“Doubting Thomas.” There is no doubt about it, most Christians regard him as something of a failure. The apostle who said he would not believe in Christ’s resurrection until he had seen him with his own eyes and touched him with his own hand (and who later got the opportunity to do so, of course), has become synonymous with those who do not believe.
Even those of us who believe faith should involve the head as well as the heart have not embraced Thomas as the poster-disciple of reasonable faith, but why is this – why do we doubt Thomas? Looking at the story – which is found in chapter 20 of the Gospel of John – is instructive:
“Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:24-29).
Although the account is often repeated as an example of unbelief, there is really nothing in it to say that Christ chastised Thomas in any way. We should remember that doubt had marked the response of all the disciples from the very first reports of the resurrection. Although Mary Magdalene, who had gone to the tomb and found it empty, reported this to Peter and John (John 20:2), apparently even John himself did not believe the resurrection had occurred till he saw evidence with his own eyes: “Finally the other disciple [John], who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed” (John 20:8).
More importantly, John tells us that all of the disciples – except Thomas who was not present – were given the opportunity to see Christ, and at that time “he showed them his hands and side” (John 20:19). Luke adds further details, and tells us that when Christ appeared to them at that time:
“They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet” (Luke 24:37-39).
So every one of the disciples had opportunity not only to see the resurrected Christ, but also to see the marks of his wounds. This helps us to understand Thomas’ specific mention of wanting to see the same things, but we can hardly judge Thomas as a doubter of the resurrection any more than the other disciples who thought they saw a ghost and had to be given the opportunity of visible evidence before accepting the resurrection as fact. When Jesus did appear to Thomas and the others later, he did not chide Thomas as “you of little faith” in the way he had so often rebuked the disciples when they beheld the miracles of his ministry; he simply gave Thomas the same opportunity to see him that the other apostles had already been given. We should realize that Jesus’ words: “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”(John 20:29) were given for us, not for Thomas.
We should also not forget the importance of the aspect of belief based on seeing for all of the apostles. In his great sermon of Acts 2, Peter himself stressed that the proof of the resurrection was that all the apostles were witnesses – they had seen Christ with their own eyes (Acts 2:32) – and there is no indication to think any of them would have believed if they had not seen him.
Finally, we might well remember that when Thomas did see Christ he exclaimed “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28) and that Thomas is the only person recorded in the Gospels to make this confession and to actually call Jesus “God.”
Tradition tells us that after seeing the resurrected Christ, Thomas’ firm belief led him to do extensive and powerful works in preaching the Gospel until his faithful martyrdom as far to the east as India. He was never called “Doubting Thomas” in the early Church, and the Scriptures clearly indicate that, along with the other original apostles, he will have an honored position in the Kingdom of God (Revelation 21:14). Thomas’ belief, once he established it, was a full and powerful faith – and there is no reason to doubt that.
Two of the Gospel writers – Matthew and Mark – record that near his death Jesus called out with what might seem to be a strange statement:
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46 ESV).
And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34 ESV).
While Matthew records Jesus’ words in Hebrew, Mark records them in Aramaic (the language in which they were probably uttered); but the words are almost identical, and the meaning is the same.
These words have long been interpreted as showing that at that point in time Jesus symbolically bore the sins of the whole world and that God – who cannot look at evil (Habakkuk 1:13) – turned away from his Son who was left in near-despairing isolation. Because sin cuts off from God, the argument is made, and Jesus at that moment represented all sinners – so God totally cut himself off from his perfect Son because of our sins.
But is that what those terrible words really signify? Did God really turn away from his only Son who had lived a life of perfect obedience – obedience all the way to death itself (Philippians 2:8)? Although that may possibly be the case, we do not have a scripture saying that. And how do we mesh that concept with the fact that it was because God loved sinners so much that he sent his Son to die for them (John 3:16)? Or the fact that God looks on and deals personally with every sinner he calls, and that we have it on scriptural authority that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ”? (Romans 8:38-39).
There is another – and far more positive – way to understand those troubling words of Jesus. Jewish rabbis have long utilized the principle of referring to a scriptural passage by means of a few of its words, knowing that their hearers would mentally supply the rest of the passage. This method of teaching and reference (called in Hebrew remez, meaning “a hint”) was certainly used in Jesus’ time and we see him employing it frequently. For example, in Matthew 21:15 when the children of Jerusalem shouted praises in his honor and the priests and teachers of the law became indignant, Jesus responded by quoting only a few words from Psalm 8:2: “From the lips of children and infants, you have ordained praise.” But the religious leaders would have fully realized that the rest of that psalm states the enemies of God would be silenced by children’s praises.
We see Jesus using this technique so often that when we turn to his words spoken on the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” we can see that this is almost certainly what Jesus was doing. The words Jesus uttered are the opening words of Psalm 22 – the great messianic psalm that foretells even the smallest details of the Messiah’s death. Every biblically literate Jew present at the crucifixion would have been reminded of the prophecies made in that psalm – the insults of the mocking crowd (vss. 6-8), the dying thirst of God’s servant (vs. 15), the “dogs”/gentiles (vs. 16) who pierced his hands and feet (vs. 16), the casting of lots for his garments (vs. 18) – simply by the “hint” of Jesus quoting the psalm’s opening verse.
We should remember, too, that these words were the only ones we are told Jesus spoke “with a loud voice” (this fact is recorded by both Matthew and Mark) on the Cross. These were the words – few though they were – that Jesus spoke in his agony to all present – and those present would have likely recognized the intent of the small remez that referenced the whole of the psalm from which it was taken. Seen this way, we realize that Jesus’ words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” were his last great teaching. These words were an abbreviated reference to Psalm 22– the final proof he offered that he was, indeed, the One who was prophesied.
Understanding Jesus’ words in this way – as a remez of Psalm 22 – is not to argue that sin cuts us off from God, but to suggest that we should not presume that this is why Jesus uttered these words. We should perhaps temper that concept with a fuller understanding of God’s love – that God always loves us as his children despite our sins – which means that God still loved his Son at that awful time of his shouldering of our sins. Jesus himself told his disciples shortly before his crucifixion: “A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me” (John 16: 32-33). In fact, the very psalm that Jesus quoted contains, near its end, not words of his rejection as he suffered, but words that Jesus knew he could trust completely: “He has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help” (Psalm 22:24).
So, if we consistently apply all of Psalm 22 to Jesus’ crucifixion, we can realize that as he hung on the cross, his Father did not reject him and had not “hidden his face from him.” The Father loved Jesus till his last breath. As a result, the words spoken by Jesus as his end neared – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – were words addressed probably not to God but quoted for our benefit as a summary of the prophecies Jesus was fulfilling in laying down his life for us.
Interestingly, the Lord’s Supper was not always kept in the way we may be familiar with today. Nowadays many people celebrate the memorial of the Last Supper and Jesus’ death with small, identical wafers of bread, and small measured portions or sips of wine for all the participants. But things were not always that way.
In the New Testament, we find that the apostle Paul reprimanded the church at Corinth for the way in which they celebrated the Lord’s Supper. Apparently, people took their own food and drink to the event – the rich taking much, and the poor very little. As Paul wrote: “when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk” (1 Corinthians 11:20-21). Paul tells the church they must eat together and indicates that restrained amounts should be available for all (verse 33).
This was the regulated form which became practice in the remembrance of the Last Supper that is the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in many denominations today. But although we may remember this New Testament story, another change that we may not be aware of has occurred through time relative to the Last Supper.
Although we may be conscious of the abundance that many people enjoy in the developed world today compared to many other areas, we may not be as aware of the abundance so many have in today’s world compared to what was available in the past. Fascinating but little publicized research conducted several years ago at Cornell University throws light on the abundance which many of us take for granted.
In a careful study published as “The Largest Last Supper: Depictions of Food Portions and Plate Size Increased Over the Millennium,” researchers Brian and Craig Wansink analyzed the amount of food depicted in fifty-two paintings of “The Last Supper” produced over the last thousand years. Each painting was analyzed in order to ascertain the content of the meals depicted, and changes which occurred over time in the size of portions in the paintings. Cleverly, the sizes of the loaves of bread, the main food dishes, and the plates were all compared to the average size of the heads shown in the paintings in order to gain a benchmark reference of size. A computerized CAD-CAM program was used to allow selected parts of the paintings to be scanned, then compared in order to get accurate size comparisons to calculate the food portion sizes with more precision.
As the researchers suspected, the number and size of the food portions in these paintings increased dramatically over time. From AD 1000 to the present, the amount of the food depicted in the paintings increased by 69%, and the size of the depicted plates increased correspondingly by some 65%. This is certainly not a matter of chance, the researchers say. There is no question that the amount of food available to people in much of the Western world has grown dramatically over the hundreds of years covered by the study and this is reflected in artistic representations. What was first shown as a simple meal has grown in artistic interpretations to more recent depictions of the Last Supper which suggest almost feast-like proportions compared to earlier paintings.
Today, many of us enjoy much greater abundance than our ancestors, as well as those less fortunate than us in other parts of today’s world. Representations of the Last Supper can remind us that we have much to be thankful for physically, as well as spiritually. Paul himself reminds us of this when he refers to the cup of the Lord’s Supper as “the cup of thanksgiving” (1 Corinthians 10:16) – something we can, and should, appreciate physically as well as spiritually.
And the king and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land, who said to David, “You will not come in here, but the blind and the lame will ward you off”—thinking, “David cannot come in here.” Nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion, that is, the city of David. And David said on that day, “Whoever would strike the Jebusites, let him get up the water shaft to attack ‘the lame and the blind,’ who are hated by David’s soul” (2 Samuel 5:6-8 ESV).
This passage in the book of 2 Samuel is puzzling at first sight. Did David really hate the lame and the blind? Some translations attempt to smooth out the statement – the NIV, for example, renders the verse “those ‘lame and blind’ who are David’s enemies,” but the translation “‘the lame and the blind,’ who are hated by David’s soul” found in the ESV is an accurate and a quite literal one.
First, we need to ascertain who “the lame and the blind” were. Most modern commentaries presume that the Jebusite inhabitants of Jerusalem believed that the fortifications of their city were so strong that even those who were mobility or visually impaired would be able to ward off David and his army. While this interpretation might seem very reasonable, it leaves unanswered why David would say his soul hated the lame and the blind. We also see that “the lame and the blind” could not have simply been a verbal taunt as David told his men that because of the situation they should secretly enter the city by way of a hidden watershaft. Finally, we see that David offered a large incentive – the rank of “chief and captain” (1Chronicles 11:6) – to anyone who would lead the way in attacking “the lame and the blind.”
Archaeology may perhaps help us to better understand the situation. There is some evidence that the ancient Jebusites were connected to, and perhaps associated with the Syro-Hittite peoples of the Near East. As a result, in 1963, the renowned Israeli soldier, archaeologist, and scholar, Yigael Yadin (1917–1984), noted that ancient clay tablets that have been found with texts written by these people include instances of a ritual known as the “Soldier’s Oath” that may be relevant to what David said (Yigael Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands: In the Light of Archaeological Study Volume 2, pages 268-269). These “oaths” were magical rituals made against enemies in which blind and deaf individuals were paraded before them and it was then said:
“Whoever …. turns his eyes in hostile fashion upon [our] land, let these oaths seize him! Let them blind this man’s army and make it deaf! Let them not see each other, let them not hear each other! Let them make a cruel fate their lot! … Let them make him blind! Let them make him deaf! Let them blind him like a blind man! Let them deafen him like a deaf man! Let them annihilate him, the man himself together with his wife, his children and his kin!” (quoted from James B. Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, pages 353-354.)
This kind of sympathetic magic appears to be exactly what the ancient Jebusites were doing – placing a terrible curse on anyone who attacked their city. If this is the case, as Yadin suggested, the biblical text is certainly more understandable. This would perhaps explain why David told his men that because of the situation they should secretly enter the city by way of a hidden watershaft – perhaps to avoid the lame and blind “curse carriers,” and why he needed to offer a large incentive to anyone who would lead the attack under these circumstances. As for “hating” the lame and blind, David’s comments would most likely apply to the lame and blind curse carriers rather than to all people with these disabilities.
This certainly makes sense as the Bible clearly shows David did not hate such people – it documents in detail his love for and help of Saul’s lame son Mephibosheth whom he restored and invited to eat regularly at his table (2 Samuel 9:10-13).
Whatever the precise meaning of David’s words in 2 Samuel 5:6–8, it is clear that the king did not hate the disabled – and Yadin’s suggestion as to the king’s actual meaning is as good as any. In this case, as in many others, passages that seem to contradict what we know of plain biblical teaching are often better understood with historical background to illuminate them.
There is an old folk story that each day as we go into the world we pass through one of three doors. The first door is the dark way, the door of evil intentions, which leads to harm for ourselves and others. The second door leads to neither good nor bad intentions, and the third door leads to the good intentions of serving and helping others. The interesting thing about the story is that it continues by telling us that most people go out into the world each day by way of the door of no intentions – intending neither bad nor good – but when we do so, we invariably return by way of the dark door.
There is certainly some truth to this simple little story. How many times have we gone out into the day not intending anything in particular only to sooner or later run into traffic, coworkers, messages or whatever that rouse us to frustration, anger, fear, doubt, or other negative feelings or actions. According to the story, it is only as we go out into the day through the light door – the door of intending to do good – that we will return by way of the middle door, or, if our intentions are maintained, through the door of good intentions.
The story has a point, but its weakness is clear. We all know that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” (as first stated by Bernard of Clairvaux), and that of themselves even the best of intentions usually are not enough. Simply put, the door of our own good intentions really only leads to a partial solution to the problem of how our lives will really play out.
But the old story can remind us, of course, of the words of Jesus which carry a much more profound lesson. The Gospel of John records Christ’s words: “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture” (John 10:9). This was part of the parable Jesus told of the sheepfold with the sheep and the door through which they entered and went out. But the words fit our old story well, too.
It is only as we go out into the world through the power of Christ – the true door – that our good intentions will be more fully realized and maintained. That takes conscious thought and determination, but if we remind ourselves daily of the door through which we need to walk, we will be much less likely to go out through the door of wrong intentions or that of no intentions at all.
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