“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” (John 20:29 RSV)

I identify with the disciple Thomas. Believing has never been particularly easy for me.Every Easter prompts me to reconsider and reaffirm that my faith centers on the confidence that God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self and that God raised Jesus from the dead. I envy the earliest believers, those to whom Jesus appeared in the days following Easter because their experience of the Risen Lord was direct and immediate. Jesus even appeared to “doubting Thomas” on the occasion when Jesus made the statement quoted above.

The account appears in the Gospel of John which deals with seeing and signs thematically. A series of signs, beginning with Jesus’ conversion of water to wine and concluding with his raising of Lazarus, structure the book. Theologian Paul Tillich distinguished signs from symbols in that both point to some reality beyond themselves but the reality itself “participates” somehow in a sign while it does not in a symbol. For example, a symbol by the roadside depicting a deer warns motorists of deer activity in the area, but deer were not involved in its creation or placement. Indeed, even the word “deer” is such a symbol. Nothing about the animal requires that it be called “deer.” The word is a cultural convention. In contrast, a deer track in my garden means that an actual deer has been through. The animal “participates” in the sign it left behind.

We cannot “see” the risen Jesus like Thomas and the others did. Yet, as John indicates in the verses just after the account of Thomas’ encounter with Jesus, the Evangelists wrote the Gospels to bear testimony to what they had experienced so that those who had not seen might have grounds for believing. Their conviction that God has raised Jesus from the grave cannot have been the wish-fulfillment of long-held expectations because the Gospels make clear that they looked forward to a warrior Messiah who would overthrow Rome not a Suffering Servant who would die a criminal’s death. If they had been interested in “selling” a contrivance, they would not have emphasized the role of women as the first witnesses to the resurrection. It was not mass hysteria because, according to the accounts, Jesus appeared to many of his disciples on many distinct occasions. Furthermore, it is difficult to imagine that so many would have endured martyrs’ deaths for a contrivance.

If we ask whether we encounter anything in our world that points beyond itself to a divine reality that participates in it, to a Risen Christ, those with discerning vision can “see” a great deal that forms a basis of “believing.” In John (chaps. 14-16, for example), Jesus promised the God’s Spirit would be active in the world “convincing” it of its sin and with believers as the “comforting” Presence of God. All the indications in the world of the life-giving and life-affirming activity of the God who raised Jesus from the dead constitute such sings. So also do examples of humanity’s overall tendency toward life-affirming actions of kindness and even personal sacrifice.

Every East, I remind myself that many in Jesus’ day saw and yet did not believe because they did not see clearly. I will be able to discern the God of Life and of the Living in the spring flowers in Eastertide, in a parent’s love, in the drive toward justice, and in that Presence who comforts and calls. It requires only a small step of faith to recognize that Presence as the Spirit of the Living God, to hear that voice as that of the Master.

Now, it remains for me only to announce and to affirm by word and by deed that I have met the Risen Christ.