John 20:19-31[1]
Faith isn’t easy. As people of the 21st
century, we have some challenges with faith. In the midst of a skeptical world
that demands proof for just about everything, it can seem impossible to get a
firm grip on faith. Pretty much all efforts to “prove” faith fall short. As the
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it, “for every proof there is some
disproof”.[2] As a
result, we may find ourselves feeling like we’re hanging in mid-air at the end
of a rope and we have no idea what that rope is attached to! If we cannot prove
our faith in God and salvation and eternal life, how can we be certain about
them? And if we cannot be certain, how can we have faith? Faith isn’t
easy.
And yet we could say that our Gospel reading for
today about Jesus’ resurrection attempts to do just that. We are told that the
“signs” Jesus did are recorded here “so that you may believe that Jesus is the
Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his
name” (Jn. 20:31). Unfortunately, one could say that’s just restating the
problem. For the most part we are not moved by the “signs” that moved people in
the First Century. They simply don’t commend the same kind of faith as they did
in ancient times. I would say this problem of “certainty” is fundamentally built
into our search for faith. If it’s faith, we can’t prove it, can we? And if we
can prove it, where’s the need for faith?
While it does seem important that our faith rests
on something more substantial than “wishful thinking,” I’m afraid that all
efforts at demonstrating exactly what that “something more” is fall short of
being convincing. I know there are those who come up with all kinds of “evidence”
that supposedly “proves” why we should believe. But at the end of the day none
of those arguments can achieve certainty
for us—at least not the kind of certainty most of us are looking for. A “faith”
that is something we’re “compelled” to believe by whatever means—whether “fulfilled
prophecy” or “miracles” or “the authority of scripture”—has never done much for
me. I tend to think that in the long run it doesn’t do much for most people.
This is part of what makes faith so hard for us: it’s simply impossible “prove”
spiritual things.
At the same time, the conclusion that since we
cannot have certainty we cannot have faith at all has never worked for me
either. I grant that in this day and age it’s impossible to avoid the suspicion
that if something sounds too good to be true it must be. But if our “suspicion”
is the final judge of all things, including spiritual things, then all we have
to go on is our own (limited) intellectual ability and our own (incomplete)
experience of life. If that’s it, then the
only things you can count on really are death and taxes, and we’re all trapped
in a vicious circle that leaves us hopeless and godforsaken in this life. That
approach to spiritual things doesn’t do much for me either!
In our Gospel lesson for today, we find that Jesus
himself did not endorse the approach of seeing the evidence in order to
believe. He said “blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believed” (Jn.
20:29). This is consistent with what we know of him elsewhere. The multitudes
kept coming to him and asking him for some kind of miraculous sign in order
that they might believe that he was who he claimed to be. But Jesus refused
those who wanted him to prove himself to them. I think he knew that any
so-called “faith” that depends on some kind of proof constantly needs more
evidence. Those who look for evidence are always looking for more, and they never
truly find their way to faith.
Faith isn’t easy! I would say that at the end of
the day, faith is a choice. It is a choice to look at life from the point of
view that God is making all things new rather than that death is the ultimate
reality. But that kind of choice is going to be a personal one. It isn’t
something you can justify to anyone but yourself. Faith is also a response. It
is a response to our experience of something beyond us, something that perhaps
even strains our ability to understand. That experience is also always going to
be intimately personal. But it’s rarely something we can do alone. We tend to
experience Jesus calling us by name more effectively when we wrestle with these
questions together with a community of faith.
Faith isn’t easy. Part of the reason for that is the
whole experience is not something that happens once and then you’re done. Those
who study the development of faith in the course of a human lifespan have
determined that there are some fairly common stages we all go through.[3] We may start out feeling very sure of ourselves, but that’s just the beginning
of the journey. Many of us go through a stage where we question everything
we’ve been taught. That’s normal. We may find ourselves becoming more
interested in a relationship with God than in maintaining religious structures.
That’s also normal. A few of us may finally reach the point where the entire focus
of life shifts from self to God. At each stage, we have a kind of “conversion”
where we choose faith all over again. To do that we have to remain open to the
stages and changes in our faith journey throughout life. As we stay open to the
one who urges us onward, we find that Jesus calls us to make the choice to come
to faith again and again.
[1] ©2021 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan
Brehm, Ph. D. on 4/11/2021 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] See
Charles E. Moore, ed., Provocations:
Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, 256.
[3] There
are many approaches to this but James Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology
of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning, is a classic.
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