Sermon: Seeing is Believing – Not (1 May, Dr. Irene Lawrence)

Doubting Thomas, Abbey Church of St. Nectaire, France, early 12th c. Photo from Vanderbilt Divinity Library.

I have always had mixed feelings about the story of “doubting Thomas.”  On the one hand, how presumptuous of him to demand proof of Jesus’s resurrection.  “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my fingers in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”  On the other hand, I admire his chutzpah.  And on the third hand, I’m a little envious that he actually got his proof in the form he demanded, even if accompanied by a rebuke:  “Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

That’s us.  In fact that’s probably all of us except that first generation—including of course Thomas.  Perhaps there have been others over the years who have been granted resurrection appearances.  But certainly most of us fall into the category of those who have not seen, yet have come to believe.  In a way, that shows God’s confidence in us—God has required a little more of us than was required of Thomas; maybe we have been put in first grade rather than kindergarten, even if not by our own choice.

Then we get a different slant on belief in the first lesson, which throughout this season is taken from the Acts of the Apostles rather than the Old Testament.  The readings give us vignettes from the period immediately after Easter—in this case, immediately after Pentecost.  Here Jews from “every nation under heaven” are surprised to hear the apostles speak in their own language.  At this point the message is to Jews—after all, Christians are just starting out, and they’re all still in Jerusalem—and the heart of Peter’s sermon, as the author tells it, is some verses of Psalm 16, which we just recited as our Psalm between the First Lesson and the Epistle.

It’s interesting how this is handled.  If you read carefully, Peter doesn’t start out by saying, “We’ve been waiting for this prediction from Psalm 16 to come true, and now it has.”  His argument is actually the reverse: “We know God has raised Jesus from the dead because we are witnesses, and by the way there is a description of this in Scripture, which we didn’t really notice before, but by hindsight, it is very appropriate.”

There is an even more interesting twist to this.  As you can imagine, there was no stenographer tasking down Peter’s exact words at the time.  While I have no doubt that these words are very representative of the kind of preaching that did go on in the early church, these exact words are a reconstruction.  We can tell because the word that the argument turns on, corruption, is only in the Greek translation of the Psalm, not the Hebrew.

A short history lesson here:  a Greek translation of the Old Testament was gradually made in the century or two before Christ by Jews for Jews who had spread out through the ancient world. In the manner of emigrants, within a couple of generations they lost fluency in their native language.  Since Christianity almost immediately spread out in the Greek-speaking world, leaving Jewish Christians a small minority, it was natural that most Christians would use this ready-made Greek translation of Scripture, as the author of Acts does here.  Then, a little later, as part of Judaism’s reconstruction after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, Judaism decided to limit the canon of Scripture to Hebrew only, repudiating both the Greek language and books written in Greek.  That left only Christians using the formerly Jewish Greek translation.  The Greek was eventually translated into Latin, which became the normative Scripture of the Western church and the Roman Catholic Church to this day.  But at the Reformation, most Protestant churches decided to follow Judaism’s lead and accept only the Hebrew Scriptures as Old Testament.  Our King James Bible was the first English authorized version that was translated from the Hebrew instead of Latin or Greek, and our modern versions, including our Prayer Book translation, do the same.  That is why there is a difference in the translation of the psalm as we said it as a psalm between the lessons:

You will not abandon me to the grave,* nor let your holy one see the pit.

and the way it is quoted in Acts:

For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One experience corruption.

I don’t mean to make heavy weather of this, as I don’t think the differences here are ultimately significant, unless you have some particular theory as to the mechanics of the Resurrection.  By whichever words, God raised Jesus up, freed him from death, and shows the ways and joys of genuine life.  I just want to point out that the author of these particular words, although he puts them in Peter’s mouth, is like us—not personally an eyewitness of the physical resurrection.  But he considers himself a witness in another sense.  It is the reality of Christ’s resurrection that makes him search out and find this passage.  It’s not that this passage proves to him Christ’s resurrection.

Personally, I have some reservations about the details in the Thomas story, too, much as I like it.  After all, it, too, was not written down until a couple of generations after the events it describes, and its author therefore is also not a witness in the literal sense.  But again, I don’t think that is significant.  After all, there were clearly witnesses to both the Resurrection and Jesus’s subsequent presence among his disciples:  the disciples themselves, many of whom are named (even some of the women), and also Paul, who speaks of his conversion experience as the equivalent of the disciples’ resurrection experiences.  These witnesses did indeed bear their witness, as we are told.  But the problem for Christians by the time these stories were actually written down is that all these contemporary witnesses were probably already dead.  That’s why things began to be written down, after there were no more living memories. What is the next generation, or the next, or us, to do with all the skeptics who sneer “Seeing is believing.  Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my fingers in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

Actually, I doubt that in this case seeing really would lead to believing.  Remember the story of Lazarus and the rich man?  At the end, the dead rich man begs Father Abraham to send the dead Lazarus to his family, to tell them to change their selfish behavior, but Father Abraham says that they will not “be convinced, even if someone rises from the dead.”  Thank about it for a minute, and translate it to our day.  Suppose an executed criminal came back to life today—I mean, really, somehow came back to life after being really dead.  No, I don’t believe it, either, but just humor me.  I suspect the first thing we would do is change our definition of death and bend all our scientific and medical skill toward figuring out how to duplicate it.  But out of all the possible things we might do, even supposing the person was innocent, I think the last thing we would do is start a new religion around him.  In other words, we believe in Jesus first; only then do we believe his resurrection.

I used the word “believe” twice in that last sentence, but you’ll notice there’s a difference in the two uses.  We believe in Jesus first—we know him, we trust him, we experience him—then we believe his resurrection—the fact of it.  Not because we have seen him, but because we know him, we believe him—in the trust sense of believe.

At the heart of the matter, I really don’t think it was all that different for the first disciples after all, even if they did “see” Jesus, and it certainly wasn’t different for our New Testament writers, who, like us, did not “see” him.  But we all were and are willing to bet our lives on him.  In some cases, literally—the author of our epistle today talks about his hearers’ “various trials,” which test the “genuineness” of their “faith,” not the accuracy of their belief systems.

So, much as we might enjoy sharing Thomas’s privilege, we are, even without it, taking part in the “new birth into a living hope” described in 1 Peter.  We can live a resurrected life in which “the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf” can be turned into good—not erased as if it never happened (the Risen Jesus bears all his scars)—but used to bring more love and life into the world.  That is our Resurrection faith—our trust.  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Dr. Irene Lawrence

Seeing is Believing—Not            1 May 2011