There are a lot of things about Jesus it’s relatively easy to believe. For example, we can believe that of all good people, he was the best. We can believe that no one else in history embodied the love of God so completely. We can believe that of all the great saints the world has produced, he is the one most worth following. But what is hard to believe is this: When Thomas the disciple says that he can’t believe Jesus is alive unless he sees him with his own eyes, I think we all know in our hearts the frustration he is talking about. We wish we could see and touch and feel and know that Jesus lives.
We want a solution to this question, since we’re those people that are mentioned today in the gospel, those people who have not seen and still believed. Even the writer of this gospel was one of those people; he didn’t see Jesus alive, either before or after the resurrection, so we are not alone in this situation, we are people who just like Thomas want to touch Jesus, to be sure that he is here as he promised he would be.
What we have to ask ourselves is, have we ever even come close to seeing Jesus alive the way Thomas did in that room? The answer I think is that we have seen him, if not in the same way Thomas did, and that we have seen him more than we realize, I think that, in the last analysis, those brief moments of seeing Jesus are what more than anything else are what bring us to church Sunday after Sunday. We have seen the truth of Jesus in the faces and lives of people we know who have loved him and served him, and I think there are probably names of people you know that cross your mind right now when you think of the presence of the living Christ. We have sometimes seen him in the pages of the gospels when suddenly one day those pages come alive for us; or we’ve seen him on those occasional Sundays when suddenly we realize that the bread we come to receive really is the body of Christ, feeding all of us, keeping us going. Maybe especially, we have seen him in those rare moments when someone has been Christ present to you, forgiving you or encouraging you, or when you have realized long after the fact that you were once the presence of Christ to someone else.
Sure, there are other explanations than the presence of Jesus for all these experiences. We live in an era when many people can’t imagine that anyone would be willing to take an everyday event and say it was a sign of God living with us, as alive as you and I are. There are plenty of times when we find it hard to believe too. But still, sometimes the evidence is convincing at times, and his living presence is the best explanation for what we see and feel. It turns out 2,000 years later we really aren’t much unluckier than those few apostles who saw Jesus before or after the resurrection. Even when Jesus was alive they misunderstood him and even abandoned him; he made promises and they didn’t believe he would keep them. But in the end, despite their fear, despite their hiding, they believed. And even now, despite all the time that has passed, so do we.
So how do people now come to this belief in the risen Christ? We do sometimes have those experiences of his presence, and we trust that it is God that is behind them. But there is something else. Jesus also told us that the real sign that he is alive would be the presence of love in those who follow him. He said that this would be how the world would recognize him, not through his physical presence, but through his believers. It turns out it is through us that people are supposed to experience and come to believe in the risen Christ. The opposite is also true: that by and large if the world does not recognize Christ it is because it does not see him in the lives of so many of the people who claim to believe in him.
That is why, ultimately, the disciples, all of them, even the doubters, needed to get out of that room, and begin their work. At the beginning of this reading, they are locked away in fear, worried and hiding from everyone, because they didn’t believe. But Jesus got past the locks and barriers they put in his way, and changed them into disciples, even the doubter.
This gospel tells us that we will always have times in our lives when the risen Christ seems frustratingly absent from this world; some of us will be Thomases off and on for much of our lives, hoping that everything will become clearer. But ultimately, even those of us who doubt, who hesitate, who feel like we don’t know everything we need to have answered for us or believe everything we feel like we should believe, we are the people most needed to bring Christ to others. Our lives, trying to follow Christ even when at times we are not sure, those lives of ours are the only lives that will show Christ to others. Leaving the locked room, and living as if we believe what we say, is still the only way that doubters become believers.