Not so much Doubt, as Love

A woman told a story about a time she had emergency surgery: “My sister, a professor with final exams to give, was getting married in less than a week. Yet she drove from New York City to Massachusetts in a snowstorm to see me in the hospital. No phone call would assure her that I was alive, and okay. She had to see me with her own eyes.”

“Sometimes,” the writer concludes, “the demand to see is not doubt. Sometimes it is even love.”

So too, with Thomas the disciple of Jesus, nicknamed throughout history as doubting Thomas.

But I think he’s been unfairly tagged. Yes, when it comes to believing that Jesus rose from the grave, he seems to require more than the testimony of his disciple colleagues. He won’t take their word for it.

But the demand to see has very much to do with his devotion. All the disciples had concluded that God had become real and present in Christ—at least until the crucifixion, with its crashing down of their hopes. 

Now, in the wake of such a challenge to faith, Thomas knew that the reality of Christ had to be more than an unexamined assumption. He wanted more vivid confirmation. More than second-hand testimony. So he won’t settle for the experience of the others. For him, asking questions was a way to deepen his relationship with God. He sensed that this belief could lead to a living reality. 

And so Thomas waits, and struggles, and keeps asking. While he sensed that something wonderful had happened, Thomas wanted to believe with more than half a heart. His foundation for believing had to do with coming face to face himself with Jesus rumored now to be alive. He was after a personal and relational kind of knowing. 

I am, too. If the resurrection happened, it changes everything. Changes me.

I see something else striking about Thomas. For all his doubts, perhaps no one in the New Testament comes up with a more explicit declaration of Jesus’ identity as the divine Son. It is Thomas who says, when Jesus does actually appear to him, “My Lord and my God!” The disciples had said only, “We have seen the Lord.” 

He thereby gives perhaps the most heartfelt, sweeping statement in the Bible of the Incarnation of God in Christ, the divinity of Christ. To Thomas Jesus is not just the Lord but my Lord, my God.

His doubts served to draw him into a deeper encounter with Christ. “Sometimes the demand to see is not doubt. Sometimes it is even love.”

During the days of Lent just behind us, I would turn especially to a prayer that asked, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Now, in the season of Easter, in these days after Jesus’s triumph over death, I too am interested in a more vivid experience of One who was made to live again. “Risen Lord,” I plan to pray, “may your living presence, your love, become even more real to me.”