And Jesus said to him, "Thomas, do you believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." (John 20:29)
Seeing is believing, we commonly say.
But this text turns it around. Believing is seeing. On that memorable evening in Jerusalem, following the Lord’s resurrection by eight days, he appeared to the eleven disciples once again - this time with Thomas present. Remember how he invited Thomas to touch his wounded hands and side, and then spoke the words we hear on this second Sunday of Easter so many centuries later, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."
With that declaration, Jesus sets aside once and for all the thought that we are somehow at a disadvantage in comparison with those who saw his resurrected body. Thomas had wanted to verify everything by sight and touch. "Unless I see his hands ... and put my finger into the nailprints, I will not believe ..." That sentence has been repeated in so many various ways down through the ages since. But Jesus does not link his resurrection presence to those who could see and touch him. The priority lies with faith.
How do we come to faith, and stay strong in faith?
Faith comes by hearing, St. Paul says in a celebrated passage from Romans 10, which is timely for us to hear in connection with the Gospel reading for this day:
... whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him of whom: they have not heard? And how shall they preach unless they are sent ... so then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. (Romans 10:14-18)
This is how we have been brought to faith: by hearing the Word of the crucified and risen Lord. What a great mystery and marvel that is. God’s Spirit is pleased to draw us to Christ by something as apparently inconsequential as a spoken message. Yet God puts all his redeeming love and purpose for us into a word that can be spoken, a word that comes to us in our words, joined with water in Baptism and with the bread and wine of the Eucharist. We do not believe on our own and of ourselves; if so our faith would forever be dependent upon our own power. Our trust and assent that Jesus is Lord comes from the hearing of the Gospel.
Believing the resurrected Lord is risen for the remission of our sins, you and I are given sight to behold what can take place in our world - things we would never see without the undergirding of faith.
This came home to me strongly some time ago when I wish you could have been with me for an evening with several hundred of Chicago’s lay Christian leaders. Senator Mark Hatfield was speaking. He portrayed much of what he sees as a "late afternoon" mood among our people - tired out and worn down by seemingly intractable problems of economy, moral compromise, and the threat of nuclear holocaust. Then he began to really take hold of the problems as one who believes in Christ’s resurrection and therefore sees what divine providence tells us to hope for and to do. Citing generous portions of the prophet Jeremiah, and even more abundant reference to our Lord’s decisive victory over all the principalities and powers by his resurrection, Hatfield challenged us all to do away with mindless consumerism in the better interests of responsible stewardship of the earth. With the Easter hope as his ground, he gave us reasons to hope that under God we can find our security not in multiplying nuclear warheads but in strengthening the moral fabric of our personal and public life. Knowing what Senator Hatfield has done in the U.S. Senate in Washington D.C., and knowing something of what he does among the unemployed people in his home state of Oregon’s forestry industry, I am mightily impressed with the vision of a Christian man in public office who sees much because he believes the essentials of the biblical truth about God’s judgment upon sin and his grace for sinners.
He gives us an example to follow. His witness is a powerful and relevant commentary on this text.
During the past week some of us have been rejoicing in blessings, others groaning under burdens. Whatever the case, this Sunday has nothing to do with post-Easter letdown. The very thought of it is totally out of order. Instead it has everything to do with believing the Easter texts, and seeing the Easter faces of people with whom we serve out our calling.
Texts and faces. Take both to heart as we think of our part in the great purposes the risen Lord is accomplishing through his church in our world.
In the church we have texts. We live by the word of the living God. Think how many people in the ages since the first Easter have heard this text: "blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." In times of famine and war, under circumstances of persecution and exile, amidst all the perplexities which beset men and women and youth, the Easter word has been spoken and heard in faith. We do not have mere reports and analyses; we have texts - the sure and abiding word of the living God that he can and does act in the middle of terrible problems for the rescue and helping of people everywhere. Such a word proclaims "a faith that overcomes the world." (1 John 5:4) We live in the middle of such strong temptations to give in to the world, to live by the secularity that undermines the resurrection of Christ as the only sure foundation. Equally forceful are the currents that would incline us to escape from the world. But God calls us to live in the faith which overcomes the world. The Scripture underlies that faith. We have texts. And so, if today finds you concerned by anxieties or worn down by a late afternoon sense of how futile it is to even try to believe anymore, listen to the text. That text has strengthened and renewed the hearts of many like yours before.
Believing the text gives us the vision of faith to see faces. From whatever vantage point one begins to understand what we’re up against in today’s world, there are always reams of statistics and endless generalizations that point to a depressed economy, a self-serving spirit of narcissism, and mounting numbers of marriages and families that have been shipwrecked. But we must still see faces. It is faces of people in job application lines that we must recognize - each one a person with a dignity and destiny under God. In what is popularly termed the "Me Generation," we still must discern faces of people who are trying - some wrongly and others faithfully - to make sense out of life. We must not know Communists as a faceless multitude far away to the east; we must look for faces - including those faces this very day in the Soviet Union who celebrate Easter amidst totalitarian forces which would quench social disease. We must see faces - those of men and women and young people who are caught and struggling with a monstrous problem of life. Faces. The church must always have an eye for faces, for people - believing each one to be made in the Father’s image and forever the object of the Father’s searching love.
In the late afternoon of his own ministry, Jesus once encountered a distraught father who had reached the end of his rope with a violent son whose convulsive and terrifying behavior had driven everyone to despair. The momentous story, tied so directly to our times with scores of thousands of young people escaping into the swampland of drug abuse, is given us by St. Matthew in his seventeenth chapter. In the face of worn out people who had given in to the problem and who could see nothing more because they believed nothing more, Jesus cried out with a holy passion, "O faithless generation, how long must I be with you? O perverse people, how long must I bear with you?" Then he brought the healing that restored the tortured life to wholeness. His disciples asked Jesus why they could not do anything for the lad. Jesus told them that if they had faith as a grain of mustard seed they would say to a mountain - move over there! and it would. The image of the mustard seed as an image of faith can encourage us. It teaches us today that our faith may be tender indeed, but that it need not stay that way. Faith grows by the exercise of faith, by trusting God and acting upon the faithful vision of what we are to do as we meet all the circumstances of life ahead for us in the next seven days before we gather again.
Do not give in. Do not run away. Christ overcame death in order to give us faith to overcome the world that assaults us like the spring wind. We ask today, not to see the finished result of the future, but only for a faith that holds us firmly to God who brings us through to the future he has already shared with us in the Gospel of his Son.
Blessed are you, who have not seen and yet believe. Though now, for a little while, you may have to suffer various trials. But all this is for the proving of the genuineness of your faith. Without having seen Christ, you love him, and rejoice with a joy that is exalted. And the outcome of such a faith, is the salvation of your souls.