Rick Olson, April 7, 2002
People saw the miracles Jesus did, and time and again, they believed they were real. When he turned the water into wine, his disciples saw it and believed and even drank. When he fed the five thousand, the people saw it and believed. And when he raised Lazarus from the dead, people saw that and came to the faith in droves. These days, if a miracle happens on the streets, we look around for the special effects man, we try to figure out how it was done . . . we just know it has to be trickery, has to be a gimmick. Wires or smoke or mirrors or something, ‘cause things like that don’t just happen, not nowadays, anyway . . .
Oh, they happened back in Jesus’ day, but not anymore . . . maybe we can figure out when it stopped: “Let’s see, now, God quit doing miracles at around, oh . . . 5:47 AM, Monday March 3rd, 120 AD.” Jewish scholars have already done something similar with prophecy . . . they declared it to have been over a few hundred years before Christ. Good thing, too . . . wouldn’t want a living tradition . . . I for one am glad miracles don’t happen anymore . . . they always came along with revelation, and that wouldn’t do . . . ongoing revelation’s embarrassing when your mind’s already made up . . .
Of course, I’m being facetious . . . the laws of physics didn’t change right after Jesus’ day, demons didn’t stop—or start—haunting the woods, gravity didn’t suddenly become stronger so people wouldn’t rise up into the sky anymore. Although God could’ve changed and stopped doing signs, I don’t think it happened. I don’t think God’s changed, I think we have . . . we’re on the other side of a cultural revolution called the “enlightenment,” where we’ve supposedly put away childish things, like belief in ghosts and demons and miracles. Unless it can be scientifically proven, we don’t want anything to do with it. Remember all those TV commercials in the 50s and 60s, with Very Serious Men in white lab coats? They’d look into the camera with great sincerity, hold up the hair-spray or motor oil or whatever it was they were selling, and spout some pseudo-scientific gobbledy-gook about d-methyl-ethyl-toluene or super-scrubbing bubbles? Madison Avenue types knew that Americans are suckers for science—or they used to be, anyway—and would believe anything a scientist told them.
And lo, it came to pass that only something one could prove scientifically or rationally caused belief. Only something that could be shown to be plausible through a chain of cause-and-effect was accepted. And that meant only something that was repeatable was true . . . because if it’s logical, if it’s the result of a chain of occurrence, related by cause and effect, then you oughta’ be able to repeat it for verification. Just start out with the same initial conditions, do the same things to it, like you did before, and – voilá! – it becomes true! It happens again.
But of course there’s a problem with this . . . it leaves no room for faith, or at least faith in God . . . Miracles aren’t repeatable. I don’t care how many years you tramp around
Biblical scholar Walter Wink calls this a “theological world view”1 . . . all things spiritual are relegated to their own sphere, their own bubble, where they don’t interfere with anything we do in real life . . . we’ve even developed a theological language for it, we separate church from the rest of creation . . . when I give the charge at the end of the service, I sometimes say “Go out into the world . . .” as if here in the church, we’re somehow not in the world . . .
And the results have been insidious . . . a grad student from Columbia Seminary did a study—using scientific methods, no doubt!—where she asked the question: “Could a Christian, practicing the ethics of Jesus Christ, survive in business today?” The answer she got was . . . no. Despite all the writing to the contrary, all the books on being a Christian in business, all the weekly Christian business-men’s breakfasts held around the country, she found no room for an ethics of Christ in the boardroom. If we keep our beliefs compartmentalized, if we keep our religion separated in some private sphere, it’s all too easy to relegate Christ-like behavior over there as well.
Why do we believe, anyway? All our other beliefs are based upon what we can measure, what we can touch, what we can feel . . . what we can see. What’s so special about our faith? Note that the disciples were more like moderns in this regard, they believed only after they’d seen . . . only after they’d seen the nail-scarred hands, only after they’d seen the sword-pierced side and only after they’d heard Jesus’ voice. And after they rejoice, after they believe that he was among them once again, Jesus says a second time “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And he breathes on them, as God breathed across the waters at creation, and he gives the Holy Spirit to them . . .
But one of them is missing, one of them doesn’t see the hands and side, doesn’t hear his voice . . . Thomas the twin, whom we slander as Doubting Thomas, isn’t in the room when Jesus first comes, he doesn’t see what the others see. And when he’s told about it, he doesn’t believe either, and says so right up front: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Unless he has the same experience the others had, of the physical presence of Christ, unless he can measure the scars with his hand, he refuses to believe . . . and exactly a week later, the disciples are in that room again, this time with Thomas, and again Jesus comes in, and again he says “Peace be with you,” and shows himself to the disciples, and he says to Thomas . . . “Put your finger here,” he says, “see my hands. Do not doubt, but believe.” And Thomas does, he believes when he sees Jesus, just like the others did.
Then Jesus says “Because you have seen me, you have believed? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet come to believe.” And right away we congratulate ourselves: We haven’t seen, and yet we believe, so we must be blessed! Yay for us! It’s a reward! That’s how we read it anyway – if you believe, you’re blessed . . . cause and effect, cause and effect. But that’s not what it says. It simply says that those who believe and have not seen are blessed. We supply the causal connection in our minds, it isn’t in the text, in either the English or the Greek.
Have you ever tried to believe on your own? Have you ever tried to believe in something without any evidence to support it? Or worse, when all the evidence is against it? Try it some time. Try to will yourself into belief . . . I believe . . . that tomorrow I’m going to be taken by a flying saucer and transported up for dinner on Mars. Or . . . I believe that great-Aunt Tilly is coming down to Tuscaloosa tomorrow, when I know she’s in Connecticut . . . try to really become convinced of it on your own, to really have faith in it . . . I’ll wager you can’t, it’s almost impossible, especially in these post-enlightenment times . . .
And so why do we believe? Why do we have faith? Could it be that it’s a gift of God, just like everything else we have? That’s what John Calvin thought . . . and that’s what Reformed Christians the world over think. None of the disciples – or Mary, for that matter – come to belief on their own – it’s all at the instigation of Jesus. He comes to them, he shows them the hands, and the side, they see him, and rejoice in their belief. Belief is a gift of God, just like any other. That’s the thing about blessing, you see . . . it’s from God, not us. And the blessing for those who believe without seeing . . . is the belief itself.
Do you remember after Jesus fed the five-thousand, and the people followed him back across the
But . . . inquiring minds want to know: what is the mechanism of that belief; if we can’t come to God on our own, how is it accomplished? The clue is in our passage . . . it relates two appearances of Jesus, side by side, and John constructs them in parallel, with identical beginnings, and he uses identical language. It’s at the same time, in the same house, behind the same locked doors, and Jesus says the same thing: “Peace be with you.” And so John invites us to compare the two . . . and an obvious difference is that Thomas isn’t there the first time,
But there’s another difference as well. The first time, Jesus breathes on them and in that moment, the Holy Spirit comes upon them, the power-plant of faith, the active presence of Christ in the world. And, Jesus has already told us, the spirit of truth . . . in his final speech before the crucifixion, Jesus had promised them the Spirit, the Advocate . . . and he said the Spirit will guide us into all truth, and declare to us the things that are to come. When Thomas missed the first meeting, he missed more than Jesus, he missed the Spirit as well . . . and therefore he has to see to believe, just like the other disciples did before they received the Spirit.
How do we believe what we believe? By the Spirit of power and truth, who guides us into all truth, who speaks what is heard, and declares to us things that are to come . . . who creates in us an enduring, unbreakable belief . . . we are blessed, we who believe without having seen, we are blessed by the Spirit who comes in power and gentleness . . . I think Calvin’s language says it best . . . “The Holy Spirit,” he writes, “is the bond by which Christ . . . unites us to himself.”2 We are bound to Christ, our belief is created, by Christ, through the Holy Spirit. We believe, not through any merit of our own, not through anything we think or do or say, but by the sheer power of the breath of God.
And that’s good . . . because in the end, we’re frail vessels . . . we’re part of God’s good creation, but we’re not perfect . . . we’re easily led, and easily mis-led. We’re immersed in a culture of skepticism, a culture of dis-belief. It’s a culture that requires evidence for everything, proof for everything, and the temptation is to follow along, become burnt-out, and cynical. Our faith gets pushed over into that separate box, that separate sphere of our lives, where we can take it out and turn it over in our hands before putting it back again.
But the Spirit changes all that, and I think the first step in re-integrating our faiths with our lives is the recognition that we don’t have to do anything . . . paradoxically, we don’t even have to recognize it . . . But that’s the grace of it all, isn’t it? The joy of our faith is that, like salvation, we don’t have to do it ourselves, we don’t have to maintain it through anything we do, thank goodness . . . God has blessed us in the Holy Spirit, blessed us in our faith . . . we have not seen, and yet we have believed! Amen.
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