Text: Matthew 28:16-20
It's not clear in this passage from St. Matthew's gospel exactly who is doubting. Are all eleven disciples worshipping and others, not mentioned elsewhere in the text, doing the doubting? Are some of the disciples just worshipping and others just doubting? Are some of the disciples worshipping and doubting at the same time? It's not obvious how to resolve the ambiguity. I like to think of these disciples, in the excited, confused aftermath of the resurrection, with worship and doubt alive in them all at once. Because this makes them like us; at least like us some of the time. I imagine myself being there, at first openly skeptical of the two Mary's wild claims about Jesus having somehow defeated death, but secretly hoping against hope there might be something to it. Hopeful enough to have come up to Galilee just in case. Then, suddenly, there he is and I am falling down, recognizing the risen Jesus for who he is and, in worship, acknowledging him as God with us. But at the same time I'm wondering "Could this really be true? It looks like the man I knew and loved...could it really be him? What are the implications of that? Who, then, would he be? What if it's just wishful thinking? My need and grief fooling me? Isn't this too crazy? A trick, an illusion? Too good to be true? I don't want to be taken in. Not again..."
However we interpret Matthew's text, what's remarkable in it is Jesus' response to the doubters, whoever they were. At first he seems to ignore them. He immediately gives the disciples the 'great commission': "go therefore and make disciples of all nations..." It is quite easy for us to regard this as the sort of task appropriately given to faithful, confident worshippers, not to doubters. It seems natural for us to want to make sure our own doubts are resolved before going out to tell others. The great task of spreading the good news about Jesus seems one best reserved for those who are certain about it, for those whose worship has no shadow of doubtfulness. We assume proselytizing should be left to those who feel 100% confident about their message. To go out and preach when you're not totally sure about it seems like a good way to make a fool of yourself, or worse, a way to become a hypocrite and a charlatan.
Yet this doesn't appear to be the way Jesus sees it. His response to the doubters shows that what counts from his point of view -- and thus what counts in reality -- isn't having faith. As though faith were always and automatically a good thing. But this isn't true. Sometimes having faith in something or someone is a bad thing. It can be foolhardy, a manifestation of credulity or gullibility. It can be an evasion of personal responsibility for what one believes and does, a way to feel good about not making the effort to ask hard questions, listen to objections, or find reasons for what we believe. It can be an attempt to get certainty and security where there is none to be had. Think of the ill-fated followers of David Koresh. There was nothing laudable about their faith in him. It was only pathetic, not praiseworthy.
Faith in Jesus is at the center of Christianity, not because it is faith, but because it is faith in Jesus. What matters is not the strength or intensity of our faith but its object. Not that we trust, but who we trust. Our faith varies; it vacillates from being strong and confident, free of doubt, to being weak and doubtful, all depending on what we're feeling, on what we're experiencing from one day to the next. What is strong and reliable isn't what we do, but he in whom we trust, however shakily, however doubtfully. The weakest faith in the God revealed in the resurrected Jesus is greater than the strongest, most confident and certain faith in anything else. The answer to our doubt is not finally stronger faith on our part; it is the faithful one himself.
This is why it makes sense for Jesus to respond to his doubting disciples the way he does. He doesn't respond to their doubt judgmentally, admonishing them to try harder to believe. His answer to their doubt is to assign them a great and difficult task, one they have not the slightest chance of carrying out on their own. If they take his commission at all seriously, they are forced to see that their own powers, including whatever powers they have to believe what they are called upon to proclaim, are ultimately irrelevant. What he asks them to do is doable only because he will be with them as they do it.
Jesus does not simply instruct the disciples to go into the world, teaching people everywhere the good news. He gives a reason why they should do this. They are to go into the world making disciples because "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to" Jesus (v. 18). Initially it isn't easy to see precisely what is the connection between Jesus' having been given all authority and the mission he gives his disciples. But I think it's something like this: if someone is an authority he or she is reliable, trustworthy, someone it makes sense to rely on. When Jesus says he is the only authority, he is saying he is the only thing in the world worth relying on, the only one ultimately worthy of our faith. Now that who God is has been demonstrated by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, there is nothing else it could conceivably make any sense for anyone to trust. God's faithfulness to us has been proved by his willingness to be one of us and even to die for us at our hands. Of course people are ignorant, stubborn and fearful and will for a time at least go on trusting in the things people have always trusted in: their own good moral character, good luck, good sense, or having the right religion, or the right family, the right nationality, or the right amount of money in the bank, the right political convictions, or whatever: there's no limit to what we can grab on to to try to be right, and in the right; to be, in whatever by our lights is the final analysis, good enough. Jesus responds to our doubts by appealing to the trustworthiness of God made real for us in Jesus himself.
The reality of God's faithfulness renders whatever doubts we have of no final significance. In comparison to his commitment to us, our faithlessness is of no account. Our faith may be all but nothing, like the tiny mustard seed Jesus talks about earlier in Matthew's gospel. We may be like the desperate father of the possessed child who in Mark's gospel cries out "I believe, help my unbelief!" If God's loving and accepting us were some sort of reward for the strength and persistence of our faith in him, there'd be no hope for most, perhaps none, of us. If our ability to share in God's continuing work in the world depended upon our having a faith free of uncertainty, it would have been pointless for Jesus to give us the great commission. Our relation to God does not depend on our faithfulness, but on God's. Our ability to go and tell a broken world about the graciousness of God doesn't depend on the strength of our convictions, but on the faithfulness of God.
God's faithfulness was made vivid and concrete in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But his faithfulness was not over and done with in history. Paradoxically, Jesus' parting words to his followers are that he is not leaving them: "And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age" (v. 20). Jesus will now be with his Father, but we are not abandoned. We are not left with a mere memory, a Jesus living on in our community in some merely metaphorical way, the way that, say, George Washington, 'lives on' in the hearts and minds of his countrymen. Though in one sense truly departed from us, in heaven with his Father, in another equally real sense Jesus stays with us. This reality of God's presence with us is what the Church has confessed (but never comprehended) as the Holy Spirit. Since today is Trinity Sunday, it may be worthwhile to recall the personal, experiential importance of our confession of the triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus, even though one of us, was also in an utterly unique way one with God, the Father. Although Jesus is now with the Father, the God we encounter in Jesus is also here with us, fully alive and active. This idea of God's irreducible threeness is at the center of lived Christian faith; it is not simply a matter of theological speculation.
The Holy Spirit is the present power of the resurrected Christ. We may at times in our lives be doubting disciples. Our worship of God may feel hollow and insincere because we do not feel sure of the truth of what we say and sing. There may even be times when we're mostly just hoping that God is there, that Jesus is who the Scriptures and the Church say he is. Yet, as Jesus promised, God the Spirit is with us, strengthening, encouraging, helping, empowering, comforting. Nonetheless, we are not always spared the discomforts of doubting. On occasion it is entirely clear that we live by faith, not by sight. At those times all we have to go on is his promise to be with us. He faithfully sustains us, doubts and all.