Doubt and frustration (by Danielle Beabout)

Whenever we hear or read or partake in any story, whether we do it on purpose or not, our minds try to search for familiar points of connection — so that we can get invested in the story. Before we learn everything about each of the characters, we become attached to the little pieces we learn about them — depending on how the stories begin, we may learn about how someone feels about something or about what someone wants before we know even their name. We get a glimpse into who they are and how they are presented before we are met with who they say they are.

That being the case... where do we begin, with Thomas?

One place we certainly can begin is with that familiar frustration we can often feel when reading Scripture, seeing all the small human failures in the ways humans interact with God — the way the disciples act around Jesus, over and over again. Thomas, I feel, draws a particularly harsh sting of ire from us. I mean — what is it we remember him most for? Doubting Thomas, we sigh, a roll of our eyes, crossed arms. The one who was just with the other Disciples in the Last Supper. Who, along with all the others, just witnessed the crucifixion. How could he doubt this good news from his brothers of faith? (We wonder) Isn’t he an apostle? Isn’t the whole thing you’re supposed to be good at — well, faith? Why, oh why, does he need to touch Jesus’ wounds? His scars?

In this moment — if you have ever felt these frustrations with our dear friend, Thomas — I ask you, to simply let the feelings sit. No pushing away, no coming to a concluding judgement of them; just sit with them. As you would a stranger at a — a bus stop; a doctor’s office waiting room; a church pew. After a moment of that, I want to ask you: do you recognize it? This feeling?

How often have you felt this same hopeless frustration with yourself? With your own doubt? Your own fear? Whatever that rankling, thorny bush you find yourself caught in when you consider God, whatever that is for you?

No matter our feelings about Thomas — how he responds or fails to respond to his fellow disciples joyous, impossible news, how immediately he reacted with need — no matter how we feel about that, we ought to see: how does Jesus respond?

He doesn’t scold or chastise Thomas — which, knowing Jesus, he would not have held back from doing if he felt the need to. No, he responds as only he can: with himself, his resurrected, embodied self, acting with the same compassion that is as characteristic of him as those scars now are. He bids peace; he says, Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.

Because of the fact his bidding Thomas to believe comes after that physical intimacy, the identification not only through sight, as with the rest of the disciples, but through touch, this call sounds not like anything forceful or demanding — but softer. Almost how one would gently coax a scared animal out of the shadows and into the light.

My brother and I have a cat; before he was our cat, he was a stray, part of a litter born under a bush just in front of our parents’ porch. He was the most easily coaxed with food, and came around most frequently (with my brother’s repeated patient calling.) There was a time my Dad set up an appointment to take this litter of kittens in to get them fixed and have their basic shots done — they each returned with a small, little snip taken off their ear to show anyone who would see them in the wild they’d been taken care of in such a way. Before he was our cat — our Bootsie — before he had a name, he had this scar as a mark of care, and we could use it to recognize him when we would call him in out of the rain for the last time.

Scars can be a big part of how we identify one another, in a creaturely sort of way, that settles into us faster and more deeply than language and names can. When we’re newborns, we don’t recognize our parents by their names or titles of Mom and Dad, all things we can’t understand, yet — we recognize them bodily. By knowing before we even have words that these are the people who take care of me. It is in this way that we learn more of someone’s Name before we can learn their name. (Danielle, you say, what you just said makes no sense. It will! Trust me, we’re nearly there.)

When we read Scripture, something that becomes clear is there’s a couple of different things that can be meant when we’re talking about someone’s name. There is their everyday use name, of what you call across a room to get someone’s attention, and it can change and adapt a lot. We see that in Scripture, too, sometimes with larger meaning, sometimes less so — Abram becomes Abraham, a point of change, but we also have Jesus nicknaming Simon to Peter. This everyday use case name is never without meaning but it’s much more flexible.

Then, sometimes, when we read about a Name, there’s an extra weight in what it means. (I like to think of this as someone’s capital N name, though Scripture doesn’t make it that easy for us.) Someone’s Name is closer to their reputation, their history, their continued and continuing story. When Abram’s name became Abraham, his everyday name changed, but his Name — the story of his continued being — was still part of the same person. A Name can even be a family one — that’s where that sort of weight comes from, generations wanting to uphold what it has meant or change what it did mean before. People can identify with Names even if they don’t natively belong to one another; you can see this with how some of the prophets relate to one another, or even between people like Paul and Timothy (and, notably, confusingly, folks who would later go on to write in the Name of Paul, but that’s a can of worms we leave on the shelffor today.) So we have names and we have Names.

So here is Thomas; he has just seen his beloved friend, the person who he has loved and trusted enough to upend his life around, die in one of the most brutal ways imaginable. Not only is he grieving the person he shared bread with not hours ago, but also grieving this new beautiful way of understanding the world Jesus shared with him, now called into question by his death. Not to mention, probably still grieving the previous understanding of the world he’d given up already to follow Jesus in the first place. That much despair, confusion, anger — it overwhelms Thomas, overwhelms us; when we’re overwhelmed, we become much more likely to act like the creatures we are versus the people we’d hope to be.

And then here come these guys — who are in the same boat as Thomas, they’re the best he’s got left; they have to understand his struggle — but now they’re saying this impossible, wonderful thing, that’s too good to be true. And Thomas just missed it? No, no, no, no, no — that can’t be true. Surely Thomas loves these guys, but he, too, has seen the same way that they have failed over and over before in interactions with Jesus and one another, has seen those two fighting over who gets the best seat in heaven, has seen Peter deny Jesus three times — no way. If they want Thomas to believe it, he needs to see Jesus for himself.

And he does. Jesus does not begrudge him this creaturely need, does not meet him with judgement — he understands Thomas’s limitations; our limitations. For the self same reason he went to the cross in the first place. If this is what it takes for you to be sure I love you, then I hold out my hands.

These scars — God meeting us in our creatureliness, not with condemnation or judgement, but with outstretched hands, calling us to see, know, touch — this is me, yes I love you this much, YES, I mean it — are now forever a part of God’s Name. The love that led to this action always was, but now, we have this. This creaturely meeting, this proof we can’t look past. When our minds are jumbled and none of the words make sense anymore and it feels like the world is collapsing and we forget what it means to be made in the image of God, when all we know how to be or feel is small and scared: there it is. The love we recognize by its scarred hands. The love that knows despite our best trying, our broken shaky hearts couldn’t know the Name of God any other way.

So what do we do with this? We’re the ones who come after, after all — the “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Our world has been remade and sometimes we do feel that bliss and peace, but a lot of times we don’t. So what do we do? If we look carefully at our story, here, I think there’s more guidance than we might initially see.

Firstly — remember that feeling you’re sitting with? The stranger in the church pew? Perhaps we begin as Jesus does — meeting that overwhelmed part of ourselves with compassion and understanding, rather than being ashamed of doubt. Once we have reached that — I think we do as Thomas does; even in that doubt, once you have accepted it, still reach back out to God. Let it not be the end of the story. Clearly, Jesus has shown us here, it is better to have faithful doubt with God than to hide from God and pretend it doesn’t exist. The hiding wouldn’t have worked anyway — Jesus got through the locked door.

Let’s not forget another part of the story — the Holy Spirit has been breathed on the apostles; on us. We may not have the physical Jesus here to press our hands to — but we are the body of Christ. We are the ones who are blessed, who, somehow, have come to believe, even if in some ways we too have been scarred on the way getting there. Even if we have had our own faith tried by fire.

Perhaps by being as vulnerable with our scars to one another as Jesus was with Thomas we may be showing the love that makes up the Name of God, too. Perhaps if we admit to ourselves and one another the way our wounds have changed us — the proof we have lived, survived, continued to trust in God with scarred hands all the while — we may be emblematic of that divine love that reached aaall the way down to us creatures, and doesn’t stop until we reach back.

We each have stories like this, where we truly felt as though we learned God’s Name for the first time — third time — thosuandth time. We each, like Thomas, have had moments where we do reach back, and finding our way with our scars and his, look to Jesus, and identify him as who we truly know him to be — my Lord and my God. Perhaps part of our calling is to share our scars — tell our stories — and to love those whose doubts and needs and hopes we are confronted with when they reach out to see for themselves. Amen.