“But Some Doubted”
I am grateful to the Holy Spirit for keeping a canonical record of doubt in the post-resurrection narratives. It was a risk that would, in time, produce a war of words in church history, but it was a risk that God saw fit to take, and for that I again thank God.
At the end of Matthew’s gospel, the disciples have gathered around Jesus, ready to receive his final blessing and mandate. Prior to receiving both, the text tells us in 28:17 that “some worshiped, but others doubted.”
The text shows no interest in identifying the precise nature of this doubt nor in producing any value judgment upon it. It simply includes it as a matter of fact: “some doubted.”
That doubt may have involved a wavering of faith. It may have involved an anxious fear over what lay ahead without their Messiah nearby. Or it may simply have involved a wondering how all of these things could be so. It’s all rather fantastical, after all. How could Christ’s physical departure involve his permanent presence with them by his Spirit? How exactly will the gates of hell not prevail? How is death—life? Littleness—greatness? Down—up?
But the fear and the mixed-up feelings and the doubt that the first disciples felt do not represent absolute failures of faith, nor an obstacle to the work of the Spirit to produce a miracle of faith in them.
The gospel writers, thanks be to God, refuse to photoshop the disciples’ fear. While it remains ever-present, it does not represent an impossible barrier to God’s work to produce courage in them.
Nor are the disciples’ mixed-up feelings doctored up so that subsequent generations might worry that their own mixed-up feelings represented a deficit or defect of faith. These feelings are left in the narrative because mixed-up feelings are native to the territory of faith rather than aberration to it. Job and Jeremiah, amongst other saints throughout history, testify to this fact.
Léon Bonnat, "Job" (1880)
And the gospel writers don’t edit out the doubt from their accounts of the risen Christ because doubt remains a central character in the tragicomic play of life in a broken world and because the risen Christ graciously extends to us his mercy in the middle of our doubts, not despite them.
I thank God, then, that he’s seen fit to keep these things in the Easter story so that future generations will find their own agonies of faith represented in the narratives of the Incarnate God who abides with us in the doubt, or as the psalms might put it, “in the depths,” and who by his Spirit forms a church where such feelings are lovingly encountered at the center of our communal life rather than cast out to the margins of it.
Rembrandt, "Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem" (1630)
