11th April 2010 - "Birds singing in the darkness"

Usha Hull - St Peter's, Tewin
John 20 19-end

When the Portuguese came with their Christian missionaries to India in 1498 they were amazed to find a Christian community already flourishing. The St Thomas Christians of India trace the origins of their faith back to the Thomas of the Gospel and as such are one of the most ancient of Christian churches.

The legends of St Thomas’s travels and adventures in India are many. I have a personal interest in this saint as his church, St Thomas’ in Kolkata, was where I myself was baptised. This same church was also recently the final resting place of another great Christian soul, Mother Teresa. Here, thousands of rich and famous, poor and unknown alike paid homage to a great Christian life lived in that vast subcontinent, a Christianity and faith first said to have been brought to India by the man the Gospels record as Thomas Didymus, or the Thomas the twin.

Thomas is mentioned in all four gospels, and three times in the Gospel of St John. A historical character, he is mentioned by the philosopher Origen, by the early church historian Eusebius and by St Jerome, to name just a few early church writers. Thomas emerges in the Gospel of St John, which we have just heard, as a strong personality. He is a man of seeming courage, urging his fellow disciples in an earlier episode to accompany the Lord, even unto death. But most of all he is remembered as wanting actual concrete proof of the resurrection. ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails, and my hand in his side, I will not believe,’ he tells his fellow disciples, when he is told that they had seen the Lord.

In today’s gospel the disciples are huddled together in a locked room. The recent violence has made them fearful, and aware of the need to protect themselves. They feel hostile forces all around them and seek comfort in each others’ company. Along with the fear is shame. They have deserted the Lord in his hour of need, fleeing for their own lives.

Something deep within them tells them that in this act of abandonment they have let themselves down, they have compromised their own integrity and way of life. Theirs is a bereavement all the more painful as they feel they are complicit in what has been a shameful and horrific chain of events.

Then Jesus comes and stands before them with his wounds and his living breath and his invitation to touch. His greeting is one of peace. And the response of the disciples is pure joy. For the first time they begin to realise the love and power of their God. They begin to realise there is no pain, no shame, no bereavement that the Lord cannot heal. They realise there is nothing in this world, not locked doors, nor safe houses, nor defensive fear that can come between us and the love of our Lord Jesus Christ.

But let’s remember Thomas. Thomas is missing, we are not told why. When he arrives to hear the story, he refuses to believe what he hears. Thomas has a clear identity of his own. He cannot be loyal to the group while being disloyal to his own inner self. For Thomas, honesty is more important than loyalty. For him, it is not enough to shelter in a faith that he cannot credit for himself.

With all his doubts, Thomas recognises that when it comes to a question of faith, no one can do our believing for us. But his doubt has a purpose – he wants to know the truth. He wants to believe, and although he might have yearned to accept what the others were saying, he knows that wanting to believe cannot make him actually believe. For Thomas to say he believes would be make-believe. It would reduce religion for him to role playing, to acting out a part simply because others were doing so. Yet when he is given reasons to believe, he does so, gladly.

In this way Thomas, though doubting, is different from an unbeliever. An unbeliever will go through life without ever seeking to know God, apathetic to the message of God’s love, indifferent to the message of the Gospel. An unbeliever never has doubts, never has questions. An unbeliever has already decided that God doesn’t exist and simply doesn’t care enough to go to all the trouble and hard work of probing deeper and seeking out the truth. Not so Thomas.

In many ways, Thomas is like us. He wants to believe, but he has a great many questions. As the poet Tennyson has said, ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.’ And all our lives, we too have questions for the Lord. For example we ask Him why there is so much evil in the world, we ask Him why He doesn’t seem to do anything about suffering, we ask Him why sometimes good people seem to suffer so much, why innocence suffers at the hands of evil. We say to the Lord in effect, ‘All these things happen in the world, yet you say you love us. I’ll believe it when I see it.’

And so it must have seemed to Thomas, who is shell-shocked by the horror of the past few days, weary from all life has thrown at him, fearful still of the hatred around him. ‘The Lord who was crucified is now alive again?’ he must have asked. ‘He has come with a message of peace and forgiveness to us who betrayed him? He still loves us? I’ll believe it when I see it.’

There’s something in us that is all to ready to believe bad news. More often, it’s the good news we often find so hard to accept. Our lives teach us that joy doesn’t come easily, that world changing events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid, are few and far between, that love, real love, when directed at us, who are so undeserving, is truly incredible and sometimes far more difficult to believe, simply because we live in a world where evil is predominant and all our lives we have to deal with the apathy of others, we have to deal with hostility and misunderstanding and awkwardness.

Yet we have our faith and all the time, through good news and bad, we keep up a dialogue with the Lord. We question, we argue, we even get angry. In our lives, too, doubt cannot be transformed into faith by willing it. Yet I would say that as with Thomas, it is our honesty that makes us doubt, it is when we want to care that we set out on the difficult and soul searching road to seek the answers, and it is when we have the will to believe that marks out lives that are truly Christian.

And like Thomas, no one can do our believing for us. In our journeys to the Lord, a journey that begins at baptism and ends when we join our Lord in Heaven, it is through our doubts and questionings that we are brought to true belief, a faith which believes not just because we are told something but because we have truly experienced the love and life of the Lord in our own lives. And it is when we are surprised by joy, as it were, when we truly begin to believe the good news, that our lives are transformed as were the lives of those early Christians.

To us who doubt and who struggle with questions of faith, let us take encouragement from the fact that countless others before us have struggled with doubt. Let us take courage from the fact that the questions we pose have been asked many times by others. And let us take strength from the fact that Christians down the centuries have found a way through doubt not through reason but through love.

Yes, it is important we have the companionship, love and encouragement of others who walk with us on our faith journeys. Yet we are gathered here today, on the lovely occasion of the baptism of Sophie, in the company of other believers not because we are without doubts, not just because we wish to belong to the company of believers, but because despite our doubts, despite our worries and our questions, we believe because we trust, because we love, because our hearts tell us what our reason will not, and this is how the Holy Spirit works.

To answer the questions set by doubt we need to look deep into our hearts, to remember the love that has come our way, the love that has helped us though the dark times of our lives, that has carried us even when we did not know it. ‘Faith,’ said the Bengali poet Tagore, ‘is the bird that sings while the dawn is still dark.’ Even when we are surrounded by the darkness of doubt, we know in our hearts that the dawn will come. And we are told by so many of the stories and messages of the Bible that in this life we see but darkly but that one day all will be clear.

‘Blessed are those who have not seen yet have come to believe,’ said the Lord. The Lord knew that faith, hope and love are inextricably linked. He knew that it is because the Holy Spirit speaks to our hearts that we can pray, without having seen, without having heard, the prayer of St Thomas, ‘My Lord and my God.’

So may we say, as countless other Christians have said before us, ‘Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.’

Amen.