My very favorite movie version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was made in 1951. It stars Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge. Now you may ask, “Why am I talking about a Christmas story at Easter time?” Because there is a great scene in the movie where the ghost of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s once-upon-a-time business partner who had died the year before, comes to pay Scrooge a visit on Christmas Eve. Scrooge isn’t really sure if he believes that Marley’s ghost is real, or not. So Marley’s ghost is trying to convince Scrooge that he is indeed real.
After conversing with Scrooge for several minutes, Marley asks him, “Why do you doubt your senses?” Scrooge answers, and rightly so, that “small things affect them”. He tells Marley’s ghost that he could be “an undigested piece of potato”. Finally, growing tired and disgusted with Scrooge’s unbelief, Marley’s ghost rises from the chair he is “sitting” on, and with a blood curdling scream, asks Scrooge, “Man of the worldly mind, do you believe in me or not?” Man of the worldly mind, do you believe in me or not? Scrooge doubted because he felt he could not trust his senses.
In today’s gospel reading, we meet another doubter. His name is Thomas and he doubts because he had not been able to use his senses to see and touch the risen Christ. Let’s take a closer look at Thomas and see how his doubts are our doubts. Plus, we shall see how Jesus handled and healed Thomas of his disease of doubt and how Jesus handles and heals us if we will seek and trust Him.
Jesus had been crucified and the disciples were hiding together behind locked doors. Some of them testified that they had seen the risen Lord and you would think that would have given them all courage. But they were not this brave band of men and women ready to take on the world. Instead, they were cowering in fear for their very lives. What were the Jewish authorities going to do next? Were they going to come looking for the disciples and have them arrested too? Were they going to accuse the disciples of stealing the body? Would anyone believe them if the disciples told people they had actually seen the risen Christ?
Oh, the disciples were hiding all right. They did not want any confrontation, any meeting at all to take place with the Pharisees and Sadducees. Then suddenly, even though the door and windows were closed and locked, there is Jesus standing right in their midst. He says to them, “Peace be with you.” (He always says the right thing at the right time.) Jesus tells them that He is there with them and they have nothing to fear. He shows them His nailed-scarred hands and feet to prove that He is not a ghost, but the same Jesus that had been crucified just three days earlier and now had bodily risen from the grave.
But Thomas wasn’t there at the time. When he comes back from wherever he was, the others tell him that they had been paid a visit by the risen Lord. Thomas isn’t buying it. He tells the others, “Unless I see the nail marks in His hands, and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe it.” You cannot get more skeptical than that.
Why does Thomas doubt? Well, unlike Scrooge, who believed he could not trust his human senses, Thomas won’t believe until he uses his senses to prove to himself that the risen Jesus is real. You see, Thomas is a practical person. He lived in a practical world and he was shattered when Jesus was crucified and died on Good Friday. Thomas was not about to give in to fantasy or wishful thinking. Dead was dead. That’s it, end of story. When a Roman soldier said a prisoner was dead, there was no reason to doubt it. They knew how to kill. They were experts at killing. Thomas knew how the world worked. Yes sir, dead was dead.
That is exactly how many people in our time feel about the resurrection of Christ today. It’s a nice idea, a cool story, but not real. Islam teaches that the crucifixion and resurrection never happened. Then there are those who teach that Christ’s resurrection is not really a bodily, but rather a spiritual one. They say that Jesus arose from the dead only in the sense that His “spirit” goes marching on, much like the “spirit” of Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King continues to have an influence on American life.
However, linguistic scholars point out that it would be a contradiction in terms for a Jew of that time period to say that someone had risen from the dead, but left his body in the tomb. They simply did not talk that way back then. When they said someone had been raised from the dead, they meant entirely risen – flesh, blood, bones and all!
Plus, as I have mentioned before, many of the disciples were executed in horrible ways because they would not deny the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. No one will die for something that they know never happened. Very few, if any, historical events have taken place that are more, or better, documented than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet here we Christians are today, living in a sea of doubt, and it is indeed hard not to get wet. Doubt can seep into our way of thinking. How about you?
How can we get rid of doubt for good? What can we do to rid ourselves of those nagging, joy-stealing doubts and fears? Nothing, really. They could find remnants of Noah’s Ark on a mountainside. They could find Moses’ tomb. They could find the lions’ den of Daniel. Your pastor, your friends and your family could all come to you with the most amazing arguments possible, yet none of these can cure you of your doubt. There is only one thing that can. It is that which happened to Thomas one week later. The disciples were together again and this time, Thomas was there also. Once again, the door and windows were locked tight. Again suddenly, Jesus was there right in the middle of them, saying again, “Peace be with you.”
Then Jesus turns His attention to Thomas. Does Jesus rebuke Thomas for his doubt? Does Jesus scream at Thomas, “Man of the worldly mind, do you believe in me or not?” He would have every right to do that, you know. But Jesus does not do that, does He? No, He doesn’t. Instead, Jesus invites Thomas to do exactly what he had said he wanted to do. Jesus allows Thomas to physically touch the wounds that Jesus had sustained on the cross. And Jesus says to Thomas as he is touching those wounds, “Stop doubting, and believe.” At that moment, Thomas is healed of his disease of doubt. He responds to Jesus by saying, “My Lord, and my God!”
Thomas the doubter became Thomas the man of faith. He believed in Jesus in spite of the fact that everything Thomas knew about how the world operates told him that it was impossible for Jesus to be Who He said He was. Like Thomas, the only way for you to be cured of the doubt that seeps into your heart, is to have moments with the risen Christ like the one that Thomas had that week after Easter, almost 2000 years ago.
I know you are asking, “How can I have a moment like that? How does Jesus come to me? How does Jesus speak to me like He spoke to Thomas? How can Jesus rid me of my doubts? How can Jesus transform me into a person of belief?” All great questions. Here is the answer. Listen closely.
Jesus comes to you personally every time you hear His Word. Each and every time you hear the Word of God read or preached, Jesus is right there saying to you, “Peace be with you.” He is right there to chase away your doubts and fears and to fill you with hope and joy beyond measure, if you will simply trust in Him. That is how Jesus changes us today. Jesus tells Thomas, in verse 29, “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen me and yet have believed.” Jesus is talking about me and you.
There is a story about a high school science teacher who told his class just a few days before Easter, “The Easter story is nothing but a myth. Jesus not only did not rise from the grave, but there is no God in Heaven who would allow His Son to be crucified in the first place.” “Sir, I believe in God”, a student named Tom protested, “and I believe in the Resurrection.” “Well Tom, you can believe what you wish”, the teacher said. “However, the real world excludes the possibility of miracles like the resurrection. The resurrection is a scientific impossibility. No one who believes in miracles can also respect science.”
Then the teacher proposed an experiment. He reached into the refrigerator and withdrew a raw egg. He held it up to the class and said, “I am going to drop this egg to the floor. Gravity will pull it toward the floor and this egg will most certainly break apart.” Looking at Tom with a challenge, the teacher said, “Now Tom, I want you to pray a prayer right now and ask your God to keep this egg from breaking apart when it hits the floor. If He can do that, then you will have proven your point and I’ll have to admit that there is a God.”
After pondering the challenge for a moment, Tom stood up and slowly began to pray. Tom prayed, “Dear Heavenly Father, I pray that when my teacher drops the egg, it will break into a hundred pieces. And also, Lord, I pray that when the egg does break, my teacher will have a massive heart attack and die. Amen.”
After a unison gasp, the class sat in silent expectation. For a moment, the teacher did nothing. Then he looked at the egg and at Tom. Without a word, he carefully put the egg back in the carton and in the refrigerator. “Class dismissed”, the teacher said, and then began to clear his desk. It appears that the teacher believed in God’s existence more than he had thought. At least he was not willing to bet his life that God did not exist.
There are many, many people like that teacher in our world today. They deny the existence of the Deity of Christ. They run from Him. They question Him. They attack Him whenever the chance comes about. But unlike that teacher, those people are indeed betting their lives, their eternal lives, that Jesus does not exist as God-the-Son.
How about you? You have not seen Jesus with your own eyes like Thomas did. Yet Jesus comes to you through His Word. The apostle John tells us that Jesus did so many miracles and signs that they would fill volumes and volumes of books, “But these (accounts and stories) have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name.”
Why do we doubt?