldn't dream of invoking the devil to describe a dissident point of view. But lest we become too smug with a sense of ourselves as the broad-minded and enlightened ones, it's important to recognize that doubt also has its limits as a religious value. Thomas has his shortcomings as a patron saint, and even skepticism can become a dogmatic stance. Doubt is not supposed to be a resting place; it's supposed to be an accompaniment or a corrective as we move along through our lives, a kind of lens we use.
Further on in her chapter on doubt, Kathleen Norris writes, "Perhaps my most important breakthrough with regard to belief came when I learned to be as consciously skeptical and questioning of my disbelief and my doubts as I was of my burgeoning faith." In other words, pure skepticism won't take us where we want to go on the religious journey any more than unquestioning belief. All by itself, doubt is a very flimsy ground on which to build a dwelling place for our spiritual lives.
There is a place for faith within our fold, a place where our rational minds come up against their limits and some of the other ways to discern truth begin to emerge. It isn't "blind" faith, because we're not called on to suspend our common sense in order to pledge allegiance to a creed of some sort. But it is faith, because not everything we treasure or hold most sacred can be touched and measured and held before our eyes.
When we ask our religious questions, unexpected and mysterious answers are sometimes the only ones we will get. Truth can speak in a variety of voices, and can come filtering through to us in a lot of different ways, some of which fly beneath the radar of our rational minds. If we are open only to what is provable, to what we can touch with our own fingers like Thomas, then we will miss some of the deeper truths our world and our lives can offer us.
In our reading this morning, Kathleen Norris brought us back to the Greek root of the verb "to believe". It originally meant "to give one's heart to". We don't give our hearts based only on logic and science and reason; sometimes our giving isn't based on those things at all. We give our hearts based on faith, on hope, and on love.
One of my colleagues, Rev. Forest Church, once said, "Legends need not be based on fact to be grounded in truth." There are some real truths in religious stories, even in the ones we can't seem to believe literally. Like Thomas, I find myself unable to believe that Jesus actually showed up among the living after he was crucified. But I still think there are some truths in the resurrection story, and we don't have to believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead in order to make those truths our own.
There is the truth, for instance, that the teachings and example of even one person can give hope to millions. There's the truth that the integrity of a life matters, even if that integrity leads to an early death. And there's the truth that no matter how we may dread death, it does not have to be the end to the meaning our lives put into the world. None of these truths depend on a literal, provable resurrection.
Truth comes to us on lots of levels that can't really be called rational. We do find it in science and math and history. But we also find it in metaphor and parable, in poetry, in music and dance and in other art. We find truth in our emotions, even when we can't clearly name what we feel or explain why; we find truth in intuition and truth through our dreams. So we limit ourselves drastically if we let our doubt or skepticism define us so completely that we believe nothing -- give our hearts to nothing -- unless we can see it, touch it, prove it.
Albert Einstein --certainly someone committed to the wonders of the rational mind -- once said, "The important thing is to not stop questioning....One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structures of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity."
I am fond of Doubting Thomas and I will always be sympathetic to his skepticism when he was told that Jesus had appeared again among the living. But I wouldn't choose him as our patron saint, because I don't think doubt can bear as much religious weight as Einstein's 'holy curiosity.' Doubt and skepticism both have a bit of a sense of withholding the self, putting up a hand and saying, "Now wait just a minute!" But holy curiosity comes closer to describing the alert interest we should bring to our religious lives.
Our faith, or what we claim as our religious truths, do not have to contradict our intellect and rationality; but they will eventually go beyond where our intellect can lead us. That doesn't take us to an irrational place but to one that is transrational. I don't think that's a real word, though I've heard other people use it; but what it means is an openness to those ways of knowing we consider rational as well as the ways of knowing we really can't explain. Holy curiosity saves us from all the dogmatisms -- the dogmatism of skepticism as well as that of certainty. Holy curiosity keeps us open to the mysteries. There is a Buddhist story from China that tells about a man who was sent to the Buddha to petition him for some scrolls that would teach religious truth to the people of China. That is not, of course, how the Buddha taught what he knew. When the Buddha's disciples gave the man scrolls that turned out to be blank, he went straight to the Buddha and complained bitterly that the monks were playing tricks on him. The Buddha was said to have answered, "You needn't shout. As a matter of fact, it is such blank scrolls as these that are the true scriptures. But I see that [you and your people will not] believe this, so there is nothing for it but to give them copies with some writing on."
In other words, the truth the Buddha discovered -- like other religious truth -- is not something that can be captured completely by words and then easily handed to someone else. We can learn something from the words on the scrolls, but the bigger thing, the real McCoy of revelation, s something we have to experience for ourselves, something that becomes a part of who we are. As Aldous Huxley wrote, "The study of theology or the mind's assent to theological propositions [can never] take the place...of 'the birth of God within'." No matter what theological language we use, it's this "birth of God within" that is the goal of the religious journey.
It is a birth or movement within us that will not lend itself easily to proof. Our doubt can keep us on the road and in motion toward that inner growth and transformation. But when we touch it, it will not be with our hands, and it will not come in a form that we can notate and quantify or put in a box for later analysis. It comes as a grace that transcends our categories, and in the moments when we're alert to that inner turning, even the Doubting Thomas within us will be brought to silence. AMEN.