On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Now a week later his disciples were again inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.” Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” (John 20.19-29)
As we see, the “Doubting Thomas” story is told to us on this Second Sunday of Easter. It’s a logical selection for the day since, after all, the story tells us that the Risen Lord appeared to Thomas and the others “a week later,” meaning a week after his first appearance to the group–less Thomas–on the evening of his resurrection.
Certainly, the story is well-known and everybody likes to pile on Thomas for his doubts. He has become a whipping boy since the first time the story was told. As a result, Thomas grabs everyone’s attention and his gaffe becomes a launching pad for a pile up of criticism. That is unfortunate because a more careful reading of the story would show us that all of the disciples still have their doubts.
The evangelist John plants the clue right in front of us with the door. Pay close attention. In the first part of the story, John tells us that “on the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst.” He offers a greeting to them, sends them out to continue his mission, and breathes the Spirit into them.
Onto the second part, the part about Doubting Thomas. The evangelist writes, “Now a week later, his disciples were inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst.” Wait a minute! The doors were still locked! Didn’t the Risen Lord send them out to do his work? So why are they still inside the Upper Room and why in the world are all the doors still locked?
Because they had their doubts. There is no other conclusion. They’ve spent the intervening week locked up tight for fear of the Jews, out of sight, barricaded behind shut doors. They haven’t gone anywhere and they sure haven’t gone out onto the open streets of Jerusalem where they might be seen and hauled off to the chief priests and religious leaders like Jesus was.
So, Thomas isn’t the lone wolf. The other disciples had as many doubts as he had, even if they didn’t give voice to them as Thomas did when he asserted, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” And remember, the other disciples have already been shown Jesus’ hands and his side in his first appearance. But they still lock the doors.
In other words, their journey–and it is a long journey–from fear to faith is far from over. They have taken a few steps forward as we see in their telling Thomas “we have seen the Lord.” But their seeing the Lord apparently has not resulted in their unlocking the door and stepping outside as Jesus told them to do when he said, “So I send you.”
It is fair to say, then, that Thomas was in good company when he voiced his doubts. His skepticism is shared by those who have seen and still have a ways to go before they fully believe. It is no wonder that the Risen Lord ends his stay with the disciples with these words addressed to Thomas, but intended for everyone, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”
Of course, it profits us little to go after the disciples for their flawed and fragile faith. Like I said, faith is always a journey of a thousand steps and the disciples have only started on the path forward. They have a ways to go. And their arrival will be announced when they’re able to unlock the doors and walk outside into the streets, continuing the work of the Risen Lord as he commissioned them to do when he sent them out.
The evangelist Luke, more sympathetic to the disciples, shows them stepping out into the streets as soon as the Spirit has descended upon them, the disciples “speaking in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim” to the crowds staying in Jerusalem. But Luke also says the Spirit was given to the disciples fifty days after the resurrection, unlike John who has the Spirit given on Easter evening.
Also, Luke claims the Risen Lord “presented himself alive to them by many proofs after he had suffered, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” It would appear, then, that even in Luke’s version the disciples needed time to assess the situation and assimilate their thoughts, aided by regular visits from the Risen Lord.
However, I don’t want to spend more time dissecting the disciples’ response to the Resurrected Jesus. It should be clear, I think, that it took time for them to make sense of it all, their fears slowly replaced by faith. The only exception, it seems, was the Beloved Disciple who, in the words of John, “looked inside the tomb and believed.” And, according to John, he went back home, unlike Peter and the others who went back to the locked room.
Let’s talk instead about ourselves and what the story of the disciples’ fear tells us about our own actions. After all, that’s the real intention of the scriptures–to probe our hearts and to guide us on our way. So, given this story, we should ask ourselves if we’ve faced our fears. Have we moved beyond them to go out and do the work of Jesus? Or are we still stuck behind locked doors?
As I see it, these are the right questions to be asking because I think a good many of us keep the locks on our doors. We allow our fears to keep us sequestered in our safe spots, away from the critics and the crowds that might threaten us in some way because we are committed to continuing the mission of the Risen Lord. I think our journey to faith, like that of the disciples, is a slow start.
As we examine our own actions, we want to look specifically at those locks and where we put them. The most obvious, of course, is the lock on the door to our houses. They provide us insulation from the world, a safe haven, a secure spot where we don’t have to see people we don’t like, and don’t have to walk by the poor man begging for a dollar, and don’t have to watch the powerless trampled upon by the powerful.
So long as we lock our front door and sit on our sofa with our preferred TV station giving us the news we want to hear, we’re good. Our world is safe. No need to step out into the streets where we can be threatened or tested by things we don’t like. Far better to close the door. Turn the lock. Turn on the TV and let the world slip by.
But let’s be clear. The lock on our front door isn’t the only lock we like to use. We’re also really good at putting locks on our minds. We don’t want unpleasant truths creeping into our heads, things that upset our worldview, make us question our way of looking at things. It’s a lot easier to keep those things locked out, out of mind, so we don’t have to change anything about ourselves, don’t have to change our attitudes, and don’t have to change our beliefs.
It makes for a much tidier existence, free of confusion and clutter, our minds made up on most everything from who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s causing all the problems and who isn’t, and who we should blame for the world going to hell in a handbasket and who is free of blame. A locked mind, unfortunately, has all the answers to these and many others questions.
Likewise, we’re fairly good at putting a lock on our eyes, which allows us not to see things we don’t want to see. Call it a lock or call it blinders, we’re talking about the same thing. With blinders, we get to see a distorted reality, a world that fits our worldview, a slice of life that conforms to our own way of living. We don’t look at other people’s perspectives and we don’t look at other people’s problems. We turn a blind eye.
In this way, we aren’t called upon to act or to change. We see only the things we want to see, ignoring the things we don’t want to see, and, like the disciples, fearful that if we ever loosen the lock we’re going to come face to face with threats and terrors too many to count. So long as we don’t see them because our eyes are closed, locked tight, we’re better off.
Then, there’s one more lock that really stays in place. And that is the big lock that we put on our hearts. We keep our hearts safely behind lock and key so that we’re not hurt or harmed by other people, instead carefully choosing to whom we open our hearts, giving our love only to people we like or to people like us, making sure our love isn’t wasted on worthless people or worthless projects, meaning people and things that don’t get us anything in return.
So long as our hearts are locked, we don’t end up feeling sorry for the losers of the world, for the lost and the lonely, for the people always last in line. With the door to our hearts locked, we aren’t made to feel concern or compassion for the neglected and the disaffected, people whose lives can only be made better by people with open hearts.
You see, when we step away from the disciples in the locked room and allow ourselves to look into the assortment of locks we use on a regular basis, we find some hard truths about ourselves, making it much more difficult to point fingers at Thomas or any of the other guys in that locked upper room. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t cast stones, especially if there are locks on our front door.
If, after reflecting on this story of the disciples, we realize we also have a ways to go in our journey to faith, then the story has served us well. Eventually, they found their way out of the locked room and did the work Jesus asked them to do. With the help of the Spirit, we also can unlock the door and move into the world. The first step in moving from fear to faith is opening the door.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 