To See Or Not To See

Summary: What will it take for us to believe Jesus and, when we do, what will we do with that information?

Scripture focus: John 20:19–31

Date: Sunday, 11 April 2010 (St John’s Sutherland)

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If That Is The Question, What Do We Do With The Answer?

Reporter Jerry Adler shared the following story about Carl Sagan in a 1997 edition of Newsweek magazine:

Carl Sagan was fascinated that educated adults, with the wonders of science manifest all around them, could cling to beliefs based on the unverifiable testimony of observers dead for two thousand years.

“You’re so smart, why do you believe in God?” he once asked cleric Joan Brown Campbell.  She found this a surprising question from someone who had no trouble accepting the existence of black holes, which no one has ever observed.

“You’re so smart, why don’t you believe in God?” she answered.

Sagan never wavered in his agnosticism, even when he was dying.  “There was no deathbed conversion”, his wife, Ann Druyan, says.  “No appeals to God, no hope for an afterlife, no pretending that he and I, who had been inseparable for twenty years, were not saying good-bye forever.”

“Didn’t he want to believe?” someone asked.

“Carl never wanted to believe,” she said fiercely.  “He wanted to know.”¹

This story does not surprise me at all.  Humans are fierce seekers of knowledge —we might argue that this disposition was involved in the fall of humankind from God’s grace.  I, for one, also want to know as much as I can.  However, I also accept that I cannot know everything and that, in fact, there is much knowledge that I take for granted, accept by faith.  But this “faith” is a contentious subject.

So, having some degree of the same struggle, as the likes of Carl Sagan and even Richard Dawkins, I am sympathetic when I ask such people to accept faith in Jesus as the foundation of their beliefs, values and lifestyle.  It is no small matter to change one’s worldview.  We want to see so that we might know with confidence; but this is not always possible.

The disciples of Jesus too struggled with this issue; yet, even when they saw repeated miraculous wonders performed by Jesus, they still doubted until the end of Jesus’ life, thereby proving that sometimes even seeing is not always believing.

Last week I shared with you all some of the incontrovertible logic and sufficient evidence that demonstrates that Jesus did what is reported of him and that is who he said he was.  Yet, even with all that evidence, and with us being so smart, maybe something different is actually required for us to believe Jesus.  Our scripture focus for today may give us some clues, so that we too may have “eyes to see” (Mt 13:15-16).

John 20:19–31

As background to our scripture focus, we know that the disciples had travelled up to Jerusalem, from Galilee, with Jesus (Mt 16:21-23).  While he told them, on the way, what was going to happen to him there, they did not want to believe it.

Then the unthinkable did in fact happen: Jesus was arrested, tried and was crucified (Lk 22:47-23:56).  Following this event, we discover that, perhaps due to shock, a group of disciples had not returned to their homes —as had the two travelling to Emmaus (Lk 24:13ff)— choosing to remain instead in Jerusalem.  They stationed themselves in “the” upper room, which suggests that this was quite likely the same room in which Jesus enjoyed his last supper with his disciples (Lk 22:12).  Even more than this, it may have been the location where the apostles gathered and received the Holy Spirit, at Pentecost (Ac 1:13), and the home of Mary, John Mark’s mother (Ac 12:12), the writer of the gospel that bears his name.  We can imagine that this room may have taken on a spiritual significance for the early Church and become a centre for worship —the site has been allegedly identified and a church, then mosque, has been present there since the 10^th century (known as the Cenacalum).²

While not having left Jerusalem following Jesus’ crucifixion, the disciples, not surprisingly, were fearful that they too might suffer the same fate as Jesus, at the hands of the religious and political leaders (Jn 20:19a).  This fear was not entirely misplaced, since it’s not as if what they did to Jesus was itself just or rational!³ Peter’s experience of being harassed at Jesus’ pre-trial, which caused him to deny Jesus, would also have ‘stoked the flame’ of their fear (Lk 22:54-62).

Because of their fear, these disciples —ten of Jesus’ inner circle of twelve disciples, not including Thomas, but possibly including others and perhaps some women too— gathered to console and protect each other.  They were not expecting Jesus’ resurrection.

It was dark, being the evening of that first Easter Sunday, and it was to these disciples gathered that Mary reported Jesus’ body was missing (Jn 20:1-3) and then that she had witnessed and spoken with the resurrected Jesus (Jn 20:11-18).  This news would have compounded the disciples’ fear with confusion, since they were not expecting someone to steal Jesus’ body nor that Jesus would come back to life.  At this point, they did not believe in Jesus’ resurrection.

Then, just a little while later that same evening, Jesus appeared to these disciples (Jn 20:19b).  He wanted his presence to calm their fears (Jn 20:19b), but, according to Luke, he only served to startle and frighten them further, as they assumed that Jesus was a ghost (Lk 24:37).  To confirm for them that he was in fact the same person whom they knew and loved before his crucifixion, Jesus showed them his hands and his side.  Only these marks could confirm for them his exact identity.  This person standing amongst them was not only a flesh and blood human, albeit one who could appear and disappear at will (i.e. supernatural), but this was the same Jesus of Nazareth that they had known and followed for 3 years.⁴

More than just to calm their fears, Jesus wanted to send them out, as he had been sent (Jn 8:42; 20:21b) and to give them the power and authority of the Holy Spirit (Jn 20:22-23).

Thomas —possibly in the same way as the disciples, who earlier wouldn’t accept Mary’s testimony— wanted to see Jesus for himself, before he would believe (Jn 20:25).  Of course, this begs the question as to just what he still needed to believe, as Thomas was committed to Jesus, even if reluctantly, as shown in his earlier willingness to travel with Jesus to Jerusalem, even despite knowing what would happen to him (Jn 11:7, 16).

Graciously, Jesus fulfilled Thomas’ demand (Jn 20:26-27).  But Jesus also highlighted that “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (Jn 20:29; cf. :3-10).  What does this say about the nature of belief and faith?  Let me come back to this issue.

The author of this gospel, John, then proceeded to highlight that the disciples were witnesses to many more miraculous “signs”, but that those included in this gospel are the ones that John felt would be sufficient to convince people to believe Jesus (Jn 20:30).  According to John, to believe Jesus is to “have life in his name” (Jn 20:31; Jn 10:10), life of a different order than that presently experienced and as typified by Jesus’ miraculous appearances.

This gospel then was never intended to be simply a biography but an apology, which is a carefully thought out and presented defence of the Christian faith for the purpose of convincing others to adopt that same faith.  While Thomas and the other disciples had the pleasure of a direct confirmation of Jesus’ identity as the Son of God —an identity they could not deny since they had witnessed his resurrection for themselves— we are still left only with their reports of what they saw.  This apology begs a decision on our part, for or against the argument, and it is a very compelling argument.

Something to Think About

As I mentioned earlier, this decision hinges more on the nature of belief and faith than the sufficiency of the evidence, and “faith” is ‘taking a beating’ these days.  So, let us ask ourselves what is really needed for faith in Jesus?

Even with all of the evidence before us, it still comes down to a choice, and a significant choice at that: Will we believe that Jesus did what he did and is who he said he was?  Setting aside the question of content, ultimately, at work here is the principle promoted by St Augustine circa 416 ad,

Do not seek to understand in order that you may believe, but believe so that you may understand.⁵

Let me put this another way.

No one knows all that there is to know about the world, not even the best and brightest amongst us, Richard Dawkins included.  Therefore, our whole life is spent trying to make sense of ourselves and the world around us.  Yet we are not comfortable with chaos nor ignorance; we each assume inherently that there are universal and unchanging laws governing every aspect of our universe.  So we engage our world and seek answers.  We do so using some form of the scientific method.

The scientific method is “a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge” —thanks Wikipedia!⁶ Essentially, we observe something or some activity in the world, we imagine an explanation for it, then we test the ability of our explanation to explain all occurrences of the thing or action; if it holds up, we can then confidently use that explanation to make predictions about that thing or activity occurring again.  If it satisfactorily explains all that it pretends to, then the explanation, or “hypothesis”, becomes an accepted theory that we can freely share and discuss with others.  This is as true for religious matters as it is for scientific matters.

The problem is, as Einstein pointed out, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong”.⁷ Thus, despite what we think we know about the world, we can only ever believe that we know enough, when in fact we operate by faith in most matters.  Even among scientists, there are often many theories that exist to explain certain phenomenon; evolutionary biology itself has many variations and does not go unchallenged by other scientists, Christian and non-Christian alike.

This is a very simplified description of the scientific method, but the logic holds.  Our worldview satisfactorily guides us in the world as long as nothing proves our worldview wrong.

How does all of this apply to our scripture focus?  While we ourselves are not direct witnesses to Jesus’ life, teaching, miracles, death and resurrection, the apostles were and they have shared the good news of their experiences with us, through the Bible.  Based on those observations, we can learn the significance of Jesus’ life and what he tells us about human nature and the world we live in, being Jesus’ explanation.  We then test that explanation; if it accounts for all we experience of ourselves and our world, then we are satisfied by Jesus’ teachings and they guide our thoughts, words and activity in the world.  In other words, we believe Jesus and then understand all that he teaches us.

What is the result of adopting this belief and lifestyle?  According to the apostle John, “through believing you may have life in [Jesus’] name” (Jn 20:31).  In other words, you should have a more full and abundant life because of your belief in Jesus and obedience to his teaching (cf. Jn 10:10).  Has anyone here had that experience?

I challenge you to consider the weight and nature of the evidence supporting Jesus’ resurrection.  I know that it may sound pathetic, but let me encourage you also to try on and test out belief in Jesus.  You may just find that those beliefs start to explain a lot of what you notice about yourself and the world that we live in.  If you see a noticeable change in your life for the better (i.e. that your life is now more satisfying and abundant), then that belief will start to inform all of your life, as it should, and you will understand how sweet it is to have faith in and be loved by God⁸

Which brings me to my final point: If faith in Jesus leads to full and abundant and eternal life, that is a fact which must be shared!

In our scripture focus, we read of the very night that the disciples cowered in the Upper Room for fear of the religious and political leaders.  Mary Magdalene had already come to them and declared, “I have seen the Lord” (Jn 20:18).  Once Jesus had appeared amongst those same disciples, they then proceeded to tell Thomas,“We have seen the Lord” (Jn 20:25).  Why did John write down his accounts of all these miraculous signs?  “These are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (Jn 20:31).  They all saw Jesus after his resurrection and told someone.  Inherent then to our belief and faith in Jesus is a response that compels us to share that good news.

The debate over the role of religion in society is getting increasingly heated.  The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2003 provided an impetus for labelling religion and religious beliefs as being the cause of all the ills of society.  While, indeed, proponents of various religious systems have perpetuated violence and evil for the protection and perpetuation of their beliefs, has not unregulated scientific research brought us the atomic bomb, the use of the anthrax virus as a biological weapon, and, in our day, human cloning?

While we can debate the relative merits of faith in God versus Neo-Atheism, perhaps Christians would do a whole lot better in confessing the crimes of past Christians and finding more naturally helpful and legitimate ways to engage other-believers in dialogue.  The fact is that everybody believes something and that something provides the basis for their beliefs, values and lifestyle (i.e. their worldview).  To change a person’s worldview is no small matter, as you are asking him or her to engage the world around them with possibly a completely different way of seeing and understanding themselves and the world.  But with patience and grace and a thoughtful response to the legitimate questions that people ask, we can and will communicate the good news of Jesus Christ, which is good news indeed.  And it is good news that will attract people to consider the claims of Jesus.

Conclusion

If God exists, then we want to know him, not just about him.  What the world around us needs is not more and better persuasive argument about why they should believe Jesus, but what the world needs is Christians who live their life in Jesus openly and honestly, demonstrating the love, joy, peace and of fruits that faith in Jesus yields in their life as they share that good news naturally and helpfully.

If God exists, and I not only believe that he does but know that he does, then we cannot pass that question aside flippantly.  To know God directly and personally, one must understand God; but to understand God, we must first believe that God exists.  Put faith in God to the test!  “Stop doubting and believe!”

Let us pray:

Almighty God,
the evidence of your presence
is visible in the works of your creation
so that no one has an excuse to ignore or reject you.
It is not the sufficiency of evidence that is wanting,
but the will to believe and to draw close to you
is missing in so many of our friends and neighbours.
Help us, dear Lord,
who know you are real
and who experience you in their life, for real,
to share the good news of your existence,
and of your love and of your grace,
in ways that are helpful and natural and acceptable,
but may we not shy away from sharing that good news
since it is our faith in you that guides each and every step
on our lives.
In the name and power
of our Lord, Saviour and Friend,
Jesus Christ, we pray.  Amen.

Endnotes