"Believing is Seeing" | Grace Covenant

“Believing is Seeing”

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Date: April 23, 2017

“BELIEVING IS SEEING”

SCRIPTURE: PSALM 16; JOHN 20: 19

–

GRACE COVENANT PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ASHEVILLE, NC

April 23, 2017

The Rev. Dr. Marcia Mount Shoop, Pastor

It’s a week past Easter, and Jesus’ followers are hold up behind closed doors

—

locked doors.

Story goes that they were scared

—

afraid of “the Jews.”

Seems like they’d be afraid of the Roman officials

—

they are the ones who executed

Jesus after all.

t they were afraid of “the Jews”

–

so the story goes.

So, they closed the doors

—

they sought refuge, safety, protection

—

they closed the

doors, and they locked them.

So who were “The Jews” anyway? For John

—

It’s pretty much anyone who didn’t

believe that

Jesus was the Messiah. The Jews weren’t an ethnic group, in other

words, they were lumped together by belief

—

or in this case, a lack of belief.

So what were Jesus’ followers

afraid of? In their grief, in their disorientation from

losing the man they had

given up everything to follow, what had them locked up,

hold up away from the world?

They had so much to try and make sense of back then

—

not that we don’t today, too.

For centuries after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the world was trying to make

sens

e of what happened, to make sense of a post

–

Easter world.

There were other stories floating around back then and into the 2

and 3

centuries

. And one of them professed to be about John, the Son of Zebedee, one of

the first disciples Jesus called.

You know John, one of the brothers who said goodbye to their fishing nets and their

dad and a pretty good fishing business, dropped everything to follow Jesus.

Legend had it that this John is the John

portrayed in a

gospel that didn’t make it into

the Bible

—

The

“

Secret Gospel of John

”

—

also known as the Apocryphon of John.

So, the story goes that John was devastated when Jesus died

—

in the depths of his

grief, a Pharisee came to him, a Jewish official, and chastised

John for his foolishness.

“You abandoned your whole heritage, your family, your community, to follow this

Nazarene, and now he is dead and he amounted to nothing. You look like a fool.”

John took this shaming so deeply to heart that he fled to the dese

rt. And there he

prayed fervently for God’s help. And the Risen Christ appears to him in the desert

and begins to tel

l him secrets of the universe.

Fear

of persecution may not be all that kept those who had staked their lives on

Jesus

behind closed door

s that week past Easter

ear of looking foolish, of

embarrassment

and shame can make us do some things

we may not be proud of in hindsight

—

kind of a crazy twist on how self

–

destructive

we humans can be sometimes

—

o avoid looking foolish, we

abandon what

believe, when abandoning our beliefs is what will prove foolish in the end.

Maybe

being rejected by our fellow humans feels more frightening in the moment

than abandoning all that we had pinned our hopes on. But, I have a feeling it’s more

about our

own insecurity, than it is about us choosing public acceptability over God.

Believing is a risk

—

it’s on us to take it or leave it, and to live with the world

we’re left to see.

So the church’s early steps into their post

–

Resurrection world may have been a step

in the wrong direction

—

a step toward fear, instead of a step toward faith.

Enter Thomas

—

he one often referred to in Christian circles as “Doubting Thomas.”

Funny how t

hose labels get pinned on people

—

when everyone else around him did

the same thing

—

he just happened to miss a meeting, that’s all.

And another thing

—

the word “doubt” is not in this passage in the Aramaic or the

Greek. The NIV and the NRSV translations go

t it wrong

—

and Thomas gets a

reputation as the weak link, when really he makes the strongest profession of faith

there is in the Gospel.

The word here is actually unbelieving, not doubt

—

and there’s an important

distinc

tion to be made. The problem is not

Thomas’

skeptic

ism

but his forgetfulness

about what belief is really about.

Jesus is telling Thomas something utterly primal about being human

: that

believing

is seeing

. T

hat is, what we believe, colors the world that we see. And what we

believe will determine what we are able to see.

It’s fine that Thomas wants to see

—

he just asked for the same thing everyone

else

got. R

emember, Mary Magdalene had already told the disci

ples about Jesus’

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