Let’s have a show of hands: everyone who believes that there is a Constitution of the United States raise your hand. OK, good. Now everyone who believes in the Constitution of the United States raise your hand. Some of you might be thinking, “Wait. Didn’t he just ask us to do that?” Well, no. There’s a difference between “belief that” and “belief in.”

“Belief in” is an attitude toward a person or an institution, a sentiment or posture of trust, while “belief that” is just an attitude with regard to a proposition, one’s intellectual assent to its validity. One may believe that there is a Constitution establishing the government of the United States while not actually believing in the institutions and processes of governance that it creates and enshrines. That may be, perhaps, the source of some of our current social and political problems, but that’s another discussion for another time. With regard to our Christian faith, however, the intersection of these two different kinds of belief – “belief that” versus “belief in” – is at the heart of today’s lesson from the Gospel according to John.

We’re all familiar with this gospel story, right? “Doubting Thomas,” the guy who would not accept that Jesus was risen from the dead, who demanded proof. The patron saint of skeptics. But what if I were to tell you that Thomas has gotten a bum rap for the past couple of centuries? That Thomas was not a skeptic at all. That Thomas’s issue was not abstract apprehension or intellectual assent. That Thomas’s reluctance to accept the story his brother apostles were telling him was not rational, but emotional. He couldn’t believe that Jesus was resurrected because his belief in Jesus, his master, teacher, and friend in whom he had reposed his trust and his hopes, had been shaken to the core! Thomas was not a scientist demanding intellectual rigour and peer review. Thomas was a man experiencing the devastating loss of his beloved mentor.

What Thomas wanted and needed was not evidence, not proof. What Thomas needed was compassion.

I’m sure you know about the stages of grief first identified by Elizabether Kubler-Ross in her groundbreaking 1969 study, On Death and Dying.[1] She identified five processes through which patients who’d been informed of a terminal diagnosis would go in dealing with their new reality. Later, other psychologists would find that all persons dealing with any sort of loss processed their trauma in a similar way. The stages, which are non-linear and may be experienced in differing orders or in no particular order, are:

Denial, an initial state involving disbelief and numbness in the face of the loss, not just a rejection of the actual loss itself, but a refusal to acknowledge the whole reality of the situation.

This denial is followed pretty quickly by anger, which can be directed at oneself, at others, at those delivering the diagnosis or news of loss, at God, at the whole world.

The third step in processing grief or loss is bargaining. Individuals may try to bargain with fate or God in an attempt to reverse the loss.

Then there’s depression, characterized by sadness, withdrawal, and a sense of hopelessness.

Thomas is somewhere in the midst of all of this. Perhaps that’s why he’s not there on that first occasion when Jesus appeared to the other disciples. He’s off by himself processing his grief, and he’s not fully done doing that when he reunites with them. He’s still denying reality when they tell him, “We’ve seen the Lord,” and he responds, “No! I won’t believe it!” He’s still angry and bargaining when he says, “I need to see the wounds. I want to put my finger in the holes in his hands, and my hand in the gash in his side.” These are not the words of an intellectual skeptic; these are the sobs of a man overcome by sadness and hopelessness.

The last stage of handling loss is acceptance. This doesn’t mean happiness; it means coming to terms with the loss and a willingness to move forward. Jesus offers Thomas the opportunity to move into acceptance, and he does this by personally being a living demonstration of the difference between “belief that” and “belief in.”

What Jesus doesn’t do is belittle Thomas. “Although many commentators read Jesus’ words and gestures … as slightly sarcastic and an attempt to shame Thomas,” there is really no support in the text for such an interpretation.[2] Jesus is not shaming Thomas; he is giving him room to grieve, to process his sense of loss, and to live into a new reality. It is not sarcasm and shame that Jesus offers, but grace and graciousness. As John had said at the very beginning of his gospel, “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.”[3] Here, near the end of his story, John gives us an example of Jesus doing so with an apostle in deep emotional pain. Jesus offers Thomas a restoration of his belief in Jesus, which allows Thomas to then believe that Jesus has returned from the dead. And that then fosters a deepening of Thomas’s belief in Jesus, whom he confesses to be no longer simply his teacher and friend, but “My Lord and my God!”[4]

It is here noteworthy that, despite our modern translation which seems to be influenced by the “doubting Thomas” notion, Jesus does not actually use the word “doubt” when he encourages Thomas to faith. This idea of “doubting Thomas,” as I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, is only a couple of centuries old. As far as I can tell, the first use of the term in any published English-language text is in a newspaper in 1883.[5] Before then, this story was not called the story of “doubting Thomas;” it was known as “the incredulity of Thomas.” This was the title the artist Caravaggio gave to his famous painting of this tale.[6] “Incredulity” doesn’t mean “doubt;” it simply means “not believing,” and that is the term John’s Jesus uses in the original Greek of this gospel story.

The word for “doubt,” for intellectual skepticism, in Greek is distazo. Jesus uses this word in Matthew’s story of Jesus walking on the surface of the sea of Galilee. When Peter asks to join him, gets out of the boat, takes a couple of steps, and then, noticing the strong wind, becomes frightened and starts to sink. Jesus asks him, “Why did you doubt?” and the word used in Greek is distazo.[7] The frightened Peter had become skeptical of his ability to walk on water.

But here in John’s story of Thomas, Jesus uses the word apistoio, which means “not believing” or “not trusting.” In other words, this is not a story about accepting or subscribing to a particular factual proposition or credal assertion. This is a story about relationship, about Thomas’s attitude of trust in Jesus and his loss of that trust, about his reposing of hope in this man he had followed for three years and believed to be the messiah and the apparent dashing of those hopes.

Remember, the principal character in this story, though it is about Thomas’s belief, is not Thomas; the focus of this story is Jesus. This means that it is not a story about intellectual acceptance of a factual assertion. It is a story about trust placed in a person, about faith invested in Jesus, “the Word [who] became flesh and lived among us,” who “is close to the Father’s heart,” and who “gave power to become children of God” to all who believe in him.[8]

If the histories about Thomas are to be believed, he received that power in full measure. He is credited with visiting and possibly establishing churches in Ethiopia, Arabia, Syria, Persia, India, and even China. There is even a legend that he then travelled to South America where he preached “the Holy Truth” to the Guarani people of Parguay and Peru.[9]

Every religious tradition stresses that the divine, whether conceived of as a personal god or merely as a source of enlightenment, is not found through the intellect. The divine is encountered in relationships and personal experiences. It was his personal experience with the risen Jesus that turned a grieving, angry, depressed, and disbelieving Thomas into a powerful evangelist. It was their personal encounter and trust in the risen Lord that turned the uncomprehending and dispireted apostles into the strong community that went out into the streets of Jerusalem and the world beyond to build the early church.

We have an example of this in our lesson today from the Book of Acts. The apostles are brought before the Sanhedrin, which was the assembly of the elders of Israel. They had received strict orders from this body not to teach in the name of Jesus, but they answered, “We must obey God rather than any human authority.”[10] It wasn’t simply that they believed that God existed, but that they believed in the God whom they and their ancestors had known and trusted. It wasn’t simply that they believed that Jesus had risen from the dead, but that they believed in the risen Lord whom they had seen, whom they had touched, with whom they had eaten. It wasn’t simply that they believe that there was a Holy Spirit, but that they believe in the Spirit whose power they had experienced and whose inspiration they had received on the Day of Pentecost.

In a few minutes – when I stop talking – we will all rise and say together the Nicene Creed. In doing so, we will affirm not that we simply believe that there is a God, but that we believe in God the Father, that we believe in Jesus Christ his only Son, and that we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life. When we recite the Creed, we do more than merely signal our intellectual assent to the credal propositions; we join with Thomas and all the apostles and saints throughout the centuries, declaring our relationship of trust and hope in the Blessed Trinity. We join with Thomas in declaring in awe and wonder, in faith and confidence, “My Lord and my God!”[11]

Amen.

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This homily was offered by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston on the Second Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2025 to the people of St. Mark’s Episccopal Church, Canton, Ohio, where Fr. Funston was guest presider and preacher.

The lessons for the service were Acts 5:27-32, Psalm 150, Revelation 1:4-8; and St. John 20:19-31. These lessons can be read at The Lectionary Page.

The illustration is The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio (1602) on display at Sanssouci, Potsdam, Germany.

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Notes:
Click on footnote numbers to link back to associated text. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Scripture are from the New Revised Version Updated Edition.

[1] Elizabether Kubler-Ross, On Death & Dying (Scriber, New York: 1969)

[2] Gail R. O’Day, Commentary on the Gospel of John, The New Interpretor’s Bible, Volume IX (Abingdon Press, Nashville: 1995), page 850

[3] John 1:16

[4] John 20:28

[5] The Veteran Legion, Sonoma Democrat, Volume XXVI, Number 41, 28 July 1883, in the California Digital Newspaper Collection, UCR Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, accessed 24 April 2025

[6] See The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (Caravaggio), Wikipedia, accessed 24 April 2025

[7] See Matthew 14:22-33

[8] John 1:14, 18, and 12

[9] Thomas the Apostle, Wikipedia, accessed 25 April 2025

[10] Acts 5:29

[11] John 20:28