Doubt and Faith in the Resurrection (Apr 27: Easter 2 - Godspell Mass)
Easter 2 (4.27.25 - Acts 5:27-32/Rev 1:4-8/Jn 20:19-31/Ps 118:14-29)
Godspell Mass at St. Paul’s Brookline
In remembrance of Pope Francis
We are thankful for Thomas because he voices what many Christians think or struggle with: what to do with Christ’s resurrection? He poses the question, how do we come to faith when we don’t have the benefit of the first disciple’s direct relationship with Jesus and their encounter with the resurrected Christ?
People come to faith in many different ways. Some people are born into a faith environment and nurtured by their relationships in the church. The sense that God is present comes naturally for such people, if they are fortunate enough to have loving family members who embody a living faith in Christ and a church community that is healthy and authentic.
For some, faith comes after a long intellectual struggle with Christian truth claims and witness of faith. St. Augustine of Hippo, C. S. Lewis, and Edith Stein are examples of such people. St. Augustine was a 4th century North African saint, later a bishop of Hippo (in modern day Algeria). He is one of the most important Christian theologians in the West. In his autobiographical Confessions, he recounts his days studying in Rome and Milan as a young man, leading a wild and dissolute life. The pleasures he found in his youth, however, could not give him the happiness and peace he sought. Augustine thirsted after truth and meaning and tried on various schools of spirituality and philosophy that he thought would help him to make sense of life. It was only after many detours and a long intellectual and emotional struggle with the Christian gospel that he crossed the Rubicon of faith.
C. S. Lewis’ story is well known, too ~ how his experience as a solider in the First World War shattered his faith; then the slow resurrection of that faith through intellectual questioning and the companionship of important friends like J.R.R. Tolkien and Fr. Walter Adams, SSJE of Oxford. My personal favorite is Edith Stein, who was Jewish and one of the first women to get a PhD in philosophy in Germany during the 1910s, converted during the time when the Nazi’s gained power.
Their journey to faith was gradual and involved long periods of questioning and reflection before they could accept God as real and enter into a living relationship with God.
Then there are many people who are formed in churches that require strict adherence to a clearly defined set of beliefs and practices considered to be the truth and the only truth. We see this in hardline Evangelical, and traditionalist Roman Catholic and Anglican churches. Many join such churches as teenagers or young adults and become enthusiastic members. There is evidence, however, that such a strait-jacketed version of Christian faith that admits almost no independent thinking leads a good number of these folks to leave their churches disillusioned with Christianity (and religion generally) and feeling deeply uprooted.[1] Some of these individuals find refuge in more open churches like ours, which are by our DNA ‘big tent’ churches where questioning and searching are welcomed alongside a vibrant affirmation of faith. Yet, the return to faith can be as arduous and difficult as a first conversion, because there are wounds there that now color everything one hears in the words used in the church.
Everyone comes to faith by their own distinct paths of formation and searching, and we have to respect the mystery of how people come to trust Christ as God’s incarnate and saving presence. This is why our tradition speaks of faith as a gift of grace.
But there are at least three factors that seem to help someone to come to authentic faith. First is rational reflection on plausible evidence for faith. Jesus said, “I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37). Faith is adherence to truth, and truth requires rational coherence and plausible evidence. That’s not all there is to ultimate truth, but for faith to make sense, it has to have a rational basis. Otherwise, we are dealing with superstition.
The second factor is having relationships with living examples of Christian faith. If Christianity is rationally coherent and plausible, but every Christian one meets turns out to be a jerk, that doesn’t make a compelling case for faith in Christ.
The third factor is something the New Testament insists on – the presence and work of Christ’s Spirit in people’s hearts and minds. All of these things need to be at work for a person to come to genuine faith.
But when someone believes in the risen Christ – not as a concept, but as a living reality, what are they actually believing in? Is it a conceptual idea that Christ was bodily resurrected? That’s clearly a part of it. But that only leaves us with more questions, because the reality that the resurrection stories point to lies beyond our imagination. We in the West tend to think of the resurrection has to do with individual bodies coming back to life after death. But the resurrection in the New Testament and early Christian tradition is a universal, collective event. If the resurrection is collective in nature, we don’t know if we are going to be raised in recognizably individual bodies. If we are raised in a collective body, what would that even look like? The resurrection accounts points to something real and powerful that goes beyond ordinary language – hence the risen Christ appears in ways that seem to straddle the boundaries of the material and non-material, and it’s not exactly clear what the nature of Christ’s risen body is.
My point here is, I don’t know if fleshing out the details of what the resurrection will physically look like was what Jesus wanted to show Thomas and the other disciples. I wonder if the point wasn’t simply – and this is just my own take - to reveal to them that their deepest identity was the same as Christ’s own identity: full of divine life, love, and power. I wonder if Jesus were saying to them, “Who you are in your deepest being is not different from me. I’ve opened up for you this way of being, and what you see in me is also who you truly are in God. So be like me, be your true selves in the world, and free people from the power of suffering and evil.”
We should note that the risen Christ didn’t make an appearance to be worshipped as a remote deity; worship of Christ as divine was certainly a part of the community’s life, but not as a some utterly transcendent God that becomes unrelatable to human existence. We can see this in how the risen Christ’s appearance is intimately tied to the gift of the Holy Spirit, which he breathes on the disciples. This is the power transmitted to the Jesus community to free others from the power of suffering and death – what Christians call ‘sin’, which is the cause of suffering in this existence.
Who are we, then, according to the resurrection witnesses like the disciples and especially Thomas? Let me approach this question by taking a look through a non-Christian lens.
It was a chilly Christmas afternoon of 2005 in Seoul, Korea. I had taken refuge from the cold in a small temple run by a Buddhist monk I had gotten to know. He loved serving tea to guests, so I was seated in front of a wide wooden tea table, drinking cups of various teas and listening quietly to the conversation around me. All of a sudden, my friend raised his head and said, “Hey, we forgot to celebrate Christmas! Let’s go outside!” He and his assistant rushed outside, put out a statue of Jesus in a small basin, poured water on him, and then bowed before him three times, saying loudly, “Thank you bodhisattva Jesus for coming to help us! Thank you bodhisattva Jesus for coming to help us!”
Buddhists bathe a statue of the Buddha on his birthday. My friend was doing the same thing in commemoration of Jesus’ birthday. What did he mean when called Jesus ‘Bodhisattva’? In Mahayana Buddhism, a bodhisattva is someone who makes the decision to become a fully awakened being, what is called a Buddha, who has the wisdom, love, and power to help liberate all living beings from suffering. In Buddhist teaching, full enlightenment liberates a person from being reborn in the six realms of existence. The bodhisattva, however, is so moved by love and compassion for those who suffer that they postpone their own liberation and commit to staying in the world to help all sentient beings. So they take birth again and again in various realms, intentionally seeking out sentient beings who are suffering to help them. One particular bodhisattva (Ksitigarbha) makes a vow to go to hell because there are beings suffering there. Her vow goes, “Only after all beings have been guided to awakening will I myself attain awakening; as long as the hells are not empty, I shall not attain awakening. If I do not enter the hells, who will?”
In my Buddhist friend’s mind, it made sense to see Jesus as a bodhisattva. There are many similarities. Like a celestial bodhisattva, Jesus descends from a higher realm out of compassion for those who are suffering and shares in their struggles. He teaches them and gives himself freely to help them. Like Ksitigarbha, after Jesus dies, he descends to hell to liberate souls trapped there, what we call the “harrowing of hell,” commemorated on Holy Saturday.
But there are also characteristics that are unique to Jesus. In Jesus, a divine figure intentionally takes on the position of a victim of injustice. He accepts public punishment reserved for treason against an empire. He does this to bear in his body the personal and social evils human beings inflict on each other and the world, and to proclaim divine protest against these evils. The Christian story also asserts his Resurrection, which is presented not as a resuscitation of one dead body, but as the transformation of nature, where the borders of the material body and human spirit are now blown open to divine power and love. The resurrection means that the power of God is present and active in all creation in a new way that swallows up evil and death. When people call on Christ and ask for this power, they receive it through the gift of the Holy Spirit, who dwells within us.
Here, the difference between the bodhisattva and Christ brings us back to another point of similarity: Buddhists and Christians tell the stories of the bodhisattva and the Christ not so that they can be worshipped like stone idols; they tell these stories so that we can become bodhisattvas and Christs in our own time and place.
It is interesting to note, then, that Thomas who is stereotyped in the West as a doubter, is said to have spread the gospel to Parthia and then Kerala in India. For Thomas, his faith after encountering the presence of the risen Christ led him to a life of action, where he taught by example the spirit of Christ’s love and compassion. The point of the resurrection was to be an incarnation of Christ in his world and continue God’s work.
This reminds me of someone who lived in our time. We are remembering this week the passing of a great human being and follower of Jesus, Pope Francis. In his landmark encyclical Laudato Si, the pope brought to global awareness a different Christian view of the world as an interrelated whole that requires human ingenuity in service of care for creation. In his more recent writing Fratelli Tutti, Francis harkened back to the example of St. Francis of Assisi who visited the Muslim Sultan of Egypt Malik-el-Kamil during the Crusades to show a love that transcends barriers of geography and distance, and called the world, especially different religions, to universal kinship and a culture of fraternal encounter. Pope Francis broke the mold of a traditional pontiff in many ways, bringing in a spirit of pastoral care and dialog across differences as well as an unshakeable commitment to care for those who suffer (remember how he washed the feet of migrants during the first Maundy Thursday service he celebrated? Or kissed the feet of women prisoners during the same service in 2024?) Now that he has passed away, our world is left without a comparable public and global voice that represents the best of Christianity in a world beset by narrow dogmatism across religions. Reflecting on his life and legacy, the Rev. William Barber III said, “We must now say ‘ I am Pope Francis’” because “the loss of Pope Francis means others must carry on his mission for the marginalized.”[2] May be it was with similar intent that Christ said to his followers, “I will be with you, but you have to be christs now. Not me.”
[1]See https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/; And https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/exvangelicals-the-americans-who-are-leaving-evangelical-christianity-behind/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/us/pope-christians.html
