|
According to last week’s Saturday Telegraph Magazine, home schooling
is increasing fast in America and Britain, and in the States over 70%
give religious reasons for doing it. The article says that fundamentalists,
whether Christian or Islamic, express real fear. They believe that the
secular establishment is determined to wipe religion out. So they create
enclaves of pure faith, withdrawing their children into explicit faith
or home schools which teach for example that the world was created in
six literal days.
The disciples were hiding in the upper room because they were afraid.
And fear leads to the creation of an alternative world – a world
where other people and other views are locked out, where you don’t
engage with the things that make you uncomfortable, things that might
threaten your faith or even your life. So the disciples locked out the
Jewish establishment; they’d withdrawn from engagement with the world
in which they lived. Because they were afraid.
Regular church attendances go down, more people are giving up on organised
religion, there is indeed an aggressive secular agenda against what their
chief spokesman describes as the God Delusion. Science can explain almost
everything – why should we believe in God? We’re told that our
religious experiences are the product of wishful thinking, our church
attendance comes from our inner insecurities, the bible writers were credulous
and got a lot of it wrong, and you really can’t believe all that
old nonsense any more.
Thomas didn’t believe it. He knew that other people couldn’t
be trusted to get it right. Dead people stayed dead – didn’t
they? It took an encounter with Jesus, the one person he could trust to
get it right, to change his mind.
And why didn’t Thomas believe it? Because he too was afraid. He feared
that it was too good to be true, that he would be let down again as he
had been already by the death of Jesus. Facts not wishful thinking were
what Thomas wanted to overcome his fear.
And you and I – are we afraid? Afraid of what other people may do
or say? Afraid of getting old and witless and losing all that matters
to us? Afraid that Richard Dawkins and secular scientism are really the
last word, and that really nothing lies ahead of us but death and decay?
Unlike Thomas and the disciples we can’t see Jesus here and now,
to put our fears to rest. We have to have faith – and that means
that we have to have doubt too. Faith requires doubt. If you never feel
doubt, then you don’t have faith – you have blind certainty.
To have faith means to choose to put your trust in someone or something
while facing the possibility that you might be wrong. Like courage, faith
means overcoming the fear that you feel, the doubt that lurks within you:
faith doesn’t mean feeling no fear or doubt at all.
But we do have something that Thomas didn’t have. We have 2000 years
of evidence of the risen Jesus at work in the Church and the world; the
experiences of people, including those around us, having lives transformed
by God’s love and forgiveness in Jesus Christ; and the experience
of the full onslaught of scientific materialism on Christian faith for
over 200 years which may mock and explain away God and the resurrection,
but cannot disprove it, and can’t explain why a bunch of demoralised
fishermen should be transformed into people who turn the world upside
down.
Unlike the disciples before Jesus met them, we don’t need to be afraid.
We don’t need to retreat from the world in fear, to use closed doors
or home schooling to create our own separate world and refuse to engage
with modern culture. Jesus leads us out to meet our fears in faith.
At the encounter with the disciples in the upper room, it is the risen
Jesus who says, Peace be with you. And it is the risen Jesus who says,
As the Father sent me, so I send you. Let us go into God’s world
in the spirit of the risen Jesus, and not be afraid.
Christ is risen….
He is risen indeed - Alleluia!
|