Like any profession, preachers occasionally have informal "shop talk" comparing and constrasting their experiences. One thing that I’ve experienced several times over the years, which has been confirmed to be a somewhat common occurrence by my conversations with my fellow pastors was something I really never expected to experience. This is one of those things, when I first received my call to be a preacher, never even crossed my mind. During my seminary training, I had no clue that this would be "a thing."
Well, here it is - people seem to like to send pastors pictures of various wounds, infections, lacerations, gangrene, rashes, unidentified bites and other physical injuries. Let me assure you, this is all quite unnecessary. I can support you prayerfully and pastorally without receiving photo verification of the puss oozing out of your toe. I've never really been quite sure what the purpose of people sending pastors these photos are. Christy gets them from time to time too.
Do they think I won't believe them?
Do they want us to include them in the bulletin?
Is this the closest thing to sending them to God?
Is prayer more effective if I do it while looking at a wound?
Whatever the case, you don't need to send me photos.
I will believe you.
We're not going to put them in the bulletin.
I can give you God's email address directly.
And I'm not going to use it like an icon while praying for you.
Just in case you can't read between the lines, let me just say very clearly, please don't send me these photos. I'm kind of on the squeemish side.
Yet it is hard for me to ignore that in our Scripture passage, Jesus does the ancient equivalent of this very thing. I had thought that perhaps this was a unique experience of pastors of this generation - doing their work after the advent of the smartphone. But no, it is right there in the Bible - Jesus does it. In fact, like many of the photo-senders I have pastored, Jesus seems pretty eager to show off his wounds. I figure, you have to really want to show off your wounds if you snap a picture of it and send it to your pastor. It is basically the first thing Jesus does after he sees the disciples and greets them in peace. He somehow breaks into a locked house in order to initiate this little show-and-tell. Then he says, "hey guys, check this out," and he lifts up his shirt and spreads out his hands to display his wounds. I have to say, the disciples were better natured about it than I am. The text says, they rejoiced. Did they "oooh" and "aaaah" over the wounds? Sometimes, I've had the sense that this is what I'm supposed to do. This is what people are hoping for when they show their wounds to their pastors. But, I don't know what to tell you, I'm not going to do that.
Now, Thomas is even worse than the other disciples. He goes asking to see the pictures of the wounds. And even Jesus is like, "this is kind of weird," but he goes with it. I think he must have sensed that Thomas was the gawking type because not only did Jesus show Thomas his wounds, he was like - hey feel this! Put your hand right here on this gash. That is really the only thing worse for pastors than the wound pictures - going to the hospital and people are all like, "hey pastor, feel this!" Uhhmmm...how about I pray for you.
Perhaps one of the reasons why people send pastors photos is that we have, for some time, been living in an age where seeing is believing.
Now, I don't want to throw my wife under the bus, especially when she's not here to defend herself, but...well, she's not here to defend herself. You all won't tell on me, will you? [Good....] A few months ago, she was driving my van and swerved to miss a cat, but in so doing knocked off the passenger side rearview mirror as it hit a mailbox. Now when we filed an insurance claim, the insurance agent wasn't as trusting as me, your friendly pastor who will just pray for any ol' incident without photo verification. But the insurance company wanted to see a picture of the broken mirror, a picture of the fixed mirror, and a bill from the dealer who fixed the mirror. I would like to point out that I have not once asked a parishioner to see a doctor's bill before praying for someone.
You see, proof isn't really the language of faith. Proof is what is required in situations of low trust. I think it is reasonable for insurance companies to require some kind of proof during the claims process to prevent fraud. But I hope my relationship with each one of you is one of high trust where photo verification isn't needed.
But for everyday encounters, for situations of low trust or absent a relationship where trust has been built through personal relationship, the standard is, seeing is believing. Since the advent of the photograph and video, these have become the gold standard in proof. Seeing is believing. Yet, this is changing. Software and technology has become so good that it is now possible to create pictures and video lies.
For example, the picture on the cover of your bulletin of your church staff is deceiving. If you looked at this photo, even if you looked at it very carefully, you’d probably conclude that AyyCee, our youth director, on the far left side of the picture was with us for the photo shoot. But in fact, she was not. She was not on our staff yet at the time this picture was taken. The talented photographer, who does all of the school pictures for our MDO program, was able to take separate photos of AyyCee and somehow work her magic and make it appear as if she had been in the original photo shoot. This is a doctored photo.
You see, the age we've been living in since the birth of the photograph and even video has trained us that seeing is believing. But we're becoming increasingly aware that seeing is no longer enough. Our eyes can deceive us. Social media is full of doctored images and videos. Or photos and videos carefully curated to be removed from their full context. Seeing isn't believing, we are slowly coming to realize as a society.
This might seem like some new paradigm unique to our modern technological, social media saturated age. Yet, Jesus taught us that seeing isn't believing several thousand years ago. After Thomas' request to feel his wounds, Jesus said this about seeing and believing: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." Belief is bigger than seeing. Seeing and believing aren't the same thing. Belief is more fundamental. It can't be reduced to verification by a single sense. Or even any of these senses. In our Scripture, at least three of the five senses are mentioned in the story of how the disciples experience Jesus's presence among them. Perhaps even all five of the senses are in the story if Jesus's breathing on the disciples can be counted as involving the senses of taste or smell. Yet, sensory verification is something that Jesus separates from belief.
Now, here is where I believe that our own understanding of this text thousands of years after it happened may be distorted a bit. The scientific revolution of the past 300 years has left, especially the Western mind, with an empirical worldview. For anything to be taken as truth, it must be empirically verifiable. And at times, science has been pitted against faith as if the two are mutually exclusive or are in some kind of war with one another. I believe this is unfortunate. There are some champions of science who investigate religious truth claims the same way they would test for any physical phenomenon in the universe. And absent positive evidence, they make the case that many religious truth claims are not true, are irrational, or often pejoratively rendering their verdict, fairy tales. And some religious people, wrongly, in my view, have tried to make empirical arguments for religious beliefs. There is an entire discipline called Apologetics that developed historically alongside the scientific revolution within certain faith communities and traditions. Apologetics is a discipline that starts with Christian truth claims and then makes an attempt through rational argument and scientific facts to back up those truth claims. While having good intentions, I believe Apologetics makes the same mistake as those with a secular materialist worldview who criticize religious beliefs as fairy tales. They both assume that proof must be the language of faith. That seeing is believing. Belief is bigger than seeing.
There’s a movie that is among my favorites called Contact, staring Jody Foster and Matthew McConaughey Jody Foster’s character is a scientist named Eleanor Arroway doing cutting edge work in the area of space exploration and Matthew McConaughey is a priest named Palmer Joss. In one scene in the movie [Watch Scene Here], Eleanor presses her priest friend on the idea of God using Occam’s razor - the idea that the simplest answer is usually the correct answer. She says that given all the vastness of the world, doesn’t it make more sense that humans have invented the idea of a God so that we don’t feel so alone. And she chides her priest friend to provide some proof for God - that God isn’t an invention of needy humans. Palmer asks her if she loved her father, who he knew she did - he had recently died and had been the inspiration for her becoming a scientist. And she replied, yes, of course I love my father, she said. Palmer replied, "prove it." It was a poignant moment in the film. Proof isn’t the language of faith, because proof isn’t the language of high trust relationships; proof isn’t the language of love. Sure, she could have mustered a case based on circumstantial evidence, provided receipts of the gifts she had purchased for her father, provided photographic evidence of them smiling together and so forth. But all of that would feel reductionistic. It isn’t the language of love.
Friends, this deep relationship of love is what Jesus wants with us. It is certainly possible to read this text back through the history of ideas and think that Jesus is wanting us to believe in miracles absent any proof; to privelege faith over empirical verification. I believe there's a better way to understand this passage - not one where a scientific worldview that we've inherited as part of our worldview is pitted against religious faith. Jesus is not saying, believe me, not science. What he is saying - let's have a loving, high trust relationship. The kind where photographic verification isn't needed. The kind where you don't have to feel or text pictures of wounds. But rather, trust one another.
You see, it is exactly this kind of relationship that Jesus was counting on. He breathed on the disciples - a sign of them receiving his spirit - the Holy Spirit. It is a symbol of the trust God has placed in them and in us - that his work of building the kingdom of God would continue after he left. You see, this isn’t a story about empirical verification at all - it is a story of loving, trusting relationships. God places that trust in us. But friends, for Thomas, and for each one of us - this only works, if we put our love and trust back in following Jesus Christ. It isn’t ultimately something that can be proven - it is just a relationship to enjoy and provide meaning and direction to our lives. May you, may we all learn to live and love in a way that goes beyond seeing, beyond empirical verification and live and love according to that Spirit Jesus breathed on the disciples.
