Just recently my small girl Anushka has discovered that if she covers her eyes with her hands, she becomes completely invisible

and is able to remain so

until she takes her hands away again.

And when she does take them away,

the mother whom she thought had disappeared is still there,

gazing back at her with love.

Sometimes when we cant see things we think they don’t exist.

Especially when we are very young.

Thomas thinks that Jesus has not returned from beyond the tomb because

he has not seen him.

‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in his side then I will not believe.’

Does such a statement mean that Thomas is young in his faith?

Not necessarily.

None of the of the other disciples believed without seeing and we do not know how many of them were filled to the brim with aching doubt and possibly despair

-And why not?

All that they had worked towards and dreamed of

appeared to have vanished without a trace.

Their exultant path of love and glory had finished inside the shadowy blackness of a stone covered tomb.

Why would they be filled, how could they be filled,

with any thing other than doubt?

For many people who hunger for the religious experience,

the question of belief and unbelief or faith and faithlessness

can become so vexed and complex

that we can end up throwing out the proverbial baby

with the proverbial bath water

and walking away from the religious heart all together,

Alternately we may find ourselves believing ‘all the right things’

and yet still live our lives without transformation.

In recent times there has been a great deal of focus given to the question of the historical Jesus and to trying to uncover

through the mists of time

what actually happened after the moment of Christ’s death by cruxifiction. Theories ranging from the eminently sensible to the wildly outlandish abound

and many of these theories speak to different people

at different stages of their faith journey.

So where does the ‘truth’ lye and why does it matter?

For Thomas it lay in blood ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in his side then I will not believe.’

What about for you?

Is it enough for you that Jesus was wise, holy man,

who taught his followers about a new way of living out their lives?

Is it enough that he was a man who challenged the status quo of the political and religious heirachy?

Is it enough that he broke through boundaries of creed and gender and tribal loyalties?

Is it enough for you?  Is this why you are here, 2000 years on?  Or for you, like Thomas does there need to be more?

Certainly for the early disciples their experience of the post resurrection Christ was an experience of Christ as Living Reality and as a living reality no longer limited by flesh and blood or time and space.

Is this your experience? Is this why you are here?

The progressive theologian Marcus Borg, when reflecting on his own journey of faith and doubt writes:

 ‘My journey from the childhood state of precritical naiveté, through the critical thinking of adolescence and adulthood has now led to me hearing the gospel as a whole from a perspective of post critical naiveté- or in other words a state in which I can hear these stories as true stories  even while knowing that they are not literally true’

Maybe, sometimes, we may need to take our hands away from our eyes, our rational, scientific, factual hands, and see that what we thought had gone away is actually still there, looking at us with love and welcoming us into new life