Easter 2 “Believing Is Seeing”
April 27, 2025 john 20:19–31 (cpr 16; 4/3/16; C)
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Dear brothers & Sisters in Christ.
The resurrection of Jesus is too big an event to limit to just one Sunday a year. So the Church devotes 7 Sundays to the Easter season. We celebrate Easter until the 50th day: the Day of Pentecost. For the Sunday immediately following Easter Sunday, every year we have this Gospel reading from John 20. This it’s an important lesson, as Jesus reveals himself fully alive to the one apostle who is refusing to believe it. Jesus singles-out Thomas in a memorable way, as a message to the whole world about God’s mercy toward the doubting.
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We think it’s a modern thing to say: ‘seeing is believing.’ But doubt is as old as fallen-man. When we read the story of ‘doubting Thomas,’ we know we’re supposed to scold him, but we sympathize with him. Think of some things people claim to us. Some claim to have seen UFOs, or bigfoot; they claim to have lived past-lives, or they visited heaven. So, we often commend ‘doubting’ people for their healthy skepticism. We even teach our children to be discerning, and to not believe everything they’re told by friends, or on social media.
The other disciples really are claiming a crazy thing. They told Thomas, ‘We have seen the Lord ~ alive!’ What in this world would make Thomas believe that Jesus was now alive?
He would normally trust his fellow disciples, but what they said wasn’t normal: nobody raises themselves from the dead. On the other hand, for 3 years they followed a Rabbi who was not ‘normal’; & who did bring the dead back to life. So, Thomas responds with that one exception: he says, ‘okay, guys; so you say. But I want to see!’
We sympathize with Thomas because it’s quite normal to say: ‘seeing is believing.’ However, since God is not ‘normal’, so God’s people are given the ability to turn that around and say: ‘Believing is seeing.’ Or, as Jesus says: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Jesus is saying that =for God’s things= believing is just as real as seeing; and that’s true, because life is not only physical, it’s also spiritual.
Now, we don’t need to criticize Thomas for having doubts. On the other hand, Thomas takes it too far. He takes an opposing stand, which wants to block God out of the picture.
And for that, he’s wrong. He says, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” That’s strong language. He’s not just doubting what the other disciples said, he’s specifically doubting whether Jesus had it in Him to rise ~ like Jesus said he would.
Normally, there’s nothing wrong with insisting on seeing something before we accept it. In the Book of Proverbs, God tell us that skepticism can be wise. A Proverb says: ‘wisdom rests in the heart of the discerning,’ and ‘The heart of the righteous {carefully} weighs its answers.’(14 &15) We know that when we’re buying a car, or a house, it’s a good idea to test the claims of the seller, and see for yourself whether everything is on the up-&-up. OR with what we hear on the news, a wise person is cautious to discern what is accurate, what is hype, or what is being left out of the story.
‘Seeing is believing’ IS a good working philosophy for life in this fallen world. And yet, life itself is more than that. Our eyes & minds have been opened by God to His unseen things. A faith-wise person keeps a bit of suspicion about worldly things; but also is not limited to what we can see. When dealing with our God ~ whom we cannot see ~ we have to take Him at His Word.
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We learn about this part of our life when we look at the OT believers described in Hebrews 11. They lived by faith; and faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb 11:1). God told Noah to build an ark long before he saw the flood. He told Abraham to leave his home for an unknown land that would become an inheritance for his innumerable descendants. But Abraham never saw the fulfillment of God’s Word. He made it to Cana & prospered, but he didn’t possessed the land.
Likewise Joseph. He died in Egypt, but he gave orders that his bones should be taken with the people when they returned to the Promised Land; & that was hundreds of years later. Moses, too, trusted in the Word of the Lord that commanded him to defy the mighty pharaoh & his army, and lead his people out of Egypt & safely thru the Red Sea. Joshua went up against Jericho, believing that God would bring down the walls. All of these believers just forged ahead, counting on God to do what He said He would.
Their lives were built on the ‘unseen’. But because God gave His Word, they had strong lives. Most were mocked & persecuted by their culture & their neighbors or relatives; they were imprisoned, & even killed. Nevertheless, they lived & died believing in God’s promises, which were to be fulfilled even hundreds of years later.
Blessed were they who did not see, and yet believed! They held tight to God’s promises; they taught those promises to their children; and they conformed their lives to those promises.
Nothing is different now in the NT; WE believe what we’ve been told without having seen it with our eyes; and we believe what is still to come without seeing it first. It is still by faith that we confess & live by the promises of God in Christ Jesus. We trust God’s Word.
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But…we don’t always stand strong in this conviction of faith. So, we understand where Thomas is coming from. And so, when we celebrate ‘the impossible’ happening each Easter ~ Jesus rising from the dead ~ we consider Thomas. He must’ve had a terrible week in his deep-doubt. All of his friends were excited with the good news of Jesus’ resurrection appearances to the women, on the road to Emmaus, and in the locked room; and he had been left out. He is stuck; limiting himself to what he had seen: Jesus suffered, died, & was buried. For a solid week, Thomas was holding on to death instead of the good news of life; even tho Jesus had talked about that Easter Day a number of times.
And this doubting~stuckness can be OUR condition too when we doubt what we can’t see, even tho God has spoken it. That’s the opposite of faith. If the Easter resurrection of Jesus is in doubt, what are we left with? Only death. Even for people who want to believe that there is something after death, if they deny Jesus’ resurrection, they’re only ‘wishing’; & they have nothing to base their wish on. Without a real & living Lord over ALL life & death, the only thing they can be sure of is what they see: which is ‘death.’
Thomas saw his beloved Rabbi crucified, dead & gone. And resisting God’s Word, he was stuck in stubborn doubt. Jesus had been teaching him about the kingdom of God, and of unseen things. In OT terms, he was being stiff-necked, resisting the HSp. He put himself in a spiritually dangerous place. He was refusing to believe what he couldn’t see, even tho Jesus himself had promised what the others were claiming.
Because of man’s sinful doubt, the Easter resurrection is connected to The Office of the Keys ~ that is, with repentance, confession, & absolution. There are times in our lives when we are stubborn in our unbelief of only what we can see. Sometimes our sorrow or trouble blinds us to the promises of our Lord & God, and all his unseen realities. As our Lord confronts our sin of unbelief, {like he did to Thomas ~ sternly & lovingly} so he brings US to our knees in repentance, and to confess the reality of His divine power, and to the comfort of His patient mercy, & the confidence of His forgiveness for us. The Office of the Keys restores us to faith.
So Thomas participates in a teaching lesson with Jesus ~ his own living parable. Jesus draws him out of his sinful view of limiting God = ‘seeing is believing,’ and into the blessed, faith-view of ‘believing is seeing.’
How important this is when WE face the death of our loved ones; how important it is when we face our own death. And we must face both of those with faith ~ not doubt. Jesus wants us to prepare for those 2 times by celebrating his own death & resurrection promises, and by guarding against Thomas’ sinful resistance & doubt. The way to face death is to continually hear God’s Spirit-filled Word, where He speaks to us about unseen things. And that’s what we do here each Sunday.
That Word proclaims our forgiveness in Jesus who died & rose again. It convinces us of his power & authority over our life, and over our death. We can’t see our Savior Jesus with these eyes; we can’t see His forgiveness won on the cross; we can’t see His empty tomb & how that means that we will also have a resurrection to heavenly life. But by His Spirit we believe & do not doubt that our Almighty God can & will fulfill all those promises.
That’s what our faith is about; that’s what it’s for; that we have strength & faith for life now, and that we are not afraid to be moving toward our heavenly life to come. By the Word of God we walk by faith with our unseen, Risen Lord Jesus now; and by his Word of promise, we know we will one day see him face-to-face. We don’t claim to be a super-man or wonder-woman of faith. We simply trust the word of the One who rose from the dead.
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Our doubt disappears when we hear WHO this Jesus IS …. He is the one who says in Rev. 1: “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.” (Rev 1:17–18).
God has made his Son Jesus our focus in this faith & life for that reason. The world had thrown its worst evils at him. And when our sin crushed Him to death, & the Roman soldier assured his death by spearing his heart & lung, they had put his lifeless body in Joseph’s tomb. But then Jesus refused to stay dead. In that act of defiance, Jesus Christ changed what it means to be human; we were blind = but now in Jesus, we see. We see death, but we believe Jesus defeated death. And having a living Lord & the promise of life to come, makes us strong in this life to live with Him.
This great Easter victory is what Christ now offers to his disciples on Easter evening: when he came to them & said, “peace be with you.” And with his living presence, they rejoiced; but Thomas was not with them. Eight days later, the disciples were together again, and Thomas was with them. Altho 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, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.’”
For those who believe this Word —the Word that Jesus is risen, and that he forgives just as he forgave Thomas — everything in our life is now different. Our Lord’s Word of peace & forgiveness to us is now the message we bring to others in what we say & do. the Risen Lord desires all to believe in Him, to have his sure hope & future.
Then, when this life is over, we will live with God; and on the Last Day, we rise again with new bodies just like Jesus. Only then we will see with our eyes what we now believe. For now, believing IS our seeing, & faith is our holding on to our unseen Savior.
In that good news, there is no doubt; there is a comforting & confident faith which truly makes our earthly life worth living now, even with our troubles; until the last promise is fulfilled.
For a time, for a week, Thomas lost sight of that; he was blinded by doubt, & resisted God’s promise. To keep us from such doubt, Jesus shows Thomas that His power & promise is true. That opens our eyes of faith. ‘believing IS seeing.’ And so we join Thomas in leaving doubt behind, and we live each day confessing with him: “My Lord and my God.”
Amen