The Sauntering Pilgrim

For several years, for the Sunday after Easter Day, I’ve written a letter to the disciple Thomas. Some of them I’ve made public. This is one of them.

Dear Thomas: The theme song from Cheers has been coming to mind a lot recently. It begins, “Making your way in the world today / Takes everything you’ve got,” and it sure seems fitting for the confusing, disorienting, topsy-turvy times we’re living in today. It’s hard to make sense of what’s happening these days, when the values I knew and trusted seem turned on their heads and the foundations of life in society seem to be crumbling. And into the midst of it comes Easter. When I think about it, the resurrection makes no more sense, even less sense, than anything else that’s happening today. There’s a lot of uncertainty and doubt in the air, so I’ve been thinking a lot about you.

For a long time I’ve been trying to make sense of the resurrection, and while I always start by aiming for the risen Christ, what I keep being drawn to is you. It’s not because of your great courage, although when Jesus decided to go to Judea and the others feared it would mean his death and theirs, too, you were the only one who had the courage to say, “Let’s go” (John 11:7-16). And it’s not because of your deep faith, even though your confession of faith, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28), was so important, John made it the culmination of his gospel.

I’m grateful for your courage and your faith. But mostly I’m grateful for your doubt, which has come to define you so much that we call you “doubting Thomas.” For a lot of people, even some who believe themselves to be good Christians, doubt is a sign of a weak faith. One is supposed to have a strong faith, they believe, faith without question or doubt. So I sometimes wonder how you became such an important figure in John’s gospel.

It’s remarkable that after you’re depicted as the only disciple who is skeptical of the resurrection, you quickly become, only three verses later, the only one in all the gospels to state forthrightly and unequivocally that the risen Jesus is your Lord and God. It’s no accident that isolating doubt and deep faith are paired so closely in you. The deepest faith often grows out of the deepest doubt.

Sometimes doubt is not a sign of weakness; it’s a sign that something significant is shifting within. Someone asked Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz-Weber, “How do you grieve without losing your mind?” It reminded me of you and the situation every one of us has been in or will be some day.

She said grieving is like a prolonged spiritual software update. One moment you understand the world one way, then you discover the world you believed you understood doesn’t exist and maybe never did. People you love – good, decent, deeply faithful people – suffer and die; loving couples divorce; good people lose their jobs at exactly the wrong time; powerful people go to war, and innocent people suffer; scoundrels are elected to high office, and the poor and vulnerable are crushed underfoot. It’s disorienting and confusing, not the way life is supposed to be. It forces us to change our way of thinking and of living.

Is that how you felt the week following the resurrection? Did the crucifixion of Jesus put an end to your hope? Your fellow disciples scattered into the night – no one knows where you disappeared to – and the meaning you found in life evaporated. After my friends and I gathered a week ago to celebrate the resurrection, we returned to a world that makes the hope we’ve been living for seem like an idle tale (Luke 24:11). Maybe that’s why I feel such kinship with you.

If my colleague Nadia is right, that any death that turns life upside down, is like a prolonged spiritual software update, it takes much more to come to terms with the resurrection that turns death itself upside down. Before any of us can begin to come to terms with Jesus’ death, we’ve got to start dealing with the realization that he’s alive again in a form so new we hardly recognize it. You’ve dealt with disbelief, Thomas, you’ve wrestled with doubt, and the wrestling somehow gave birth to your deep faith. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to you.

Recently I heard the story of a camel caravan crossing the desert. When they stopped for the night, the camel drivers put pegs into the ground to tie the camels and keep them from wandering off. But there were only nineteen pegs, and they had twenty camels. “How do we tie the twentieth camel?” they wondered.

“Camels are stupid animals,” a veteran caravan leader said. “Just go through the motions of tying the camel and he’ll stay put all night,” which is what they did, and the camel stood there as if tied. Next morning when they continued on the journey, all the camels were following, except one that refused to budge. The veteran leader said, “You forgot to go through the motions of untying him.” When the drivers did this, the camel started moving with the others.

Thomas, I admit I’ve become so conditioned to living in an un-resurrected world, I forget I’ve been set free. That’s one place to be, the place of being confined by restraints that exist only in my mind. Wherever it was you disappeared to that week, you doubted, but I believe you doubted faithfully. From wherever you had been tied in an un-resurrected world, you were set free. And you remind me that even though I doubt, I, too, have been untied and set free.

One who came after you, St. Paul, wrote that since he had been crucified with Christ, it was now Christ who lived in him (Gal. 2:19-20) – the same old body but a brand new person. Maybe that’s what happened to you that evening a week after the resurrection: your own sudden experience of new life, a spiritual rebirth. Maybe that’s what’s happening to me – slower and less dramatic, a lifetime in the making, but just as real. Maybe it’s precisely the wrestling with doubt and skepticism that is the labor pain of a spiritual rebirth. So today I’ll embrace my doubt and continue to live with it, like the seed of some new living thing that’s beginning to germinate.