Garrison Keillor went to church as a pagan this year, he says, wearing a Christian suit and white shirt, and sat in a rear pew with his sandy-haired gap-toothed daughter… and there he was, as he described it: a sceptic in the henhouse, thinking weasel’s thoughts. Easter is a good time to face up to the question: Do we really believe in that story or do we just like to hang out with nice people and listen to organ music? There are advantages, he said, to being in the neighbourhood of people who love their neighbours.  If your car won't start on a cold morning, you've got friends.

 

Now the questions that raises are these: What is the crunch of the story we are asked to believe? And what would count as evidence for the validity of the story? 

 

Well John’s gospel tells us: the gospel was written that we might believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God. Just before this, we have the story of how Jesus appeared to the disciples, and then how Thomas made his confession. The significant verse in this story of Thomas is the last verse, verse 30:

Thomas is nicknamed the doubter, because He said he would not believe

Yet Jesus is saying that blessed are those who do not see, but believe. It is not necessary then to see in order to believe. 

 

Believing here is a verb. It is not believing ‘that’, it is believing ‘in’. Thomas, as it turns out, does not actually take up the invitation to put his hands in the side of Jesus. In John’s gospel, to believe in Jesus is to abide in Christ. It is a relationship of personal encounter. 

 

John Marsh in his commentary puts it this way: Thomas had learnt that in the mere seeing of the glorified Lord, that sense and sight were not sufficient. In a strangely paradoxical way he had found through seeing, that seeing was not believing. To see was one thing, to believe was another. 

 

I think if you try to go down the track of seeking a physical explanation of what was happening a week after his death, when Jesus appeared to the disciples in a locked room, if you try to understand this in physical terms, you only end up in confusion. Seeing is about seeing in a sense wider than the physical. It is believing in, rather than believing that. If we believe in Jesus the Messiah, then believing in Jesus brings its own change and its own evidence. 

 

Let me put this in another way.

There are some things you can only learn by doing, by being involved. Writing poetry or composing music are interesting experiential skills, because when you start writing or composing, you learn things that you cannot learn simply by being a spectator. That is, the experience of participating makes a difference. 

 

Or take endorphins. Endorphins are the chemicals released by the pituitary gland in response to stress or pain.  Exercise stimulates the release of endorphins within approximately 30 minutes from the start of activity.  These endorphins tend to minimize the discomfort of exercise and are even associated with a feeling of euphoria. You cannot get these from sitting in an armchair, but if you regularly exercise, the body chemistry changes. It is a change that comes from doing, from being involved.

 

The experience of being in love is the same. When we love we see things of great worth, and minimise the things that do not count. The key point is this. When you are in love, your attitude and perspective change, because you love. The very act of loving someone and making a commitment to them means that your love deepens, and you love them more. One term for this is personifying evidence. 

 

Another term that the philosopher John Bishop uses is a doxastic practice. What is meant by this, is if you believe within a framework of beliefs, then the practice of those beliefs brings about its own evidence. Being in love or being forgiven are examples. And clearly belief in God is this kind of personifying evidence. 

 

Now that does not mean we are justified in believing the impossible and the absurd. But it does mean that if we believe in the love of God shown in Christ Jesus, and we are forgiven and loved ourselves, then this kind of experience is evidence that counts. And this kind of evidence is different from the objective or physical evidence that an atheist might demand. So if they say we need evidence of celestial fireworks kind of evidence, they miss the point. A Christian experience is evidence of the heart. 

 

If we wind the story back a bit, we come to the appearance of Jesus through locked doors. 

This is John’s account of the appearance of Jesus, and the giving of the Holy Spirit. We cannot harmonise this account with the account of the Holy Spirit given by Luke in the opening chapters of the book of Acts. And it is difficult also to harmonise the accounts between the four gospels. We are dealing here with stories of faith.

 

The disciples had gathered behind locked doors for fear of the Jews, and Jesus came among them and said: Peace be with you. 

 

Earlier in the ‘I am’ sayings, Jesus says I am the door, or I am the gate. The image he is using is set in the context of a sheepfold, where the sheep gather at night behind the walls of the sheepfold. They are safe behind the fence. They can enter the sheepfold through the gate of door. Jesus uses this image to speak of himself as the gate or door.

 

Now here at the end of his gospel, we have the disciples trapped behind a locked door, in fear of their lives. And Jesus appears to them and gives them his peace. 

 

The disciples then are trapped with their own fear, and seek safety behind the locked door. But Jesus appears to them, and gives them the Holy Spirit. 

 

The focus of the story is Jesus. He is the door. He is the resurrection and the life. If we believe in him, then our lives will change.