Believing is Seeing

Bread and Wine Reading: "Believing is Seeing", Romano Guardini

Scripture Reading: John 20: 20-25
After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

Most of us are a lot like Thomas. We want proof. We want to be sure. We don’t want to make the wrong decision, go down the wrong road, assume the wrong thing, or look like a fool. Proof is good. Proof means certainty. Proof removes any doubt. But what does “proof” have to do with faith? Romano Guardini reminds us that “nothing that comes from God, even the greatest miracle, can be proven like 2 x 2 = 4. It touches one; it is only seen and grasped when the heart is open and the spirit purged of self. Then it awakens faith.”


The truth is, God never promised us certainty. God never promised us that we would see proof of our belief. Faith, you see, is not certainty. If there was certainty, why would we need faith at all? If you read farther beyond the Scripture passage, Jesus did indeed show Thomas his proof and Thomas believed. (Interestingly, the passage doesn’t say that Thomas even took Jesus up on his offer to touch his hands!) Then Jesus looked him in the eye and said “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” But this “proof” was not shown until one week later according to the Scripture. So, did Thomas all of a sudden believe because Jesus showed him the proof? (That’s usually how we read it.) Or, had Thomas spent that week mired in questions and doubts, searching and straining and exploring his own understanding of who Jesus was so that when he saw, it was because he believed?

Does everything always have to be clear for us to believe? God doesn’t prove God’s existence. Instead, God shows us. God shows us in the unexpected and the ordinary, in the grand and in the seemingly unimpressive, in our successes and even in our failures. Faith isn’t about proof or certainty. I think God knew and perhaps even hoped that we would sometimes have doubts, hoped that we would question our understandings enough that they would become ours, rather than someone else’s that we had simply decided worked for us. Hans Kung said that “doubt is the shadow cast by faith. One does not always notice it, but it is always there, though concealed. At any moment it may come to action. There is no mystery of the faith which is immune to doubt.” “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Belief is not about seeing what is there but about seeing what you know. Faith is not about seeing things; it is about allowing yourself to see. God does not call us to a blind, unexamined faith, accepting all that we see as certain, unquestionable truth; God instead calls us to an illumined doubt, through which we search and journey toward a greater understanding of God, through which we see God for ourselves. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Believing is seeing.

Discussion Questions:
1.) Where in everyday life do you see God?
2.) What, for you, is the difference between faith and certainty? Which is more comfortable for you?
3.) What effect does certainty have on faith?

So go forth and see, whether or not you have seen!

Grace and Peace,

Shelli