The Reflectionary

Adapted from a 2017 post

An Activity

Find an audio recording of today’s passage – you can find them at Bible Gateway, for example.

Sit quietly for a moment and notice to your breathing. Then listen to the passage with your imagination as well as year ears. Imagine yourself in the room.

• I wonder who you were
• I wonder what you said
• I wonder what Jesus said to you

A Reflection

I like Thomas, and I think it’s a pity that he gets called ‘doubting’ Thomas. I prefer Not-afraid-to-mention-the-elephant-in-the-room Thomas, though I admit it’s not so catchy.

I like Thomas. He was a logical, rational person, and he didn’t simply believe it when people told him strange stories about Jesus being alive, however much he would have liked to. And Jesus understood his logical mind, so when Thomas missed the weekly home-group meeting where Jesus had dropped in to say ‘hi’, Jesus very helpfully nipped back the week after and gave Thomas the chance to do some rather yukky hands-on testing. (Image by Julia Ward)

I like Thomas. He didn’t simply go along with popular opinion. He wasn’t afraid to stick his head over the parapet. He was the best sort of skeptic. He’d have done well in the Royal Society, whose motto is ‘Nullius in verba’, meaning ‘take nobody’s word for it’.

I like Thomas. I too am a sceptic. I’m a card-carrying, conspiracy-theory-bashing, pseudo-science-crunching sceptic and I’m proud of it. Crop circles are pranks, ghost photos are dust in the flash, relics of saints are medieval fakes, the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and it’s not flat. With a research degree in mathematical computing from mechanical engineering, I’m about a sciency and rational as you can get. I even occasionally pick up Spock in his logic.

And I’m also a published theologian.

Isn’t that a bit … well … inconsistent? After all, Christianity is full of non-sciency stuff that can’t be proven, worse, that contradicts well-known science facts – like, ooh I dunno, dead people stay dead, just to pick a random example. How can a rational, logical person like me possibly believe all this weird stuff? I haven’t even had Thomas’ advantage of actually poking the wounds.

I’m not into the ‘Sunday Christian’ thing, where I believe six impossible things before communion, then don my rational head for college on Monday. Nope. If this Christian thing is true, it is true all the time, Monday as well as Sunday.

Neither is it like watching Harry Potter (which I binge-watched with my children over the Easter break). When I immerse myself in a world like HP or My Little Pony (shudder) I suspend my disbelief. I don’t ask what a Boggart should look like if several people are looking at it at the same time, or how a unicorn can sew a dress. I just accept that it can so that I can enjoy the story.

Christianity is not like that. We don’t have to suspend disbelief and pretend to be certain of things while at the back of our minds we know they cannot be true. But neither do we have to reject science on the basis of what we read in the Bible. When Ps 104 and Job 9 say that the earth rests on pillars and cannot be moved, they are not making statements of astrophysical fact. They were never intended to be taken literally. Instead they are poetically communicating ideas such as ‘the world God made is a very reliable place’, and that’s true enough.

Do I believe that the Bible is true? Yep. Do I believe that Jonah prayed to Lord from inside a fish? Nope. For me that comes in the same category as the earth resting on pillars. It was never intended to be taken literally.* Like a parable, it teaches me true things without literally being true itself. (A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho …) Truths like: ‘You can’t get away from God’, ‘God knows and cares even when you do right stupid things’, ‘Even the biggest twits get second chances’ (both the Ninevites and Jonah). All of these are the truths communicated by Jonah, and we don’t need an actual super-sized fish with a completely unique arrangement of internal organs.

(*) Your mileage may vary. I understand that folks have different views on the literalism of these parts of the Bible. Not a problem.

But that doesn’t mean I cut out from my Bible everything that does not conform to present scientific understanding. Neither do I feel the need to explain away the walls of Jericho by a sonic boom. Plenty of stuff that is commonplace now would have been called witchery 500 years ago, and I’m sure the same will be true in another 500. So I don’t have a problem with God doing stuff that looks like magic to me. Like people coming back from the dead.

Sure, that contradicts the law that dead things stay dead. But water contradicts the law that things expand when heated. Hydra (the freshwater animal, not the monster of Greek myth) contradicts the law that animals grow old and die. There are plenty of others. Exceptions seem to be (as in English grammar) the rule.

Star Trek’s Scotty famously said, ‘Ye cannae change the laws of physics, Jim”, but we do that all the time. Anytime we find a phenomenon that does not fit the current laws, we re-write the laws. And if we can, why not God?
And that’s how come I’m OK with both.

I’m OK with science and I’m OK with faith.
I’m OK with scepticism and I’m OK with belief.

If science teaches us one thing it’s that we really don’t know anything at all. Don’t even get me started on Dark Matter! My current bedtime reading is a quantum physics primer, and the stories of entangled particles, collapsing waveforms and polarised photons in superposition have many similarities to the Bible reading today. In that the natural response is, ‘Huh?’

You seriously expect me to believe that my tin is full of both cookies and sewing supplies until I look inside?
That’s crazy! Nuts.
Unfortunately, also true (at least on a nano-scale).

You expect me to believe that time runs faster on satellites than it does on earth?
That’s crazy! Nuts.
But if we didn’t adjust for the effects of relativity, your GPS would drift by 40 cm per day. 

You expect me to believe that a guy died and came back to life?
That’s crazy! Nuts.
But why not? It’s no madder than quantum tunnelling. I don’t really get it but I accept that it is true. Because I trust the person who’s telling me. And because it makes sense of a bunch of other things. Science is full of the weirdly incomprehensible which, for ordinary folks like me, have to be accepted by faith. 

Oh – there, I’ve said it! Science and faith. Not opposites, just different expressions of how we see the world. We need both for a 3D view. Scepticism and belief, both OK. Both needed.

“Religion and science are opposed: in the sense that the thumb and fingers are opposed. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped.”
—Sir William Bragg (Nobel Prize for Physics, 1915)

Jesus said it was OK for Thomas to ask for proof, but he also commended those who believe without proof. Which is just as well for folks like you and me, who missed both home-group meetings.

Our Response

What do you think about Jonah and miracles and resurrection? (What you think, not what you have been told to think). Whatever your answer, remember the God is OK with that.

Bible Text

John 20:19-31 New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘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.’

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But 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.

New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised (NRSVA)

New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.