HELP THOU MINE UNBELIEF

A SERMON FOR LOW SUNDAY

On this Sunday after Easter, we read the story of the Apostle Thomas, and follow him in his journey from doubt to certitude.   In a sense, it was rather a sad journey—only by placing his finger in the wounds of our Lord was Thomas convinced that Christ had indeed risen from the dead, and for this reason he has always been known as Doubting Thomas.  Without proof, he would not have believed.  The message of today’s Gospel is precisely the one our Lord gave us: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Today’s message is all about the importance of faith.

And yet, I’d like to shift focus this year away from faith itself, without in any way belittling that most important of virtues.  But let’s face it, there are times when too much faith can be a bad thing.  It’s actually pretty obvious if you think about it.  Should we believe everything we’re told?  Obviously not.

There’s a very good reason for often doubting what we’re told.  It’s because it might not be true!

People are very often mistaken when they tell us things.  Maybe we read something on the Internet, and because it falls into our own belief system, because we want it to be true, then we believe it. We give it the assent of a certain natural faith.  There’s a saying that “people believe what they want to believe.”  Caution!  Don’t be too quick to believe what you read, what you hear.  Especially, if you like what you’re being told.  Because when you want to believe it, you’re all the more likely to do so and fall into error.  A case in point would be a false apparition, for example, where our Lady supposedly appears and says things we might agree with.  Be very careful with apparitions that haven’t been approved by the Church (before Vatican II)—there’s probably a very good reason they haven’t been approved, and it would be gullible of us to blindly think that such apparitions have the same value as Fatima, La Salette, and Lourdes.  Or the same value as what God has revealed through Holy Scripture, or by the Church’s long-held and traditional beliefs.  Don’t be taken in!

 Many times, what we’re being told is not just a sincere error on the part of the teller. Sometimes it’s an out-and-out lie, deliberately told in order to deceive us.  People do tell lies, and it would be foolish to think everyone is truthful and virtuous.  Very often they have an agenda, where they will make the facts “fit” so they can persuade others.  This involves twisting the truth, distorting evidence and logic, using insufficient or erroneous data and creating false conclusions.  There are so many ways people can lie.  But lie they do, and if we suspect they are lying, surely then, we must withhold our belief, and doubt what they tell us.

To doubt then is not always wrong.  It’s merely to believe something may not be true or is unlikely.  We may quite legitimately doubt a person if what he says appears unlikely, or if he has a history of embellishing stories, or of exaggerating and even inventing truths for his own purposes.  We would be foolish to give unthinking credence to what he says. 

Today’s message though, is not about being cautious when people tell us something unlikely.  It wasn’t that St. Thomas had a hard time believing the other apostles.  For this, he could have been excused—maybe they were trying to teach him a lesson for being absent from their earlier meeting, or perhaps they were playing a joke on him.  Perhaps he didn’t want to believe for fear of being let down when he finds out it isn’t true.  All this would be excusable.  But Thomas’s sin lies elsewhere.  He failed to believe our Lord.  How many times had our Lord told the apostles that he would be put to death and would rise again on the third day?  But Thomas had doubted the Son of God himself.

God must always be believed.  If God says something is so, then we must not doubt.  We must give the assent of our faith to everything God has revealed to us to be true. And how are we to know that it’s true? Because it has been taught as true for two thousand years from the time of the Apostles until Vatican II.  These are the truths and dogmas of the Church, and we mustbelieve them.  All of them.  We can’t believe some mathematical truths but not others.  I can’t believe that the number three doesn’t exist, for example.  To pretend there’s no ‘3’ would destroy the whole system, for what would happen if I added an apple to the two apples I already had.  How many apples would II have?  Certainly not 4, but I have more than 2.  The whole thing comes crashing down.  And so would our entire theological system collapse if just one dogma were not true.  Because it would mean that when God revealed it, he either made a mistake or he lied to us. Either way, he would no longer be a perfect god, and thus not God at all.  

So what happens if one day we happen to wonder if heaven and hell really do exist, if this or that action really is a sin, if there really are three Persons in the Trinity, or if maybe we just cease to exist when we die…. How bad is this? Is it a sin?  Does it offend God?  Not necessarily.  It’s actually just a temptation, and we should regard such doubt as simply a bad thought that has to be treated like any other.  Don’t play around with it, don’t let it fester in your mind.  Don’t wish your doubt to be true, for example, by wishing something were not sinful so we could take advantage of it, or if we deliberately give in to the doubt so as to reject our belief in some aspect of the faith. Doubt will, at some point, become sinful.  But usually, if we treat it properly, it is simply a temptation.  And like all temptations, it is something to thank God for, even as we fight it, for it is a test from him to find out if we’re worthy of grace, and ultimately worthy of heaven.

In the case of St. Thomas, it wasn’t so much a case of doubt as a refusal to believe the very Word of God.   If Thomas had faith, he would not have been so obstinate that he required physical proof of the Resurrection before giving it the assent of his belief.  His was a classic case where doubt was willingly accepted and Thomas yielded to temptation and rejected his faith.

And yet Doubting Thomas went on to be a saint.  Like other apostles, he sinned, but went on to great holiness.  Even St. Peter had his moments of doubt. Think when he impetuously jumped from his boat and walked on water to go meet his Lord.  As soon as he realized what he was doing, he doubted and sank beneath the waves.  With faith, our Lord tells us we can move mountains.  So what should we do when that first little doubt inserts itself into our hearts and minds, and we contemplate questioning even just one little dogma of the Catholic faith? When we stand at the edge of that great chasm of emptiness and despair that would surely open up and swallow us if we yield to the temptation of doubt, and our whole belief system then comes logically crashing down and we are left to contemplate a world without God and a life without purpose? What should we do?

The answer is we should pray.  Recite the Act of Faith, and remember that God can neither deceive nor be deceived.   If that’s not good enough, to remember the story of the father who brought his possessed son to our Lord, begging him to drive out the demon from him.  The poor boy had been possessed from his infancy, and would roll around on the ground, gnashing his teeth and foaming at the mouth.  The poor father had tried many times to get the apostles to cast out the demon but they were unable.  He was beginning to lose faith.  And then our Lord told him, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.  And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears,”—and this is what we must all learn to say in those moments of doubt… “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”