The daughter of Karl Marx once confessed to a friend that she had never been brought up in any religion and had therefore never been religious.

“But”, she said, “the other day I came across a beautiful little prayer which I very much wish could be true.”

“And what was the prayer?” her friend asked.

Slowly the daughter of Karl Marx began repeating in German:

“Our Father, who art in heaven…”

Wishing something could be true is at the heart of today’s Gospel which centres on the unbelief of Thomas, the disciple who is called ‘doubting’ because he couldn’t believe what the other disciples told him about the risen Christ.

For reasons we are not told, Thomas was missing on that first Easter Day so the heady excitement of that first Easter Morning with its rolled away stone and the amazing vision of the Risen Christ was something outside his experience.  Maybe Thomas was one of those who always demand proof. You might be taken in, he seems to be saying. You might be swayed by the emotion of the moment but not me. I’m a rational being. I’m logical and what you are saying defies logic – so I won’t share your euphoria.  Or maybe he belongs to another group – those who, because the experience isn’t theirs deny it to others.

One of the effects of Easter is that it can catch you up into its breathtaking exuberance.  A lot of religion is like that – and some would say that it isn’t all that different from the euphoria of say, a football match when your team is on a winning streak. We’ve seen and heard it on television and, in my dim and distant past I’ve been part of that on the terraces of Old Trafford (where?).  It’s easy to be caught up when all around you are screaming and yelling with mass joy.  Others would say that’s the kind of feeling you get at a Pop concert or, for some at least, the last night of the Proms.  There’s actually nothing wrong with that – in fact, the reverse. We need the experience of being so caught up in joyful worship that our own faith becomes enlivened and Spirit-filled.

But there is another side to Easter and it’s the quiet reflective side. Not all good religion is emotional nor does it produce great highs and if we rely on a Christianity that is for ever looking for mountain-top experiences we are going to be disappointed – and rightly so because our faith has to carry us through troughs and dark valleys as well as great uplifts.

A wise priest of the 19th century, H. P. Liddon, who helped found the first C of E Theological College, once said that the greatest test of love (of God) is not emotion but obedience –and often that obedience is to the nitty-gritty daily grind of faith.  Take the clergy, for example. Like everyone else they need spiritual highs but every day of their lives they are bidden to engage in a form of prayer which is known as the Office of morning/evening prayer. This follows a set form of biblical canticles (verse songs); psalms and a systematic reading through the Bible.  Usually undertaken in the bleariness of morning or the weariness of evening, it rarely produces a spiritual high but it is the ongoing heartbeat of reflective biblical prayer on which the spiritual life of our Church depends.  Often it is this slogging away at prayer which opens us to a God-experience which if not mind-blowing is heart-warming and life-sustaining even, especially, in its blackest moments.

But back to Thomas – denied his spiritual high and applying to the disciples’ witness a brutal logic.  Into this unpromising, doubtful life, Jesus steps in, though not immediately. Thomas had to wait eight long, fretful days.  Nor did Jesus burst upon him in quite the same way that he encountered Mary Magdalene. Sure, he walked through a door into a locked room – which is pretty fantastic but he came with soothing words of peace. And then, quietly, he gave Thomas the proof he needed and Thomas found his mind and heart unlocked.  “My Lord and my God” was Thomas’s response – one of the most profound, yet also simple, heartfelt praises of Christianity.  This from one whose heart was filled with doubt!

For centuries afterwards we have labelled sceptics as ‘doubting Thomas’s’ but if we are saying by this that doubt is something contrary to faith; that if you doubt you can’t be a true believer, we’ve got it wrong, because the opposite of faith is unbelief not doubt.  Doubt is, actually, the refiner of faith.

When I worked with ordination candidates we used a booklet produced by our Central Church Ministry Board known as the Criteria for Selection.  Surprisingly for something produced by a C of E Committee it contained a wealth of spirituality and one thing it said was this:

God is greater than our hearts and minds or he would not be God. Certainty is therefore not to be had. A degree of agnosticism is an important element in the faith of a Christian. It is a God-given tool, provoking exploration leading to greater understanding even if that means we sometimes have to proceed through a negative way.

Then came a chilling observation:

A glib and watertight faith that acknowledges no doubt becomes a tool rather of the devil than of God, for it can do harm both to the gospel we proclaim and to the person proclaiming it.

What is meant by that is that a seemingly watertight, unshakeable faith puts a barrier around the Gospel we proclaim. It says – this is what it is, this is what it means and there is no other interpretation. What I believe you must believe and in exactly the same way or you aren’t a real Christian.

An awful lot of Christianity has been packaged that way and it excludes rather than includes because it demands an allegiance to a set of beliefs which are often impossible because they are not of God but of our own making. It’s very easy to reduce God to the level of our own limited understanding without raising ourselves to the unlimited and eternal vision of God.  Without such a vision our faith will never change and never grow. God can never act nor can He change our way of thinking or being.

And that is precisely what God goes on doing. Our exploration of faith is a journey from cradle to grave and only on the other side of death will we know the ultimate truth though, hopefully, we are given strong indications throughout our life just what that truth may be – because the truth is contained in Jesus Christ, born into our midst. Crucified, Risen and Glorified, Jesus has changed human destiny and so can change all of us – as a hymn puts it – from glory to glory.

Thomas is a living example of this change. He had spent three years living as close to Jesus as anyone can ever get. His faith was watertight, unswerving. Remember when he said that the disciples should go with Jesus to Jerusalem and there die with him. Very strong faithful words!  But when it came to the crunch, Thomas fled with the rest. What use unswerving faith then?  And then came doubt – perhaps in God and in the promises God had made and which Thomas now distrusted.  It’s not an unfamiliar place for some of us.

We can have such a certainty in God but then something shakes our life to its very foundation and somehow we feel let down. God hasn’t answered us in the way we would like. He hasn’t behaved as we expect him to. He hasn’t given us the ‘high’ we long for. He no longer fits into the neat image we have constructed for him. So we doubt.  And there is that other doubt that Thomas faced – not in God but in himself.  He really believed he was strong – he really meant it when he talked of dying with Christ but then he didn’t do it. He fled.  Part of Thomas’s doubt was self-doubt.  And perhaps we’ve been there too.

We let God down – maybe in small ways, maybe big but when our faith is put to the test – as surely it must be if we are to grow spiritually – we are found wanting.  We don’t know what went through Thomas’s mind when the Risen Christ stood before him. We only know that when Jesus offered him the proof he said he wanted, he didn’t do what Jesus said he could do. He didn’t touch the wounds. He simply cried out with renewed faith.  It is that other let-down we have to look at – that of Peter – to see that the misery of failure and self-doubt can be turned round - not by Peter’s renewed faith but by our Lord’s continued and unswerving faith in Him.  But in both cases, it was God’s action that changed things – that opened a new growth in faith. He rebuilt and renewed faith. And that is ultimately our salvation.

We might sometimes feel God has abandoned us. Or we might know that through some action of ours we have abandoned him.  We might try to gloss over this sense of loss by having doubt – after all doubt can mask anything and can be itself a delusion.  But it doesn’t matter because it isn’t what we do that can make things better. It can only be God’s loving action that does this.

And what this Gospel Resurrection story should tell us is that out of sheer love for each one of us – God will indeed act – though as Thomas had to discover – in God’s own time because we can’t manipulate God to act. He will only do so when he knows we are ready and when his action can result in real, genuine, heartfelt praise which springs from a faith which is true.

The daughter of Karl Marx wanted the Lord’s Prayer to be true. Maybe it never was for her but God’s love for us is true and if we want it to be true for us, he will find a way of making it so.  “My Lord and My God” said Thomas – A genuine cry of renewed faith – but made possible not by Thomas but by Christ.