Canter Bridge

Contrary to widespread suspicion, In Christian experience doubt comingles persistently with belief. Doubt is only seldom faced down as an adversary, in contrast to, say, hardness of heart. Though well-armored hearts produce doubt with regularity, the condition should not be mistaken for the result. Doubt occurs for many more reasons than simply that obstinacy which opposes itself to all evidence that God may be about.

Even the resurrection of Jesus following his execution is narrated in the early Christian documentation of the events in a way that indicates it was not persuasive to all observers. Indeed the gospel of Matthew opposes doubt in the face of signs that Jesus might not have agreed to remain dead not to credulity but rather to worship:

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.

The custodians of his now empty tomb, we are told, had been paid off. Money had changed hands, agreements had been reached, the kinds of conversations had occurred that can be plausibly denied if people stick their noses into things of which they out to remain ignorant.

The ‘disciples’ trooped north to Galilee, as they’d been told to do. Regrouping and accommodation to the reality of yet another dead Jewish messiah might have been the best thing people could hope for.

Instead they find that Jesus is still quite alive. Palpably so, in the most literal of fashions, as another of the gospels reminds us that Thomas—that icon of realistic doubt—was to discover.

Just before finishing with that flourish that we have in recent centuries learned to call the great commission, Matthew’s report records the odd detail that though the disciples as a whole worshipped Jesus, some doubted.

It is not clear that the doubters constituted a separate party that renounced their hopes that this Jesus might lead to good things. Perhaps Matthew simply has the good sense to record that things were not entirely obvious with Jesus.

They seldom are, even when consensus leads to worshipping him being the appropriate response.

Doubt and worship are not final adversaries, even if they compete in space and time for pride of place.