Tangible Faith

One reader of this blog, a parishioner at the church I serve, sent a comment on Monday's blog to me that she was unable to post to this site. She says this:

Hebrews 11 starts with:  "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
As you mentioned, no one ever saw the resurrection.  There are things of God that we can never know with our finite minds.  Our eyes may never see those things, but our hearts can "see" with the inspiration of the Spirit.  Isn't Thomas' experience with the resurrected Christ a question of faith?  He wanted to see with his own eyes before he believed.  Part of our belief also has to be based on the scripture accounts, since we were not alive at that time. 

In my response, I said the following:

Precisely. We all base our faith on tangible things. Don't we sing songs about Jesus walking on water, or the Feeding the 5000 as a very tangible event? Nobody would give a hoot about Jesus if he were just a story, or a bunch of ideas. The fact that he was flesh and blood (1 John 1: "that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life...") is central to Christian faith, but it also highlights the tangibility of faith. Jesus spoke about knowing the tree from the fruits it produces - tangible evidence of what motivates and moves within a person. So today, we may not be witnesses to the actual Resurrection of Jesus, but we are everyday witnesses to its power and to His enduring presence, a power that shows forth in daily tangible acts of kindness, self-giving, advocacy, healing, strengthening of others, and so on. 

There is a Praise Chorus that is a favorite of many people entitled "Open Our Eyes," that goes like this:

Open our eyes, Lord, we want to see Jesus,
to reach out and touch him, and say that we love him.
Open our ears, Lord, and help us to listen.
Open our eyes, Lord, we want to see Jesus.

Notice how tangible this desire is: to touch,  see, listen. We derive all our information about the world, all our knowledge through our senses. Even our abstract concepts about love, faith, ideals are mediated to us through our senses. We experience these concepts first physically. We learn love by being loved, through the touch, caress, kisses, gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice of those who love us. We learn about trust from how our parents and family behave toward us. If we are attended to with soothing words when we are hungry or when our diaper needs changing or when we need to nap as an infant, we learn that we can depend upon having those needs to be taken care of - which is the basis of trust. The experience precedes the rational description and definition.

The life of faith precedes in a similar manner. The Gospel lesson this week is a story about the resurrection encounter between Jesus and the much maligned and wrongly-named "Doubting" Thomas. You can read the story in John 20:19-31. In this story a grieving Thomas is not in the room with the other disciples when Jesus makes one of his post-resurrection appearances to them, and so has not had the benefit of experiencing Jesus in his resurrected form (whatever that may have been). Thomas and all the other disciples lived during the time when people first experienced the resurrection of Jesus and so had nothing to base their faith upon outside of what they knew up to that point. Lazarus had been raised from the dead, but it was Jesus who had done that. Jesus had acted as the outside agent of Lazarus' resurrection. Now Jesus was dead, and how could a person raise themselves from the dead? 


It is important to pause here for a moment and comment that in the New Testament accounts concerning the resurrection of Jesus, two verbs are used to denote rising from the dead. The first is egeiro (to raise, lift up) and the second is anisthemi (to stand up, arise). When the New Testament refers to the resurrection of Jesus, it consistently refers to God raising Jesus (cf. Acts 2:24, 32; 3:15, 26, 4:10, etc.). The transitive form of the verb is used in translating into English. Jesus does not raise himself, God raises Jesus. All this was written down at a time before the church got into the theological tangles of the Son being of one substance with the Father, and so on. The point of all this discussion is this: Resurrection is something that is done to a person by an outside agent.

So Thomas' declaration that he will not believe this wild report until he touches the wounds of Jesus with his hands is not so crazy. It does not reveal a weakness of faith. It is based in the normal process of coming to know anything - through the five senses. This was especially true for thomas as he struggled to understand something that was new to the thought world of his time. The early church affirmed this approach in the words cited earlier from the first letter of John: "that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life..." The early church argued from the physical experience and witness of the early disciples as their proof of the good news of Jesus Christ. 

Thomas is not a doubter. Earlier in John as the disciples hear about the death of Lazarus, it is Thomas who rallies them by saying "Let us go also, that we may die with him" (John 11:16). Thomas asks questions in order to understand what Jesus means, and when he understands, he commits himself. So it is in keeping with his character as a deeply committed follower of Jesus that he makes his statement that he will not believe their story unless he is able to put his hands in the wounds of Jesus. Symbolic in this pronouncement that he is willing to put his whole body on the line for his faith. All his sense and all his physical presence is available for God to use and to witness to. In this sense, Thomas just might be one of the more sacramental of the disciples in that he places the ordinary physical at the disposal of the sacred, the material in service of the spiritual.


It is certainly true, as Jesus says, that those are blessed who believe without seeing, but let's not disparage the human need to confirm what is believed by means of what is perceived. 

(Images of St. Thomas from http://www.skete.com/images/products/icons/S181.JPG;  http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1167/554305524_f0fd2145f8.jpg?v=0;  http://www.melkite.org.au/images/users/2/ICONS)