In Soviet Russia, Jesus doubts You!
John 20:19-31; 1 John 1:1-2:2; Psalm 133; Acts 4:32-35
We live in a very distrustful society. In the internet age, we kind of have to be. We see pop-ups for “FREE IPHONES” and “FREE TRIP TO SOMEWHERE AMAZING” but we know that if we click them we’ll either have to sign our soul away to a credit card company, get our identities stolen, or pick up some manner of computer virus. The internet is a place where anyone can voice their opinion about something, no matter how factually accurate it may be. In fact, in a number of internet message boards and forums, there is a very simple statement — “pics or it didn’t happen” — whenever some brags about just about anything.
On the internet you can be anyone and say anything with very minimal censorship, though the internet does have some of its own strange forms of self-censorship. Of course this means that you can’t trust anything you read on the internet either. Oftentimes this spills over into our daily lives as well. I often find myself double-checking just about everything I hear, because it’s a habit I got into since I get most of my news from the internet.
This is why Wikipedia is considered such a poor source for educational purposes. Wikipedia is a user-editable encyclopedia, so by its very nature, anyone can change any article for any reason. Granted, there is a large degree of checks and balances; for example, if there is inaccurate information in an article it doesn’t last very long, as someone who knows the topic at hand will very quickly fix improper information, but sometimes you get unlucky.
In fact, the internet is so distrustful that there are websites out there who do the research for you to confirm if or not something actually happened. However you must be careful even with them, as the most popular of these sites has an entire section devoted to tricking the reader into thinking certain false stories are true.
So with the amount of skepticism we express on a regular basis, it’s almost surprising that we give Thomas such a bad rap. He’s always talked about as “doubting Thomas”: the one disciple who didn’t believe that Jesus had actually risen from the dead. There’s a an important thing to remember though. From Luke 24, “When [the women] came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.”
It’s important to remember that none of the disciples believed the women! Now, to their credit, we know that John and Peter ran to the tomb to check on the women’s story, but at first they weren’t convinced. Like any of us would likely do, Thomas basically said, to quote the internet phrase, “Pics or it didn’t happen.” The gospel records it as, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
In a way Thomas is just being sensible. People don’t come back from crucifixions, let alone being stabbed through the heart. He also happened to not be with the rest of the disciples when they all got to see Jesus, so he likely thought it wishful thinking or some kind of hoax. So Thomas really just gets a bad rep for his “doubting” the resurrection.
It’s something that’s important for us to remember today. While it’s only the most passionate, yet woefully ill-informed person who doubts that Jesus even existed, most people have a hard time with him coming back from the dead. They assume it’s either a story the disciples made up or some other kind of hoax, not unlike Thomas. It takes a pretty big step of faith to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, which is why Jesus’ reply to Thomas is, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
It’s that step of faith that is so hard for many people. We have absolutely no concrete “proof” of Jesus’ resurrection; the only account of it we have is from biased sources, namely the Bible and other Christian writers. It’s not something that we can convince someone of; you can’t make rational arguments to try and convince someone that Jesus rose from the dead.
That’s why the best way to tell people about Jesus’ resurrection is not with an intellectual argument, but to go about it the way Jesus himself did, by loving people and showing them what God is like, and then letting God do the rest. Note that Jesus didn’t judge Thomas for doubting the resurrection, He showed Thomas exactly what Thomas said would make him believe. That’s how God does it — He shows us exactly what we need to believe.