In my childhood Sunday school classes, Thomas was a bad man. When the other ten disciples told him that Jesus was alive after his crucifixion, Thomas refused to believe it. He separated himself from the others and demanded to see Christ for himself. My teachers in Sunday School said that he was a dull, doubting (read faithless) follower of Christ whom we should not imitate. The moral of the story was clear - “Don’t be like Thomas! Believe! Don’t doubt!”

But I confess to a secret infatuation with the scallawags of scripture, the Jacobs, the Judases, the Thomases, too.

Perhaps because, more often than once, I have found myself in communities-of-faith where no one voices doubt or admits to struggle, I am reluctant to dismiss Thomas wholesale. In the church of my childhood, and even to some extent at my evangelical college, we didn’t talk about our fears or crises-of-faith because we thought others would judge us as “unspiritual,” or otherwise unfit for kingdom work. And in churches that display only facades of niceness, I’ve noticed - even felt - all sorts of anxieties and resentments festering underneath. I’ve watched people struggling all alone with deep questions because they were afraid of how others might react to their doubts. Doubts and uncertainty frighten us and make us feel inadequate, especially when compared to the Jameses, the Johns, and the Jesuses of the world. That’s why we initially reject Thomas - he dares to bring doubt into our lives of faith.

But I like Thomas. I like him a lot. Here’s why...

Thomas wants proof, wants to see, wants to touch...wants Jesus. It is Thomas who says, “Hey, let’s join Jesus’ self-sabotaging plan and go to that perilous city (Bethany) to get stoned alongside him.” It’s Thomas who first and finally makes the only christological claim of its kind in scripture: My Lord and my God! It’s Thomas who simply asks for what everyone else had already gotten: the gift of being in the presence of the risen one.

My congregation is, as we say, a community of faith. Which means it must also always be a community that isn’t afraid to doubt. Unlike the church of my childhood, our faith-family is given ample room to throw open the doors, throw open our minds, throw open our hearts, together, and to sit-a-spell, talking about how you have experienced Jesus alive among us, and how I have. Some of us will believe more readily than others. All of us will have our doubts. And there is space, and time, and hope enough for us all to arrive at Jesus’ side in God’s own good time with our hands outstretched to touch him, and in so doing, with our pockets full of both faith and our doubt, we somehow, grace upon grace, finally come to believe.

During my father’s 11-day stay in the ICU following a failed surgical attempt to remove an esophageal tumor, about a week before he died, word spread around our community that he had died already. My family and I heard the news in the hospital parking lot on our way back from the first lunch break we had taken outside the hospital. “We’re sorry to hear about your dad,” they said. I was stricken with sadness and fear. Just then, we were informed by my aunt, who had run down to intercept us before the rumor did, that it wasn’t true; that my father was still alive. I obviously didn’t know what to believe. So I ran...I ran on my 15th birthday, I ran into the hospital, to the second floor, and into the ICU, where I discovered through the tubes and trauma that my father was, in fact, alive. I reached out to touch him. No message would do. I had to see him. Had to touch him.

Sometimes the demand to see and to touch is not doubt at all. Sometimes it is even love.