Sermon for Sunday, April 27, 2025 || Easter 2C || John 20:19-31

Today we are going to do Part Two of last Sunday’s sermon. We’re going to dig into the meaning of the word “believe” because it is central to the story of the disciple Thomas and to our stories as well. Let’s start with the scene in which the Risen Christ encounters Thomas a week after standing amidst the others. Jesus invites Thomas to touch his wounds, saying, “No more disbelief. Believe!” Thomas immediately responds with the highest form of adoration in the entire Gospel: “My Lord and my God!”

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It’s the next line we need to ponder. We don’t know how Jesus says these next words, so we have to choose like a director counseling an actor how to deliver a particular line. Is Jesus angry? “Do you believe because you see me?” That doesn’t sound right to me. Perhaps he is exasperated? “Do you believe because you see me?” That’s closer because Jesus often sounds exasperated, but the Risen Christ is too full of joy and new life to have much exasperation in him. Let’s try one more. Let’s give his voice some levity, some humor. “Do you believe because you see me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.”

This feels right to me. Jesus is not scolding Thomas with these words. Rather, he is speaking past Thomas to the reader of the Gospel. Every reader from day one can identify with Jesus’ words, because none of us has seen Jesus in the flesh. God blesses us with the grace to believe even though our eyes have not seen.

So what does it mean to believe?

Let’s start with the next verse of the Gospel reading, the last of the scene: “Then Jesus did many other miraculous signs in his disciples’ presence, signs that aren’t recorded in this scroll. But these things are written so that you will believe that Jesus is the Christ, God’s Son, and that believing, you will have life in his name.”

Here “belief,” as I mentioned last week, is synonymous with life and relationship with God, not with mere assent to a particular position. As we journey to the center of the word “believe,” the best way to get there is to tell a story. Here’s a version of one that I heard a priest friend of mine tell many, many years ago (and he heard it from someone, too, so there’s no telling to whom this story belongs).

A Bible scholar trekked deep into the heart of the Amazon River basin, and there he found an indigenous tribe that had barely had any contact with the outside world. Like any decent Bible scholar would do, he set about learning the language of the people in order to translate the Bible into the local tongue. While staying in the village, he lived with a farmer and his wife. For months, the scholar worked and worked: he listened to the people talking, made notes, slowly built a lexicon, and then set to the task of translation. He spread his papers out over the rough wooden table in the kitchen of the hut and put pen to paper.

But soon he stopped. He was stuck. In all his study, he had never heard the villagers use a word that seemed to him synonymous with “belief,” which was, after all, an important word in the Bible. He put his pen down and sat there, pondering and feeling sorry for himself. Just then, the farmer came in from the fields all hot and sticky from a hard day’s labor. He sat down in the chair opposite the scholar, leaned back on two legs, propped his feet on the table, and let out a grateful sigh. In halting words, the scholar asked the farmer what his word for “believe” was. The farmer didn’t understand. The scholar tried to explain using other words, and comprehension dawned on the farmer. “Do you see me sitting here,” the farmer said in his own language. “I am leaning back in this chair after a hard day’s work. My feet are up. I am resting all my weight on these two legs.” And the scholar found his word.

So to believe in something is to rest all of your weight on that something. Think about the first time you ever jumped in a pool. You stood by the edge of the pool, your toes curled over the cement lip of the shallow end. Your arms were crossed in front of you and your knees were bent in. Your teeth chattered – from either fear or cold, you couldn’t tell. And there was your Dad standing three feet from you. He was standing waist deep in the water like a titan. And he was extending his arms out to you, beckoning you to jump. He would catch you, he said. You would not drown. You would be safe. You would have fun once you got used to the water. All you needed to do was jump into his arms.

You had a choice to make. You could waddle back to the safety of the towels and the bag with your sister’s change of clothes in it. Or you could jump, believing with all your might that your Dad would catch you, that you could rest all of your weight in his embrace. That’s belief.

But belief is a tricky concept. It’s tricky for several reasons. Here’s one of them. When you decided to jump into your Dad’s arms, you took the leap because you believed what he said. He would catch you, no matter what. You could rest your weight in his arms. Equating this belief with belief in God is where everything gets tricky, because there is a chance, however slim, that your Dad would fail to catch you.

No matter how earnestly we believed in a parent’s omnipotence or a coach’s perfection or a teacher’s omniscience, those people turned out to be…well, people. They were all stricken with the gene for human fallibility. Of course, not being perfect didn’t make them bad people. It just made them people. When we equate our belief in humans with our belief in God, we often make the mistake of hedging our bets where God is concerned. We apply to God the expectations we have when we believe in other people, so we unwittingly reducing God’s power and glory to the levels that fit comfortably in a fallible human body.

Now, please don’t misunderstand. Human beings are fundamentally good. We usually do the right thing. We usually live up to the trust others have in us. What I am saying is this: there is no “usually” with God. God always does the right thing. God always lives up to the trust we place in God, or else God would not be God. (And I know this is frustratingly circular logic, but that’s because God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, an infinite circle of wholeness.)

So when you speak of belief, remember that God is the One in whom you can always rest your weight. God is the One who never fails to keep a promise. Therefore, God is the one whom we can always believe. If believing is about resting your weight on something, then belief means knowing and trusting the something that takes your weight. This is your foundation. Every foundation that is not God is not a foundation at all, but a structure built on God, who is the ultimate foundation. God is, so to speak, the ground upon which everything rests. Believing in God is all about not being content until you find that ground, that deepest foundational level, upon which to rest your weight.

In our Gospel lesson today, Thomas discovers this foundation when he sees the Risen Christ’s wounds and says, “My Lord and my God!” Thomas’s journey has led him to rest his weight on the Risen Christ – to believe. The next time you use the word “believe,” ask yourself if the context surrounding that word is your foundation, something you can truly rest your weight on. If not, try a different word. We rest our weight on the One who is our foundation. For we believe in God.

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Photo by Samuel Girven on Unsplash.