April 7, 2013 | 4:00 p.m.

Believe

Edwin Estevez
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

John 20:24–31

This is the famous doubting Thomas story, a name the disciple earned by questioning the resurrection of Jesus, by asking to see Jesus’ wounds. It is probably most familiar to us as an encouragement, but it is often messaged as a chastisement: to believe without seeing rather than having to see. It’s easy enough to get the point: we don’t always have the evidence, we don’t always know the measurement of the thing, but we’re asked to believe anyway.

What I think we miss is that Doubting Thomas also becomes Believing Thomas, and the resurrected Jesus meets him in the midst of doubt. To be fair to Thomas, all he hoped for and believed in had come crashing down on a night when Jesus was betrayed, arrested, beaten, and crucified. How could the one that was executed by the state and buried in a tomb be alive? All seems lost and Thomas feels lost, wounded. How will he get through all of this?

Perhaps he’s experienced the dark night of the soul, when the darkness seems invincible against any sort of light, the world seems at an end.

You’ve heard this kind of story many times. It is the struggle of all people of faith, the moment when the doubt creeps in, and when our hope seems finally at the end of the rope.

Our culture is infused with this story. Almost every movie about heroes, every epic, every romantic comedy or justice story references this doubt as to whether the world will be made right after all and whether we will live to see it, whether we will find love, whether there will be change, whether the day can be saved, and the characters themselves have their doubts. In a movie like The Dark Knight, filmed right on location here in Chicago, Batman must confront his own doubts.

If you’re willing to admit that you play video games, you might actually catch this next reference. Halo, a game that deals with intergalactic battles between human beings, aliens, and other life forms, has been one of the most successful series in video game history. So successful, in fact, that they actually released a campaign of commercials promoting Halo 3 that are themselves mini-movies.

In one such remarkable video there is a soft piano melody playing in the background as a camera stands over what looks like a frozen battlefield caught in clay sculpture. The detail is precise—the despair on the faces of human beings, the gleeful triumph of the aliens, the disarray and chaos of an epic battle scene. In the midst of all this chaos and despair, the camera quickly pans to the hero, named Master Chief, whom the player has followed for the entirety of the series, held captive by an alien who holds him in apparent victory and celebration. The last hope for human beings hangs there, and suddenly Master Chief raises his head, the the only moving thing in this whole frozen montage; a light glimmers; and then the screen cuts to white words across black: “Believe.” Suddenly, it ends. (If you’d ever like to see it, you can simply Google or YouTube Halo 3 trailer “believe.”)

I invite you right now to pause and imagine one of your favorite films that deals with loss of faith and hope and perhaps finding faith and hope again—where all seems at its end. Films like The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and films based on comics—there is a force at work that will come through, usually manifest in the form of a person or a team of persons either with very human or superhuman strength.

Why do these films, video games, and books do so well? On the one hand it is simply because they offer hope in the midst of our own pain. But, says author John Eldredge in The Sacred Romance, we find that this story is not new at all but has been part of our history for thousands of years, and I think they tell us something about us.

According to him, it suggests that deep inside the human heart is the desire for the world to be made right and it was written there by God. Eldredge then says our challenge is to live from our hearts, to not pretend to be something we’re not, to be true to our identity, and to open ourselves to life adventures with gratitude, boldness, and fierceness. We seem wired to believe. But then the wound comes, he continues, and our hearts close up.

Here, our faith fails us, we falter, our hearts are hurt, our pain too deep for words. We become, like Thomas, disillusioned, disenchanted, disheartened, discouraged, and disappointed.

Like Thomas, we want to see the wounds because we’ve been wounded. Perhaps not fully aware of it himself, Thomas wants to relate to someone who knows about wounds. Like him, we want to relate to someone who knows something of our pain and our doubt. We don’t want to be tricked. No more of that.

Author G.K. Chesterton, in an essay titled God the Rebel, proposes that God is God’s biggest skeptic:

But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt.

In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.

But let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

So tonight, I want you to remember two things:

God is big enough for your questions and big enough for your doubt.

There is room in God’s love for your struggle with faith, for wrestling with God. It is there, in fact, where our faith is challenged, called out, and grows. It becomes more than a nicety, than polite answers to tough questions; more than a creed we use to divide, to exclude, and to feel self-righteous. Instead it become a story about love, about falling and rising again, about the mystery of God’s creation and work in the world and in our own lives: there we find our faith, however wavering, however skeptical.

God can handle your doubt and your questions. And that’s exactly why Jesus welcomes Doubting Thomas to touch the wounds. God understands that we need to sometimes see it, to sometimes experience, to believe—and Doubting Thomas becomes Believing Thomas, just as we can also become believers in the midst of our doubt.

Second takeaway: You are called to a choice. It doesn’t mean that God’s love for you is dependent on this choice, or that the grace of God is earned by your choice. You are loved, forgiven, and offered grace anyway. Your choice is what gives you the freedom to participate in God’s love. For this, like Thomas, you must touch the wounds; you must experience the suffering of Jesus.

Pause there: what is that? No, it’s not some strange self-torturing in which we bear the pains of the world alone, as if we were its saviors or heroes. Instead we experience the suffering of Jesus—we begin to see the world as connected and the Creator who mourns the ways in which we destroy one another—and like Jesus, we begin to stand up to the injustices, to the ways in which we hurt one another.

In the midst of this experience of the suffering of Jesus, where we’re not alone but God’s very self journeys with us, in the midst of the pain, and the chaos, we can raise our heads and believe—choose to believe that God is good. Believe. We might not understand all things, know everything, and we are angered by the evils we see around us and the injustices carried out, but we choose to believe that God is at work—with us, among us, and through us, that each of us is an agent for good, for God’s love.

In your doubt, believe. In your unbelief, believe. In your pain, believe—because you too are blessed. Amen.