SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER

One of the things I always do on holiday is read Spanish history. And it was through this that I came across a man called Javier Tusell. Tusell had played a part in the government which spanned the period between the death of General Franco in 1975 and the transition to democracy in 1978, during which time one of the things he did was to negotiate the return to Spain of Picasso’s famous anti-war painting, Guernica. In 1981, however, influenced by something the French writer, Albert Camus, had written, he gave up active politics and devoted the rest of his life to being an academic historian and a political commentator. Camus’ advice to anyone interested in politics had been to find a party of people who weren’t sure they were right all the time, and join it, and it was basically because there was no such party on offer in Spain at the time that Tusell withdrew from the political stage. With an election just a few weeks away here, of course, we might wish there were such a party currently on offer in Britain, but that is not the point I want to make this morning. Rather, in the light of the Gospel passage we have just heard I would like to reflect with you on the importance of doubt and the danger of too much certainty when it comes to faith.

The idea that certainty in matters of faith could be dangerous may sound strange to some. After all, isn’t a firm conviction about what is true part of what faith is? Well, in a certain sense that is true. The trouble with faith that has too much certainty, however, is that it cannot mature. Lacking the flexibility and room for manoeuvre which go with uncertainty, it is incapable of growth, and when this happens the consequences are far-reaching. In its most extreme form, certainty gives birth to fundamentalism, intolerance and the kind of religious fanaticism which ends up ramming belief down other people’s throats. In its less extreme form, far more common among people like ourselves, is the kind of rigidity of thought which, lacking flexibility, finds it very difficult to take on board anything that is new or different and so gets stuck in a rut of partial, half-baked truths which, in our inability to cope with mystery or truths beyond our understanding, we turn into certainties. They may be false certainties, but we cling to them. Like a child’s comfort blanket, they reassure us and make us feel better and God help anyone who tries to take them from us.
But as the fourteenth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, famously put it, ‘Whatever we say God is God isn’t. Anything at all that we say about God or the things of God will always be only partly true and therefore partly false. Even to say that God ‘exists’ is problematic in the sense that the word ‘exist’ cannot be used of God in the same way that it is used of everything else that exists. And so to be a man or woman of faith is a mixture of knowing and simultaneously not knowing which is why doubting, and asking questions are so fundamental to a life of faith. Without them we soon reduce God to something we can understand, something that makes sense to us and before we know where we are we are worshipping a false god, an idol created in our own image and likeness.

Take, for example, the Resurrection. Many today find it impossible to believe in. The idea that a man could die and then come back to life seems ridiculous to them and they dismiss it out of hand. Except that they are right. Such people are closer to the truth than we think, because Jesus did not come back from the dead. That’s not what resurrection is about. Jesus did not come back. He went forward, through death, into a new way of living which the Gospels struggle to describe. He ate real food, but he passed through closed doors. He was the same Jesus but people did not recognize him. How this can be, of course, I don’t know. But I do know this: to dismiss it because we don’t understand it is a very special form of arrogance married to certainty which grows out of ignorance and is one of the great signs our time. To reduce truth to what we can understand, as so many do in the world today, is the height of foolishness, and to illustrate this I would like to quote from an article which appeared in the Tablet some time ago. There will be some bits of it you don’t understand, but if you are with me so far you will know that that’s my whole point.

The author was, and may still be, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. His name is Keith Ward and in the article he explores the implications of quantum physics for the doctrine of the Resurrection, with special emphasis on the resurrection of the body. It contains sentences like: ‘Freeman Dyson, in an influential paper on the far-future universe, has proposed that human thoughts and feelings might ultimately be downloaded into magnetic fields composed of clouds of photons and gravitons long after galaxies and stars have ceased to exist’ Or ‘The astonishing thing is that perfectly reputable physicists take seriously the possibility, from a strictly scientific point of view, that that we might come to exist in very different forms, even in different forms of space-time, in another universe long after the death of our physical bodies.’ His final sentence, in fact, says this: ‘Prompted by modern science, we might say that it looks as if the resurrection shows what reality, often veiled by the appearances of this space and time, is really like. It looks as though, if there is a God, the Resurrection is virtually inevitable.’

After his encounter with Thomas in today’s Gospel, Jesus utters those famous words: ‘Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe.’ Maybe as we move ever deeper into the 21st century we could put it like this: ‘Happy are those who doubt and ask questions without ceasing to believe’ or ‘Happy are those who, because they know that they know nothing, keep their mouths shut.’ Or ‘Happy are those who don’t dismiss out of hand what other people have believed for centuries until they learn more about it.’ Or ‘Happy are those who have the humility and sense to realise that what we think of as very advanced scientific knowledge has hardly begun to scrape the surface of all that exists.’

We all have much to learn. But we have a lot to unlearn too. All I can say is that I am up for it. Are you?

BIDDING PRAYERS

The Resurrection is not about Jesus coming back from the dead. The person in the Gospels who did that was Lazarus, who then had to die again. The Resurrection of Jesus is about something more profound. It is about a new way of living which God longs to share with us through Jesus. It begins now and comes to its fullness beyond death. And so we pray that in an age which finds this increasingly impossible to believe we will have the courage and faith we need to witness to it in the world.......Lord hear us

Faith in the Resurrection always involves a leap of faith. It is not that there is no evidence for it, but, in the end, we have to choose to believe it. It is a truth which takes us far beyond the limits of human knowledge and opens us up to realities we can only know through divine revelation. And so we pray for the courage we need to make this leap of faith, especially in a world which foolishly dismisses anything it cannot understand and reduces truth to what it thinks it is or wants it to be.......Lord hear us

Given the limitations of all human knowledge and the individual limitations of our own personal knowledge, only a fool, and an ignorant one at that, would be certain of too many things. And so we pray for the humility we need to live with uncertainty, not be afraid to doubt or ask questions and be open to the movement of the Spirit in us inviting us to let go of what we previously thought to be true so that we can move on and embrace new and deeper ways of thinking about God.........Lord hear us

False certainty, especially about religious truths, has caused much trouble in the world over the centuries. It leads to fanaticism, religious intolerance and persecution of those who do not think as we do. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to recognize signs of this in ourselves so that the world can finally break free from it and become a more tolerant and godly place. We pray in particular that God will lead the people of Scotland beyond the religious bigotry which bedevils us still.......Lord hear us

We live in an age which rejects religious truth but tends to believe every word that comes from the mouth of science. And so we pray for the sense of balance humanity needs to recognize that, while science is a God-given source of truth for us, much of it is no more than theory, theory which has to be constantly changed and up-dated in the light of new discoveries, given that, compared to all that there is to know in and about the cosmos, science is only in its infancy.......Lord hear us

One of the great needs in our parishes at this moment in history is for adult education in faith. There is so much that we need to learn and so much that we need to unlearn. Faced with the responsibility of sharing the Good News of the gospel with others, we need to make sure that what we share with them is the truth and not some half-baked version of it which will do more harm than good. And so we pray that our whole parish will be open to such learning and embrace it with joy and enthusiasm......Lord hear us