One of my favourite television crime dramas is Death in Paradise, it is gentle, often funny, and whilst it deals with the horrific issue of a suspicious, almost unfathomable death. There have now been four different reluctant British detectives who find themselves on the idyllic Caribbean Island of Saint Marie, the characters are brilliant and the scenery unbelievably beautiful. As a death is discovered there is usually a finite number of suspects, and the death defies all reasonable logic rendering the murder almost impossible to fathom. Within the space of an hour, which is convenient for the TV schedulers, the genius detective gathers the evidence, weighs up the options, then in an unexpected moment the penny drops, he then gathers the suspects together, explains how the crime was committed and names the perpetrator, brilliant, and entertaining, I love it!
One of the biggest issues for the Christian in the modern world is that we live in a scientific age when everything must be proven. The old-fashioned detectives like Jack Regan in the Sweeney, Columbo, and Kojak relied on gut reactions, they had a feeling and then started searching for the evidence to fit and dare I say engineering it on occasions. There was a time when gut feelings were enough. There was also a time of innocent trust, when if somebody told us something, we simply took it at face value and believed. In the modern world of things like scamming, fake news, and AI, we don’t know who we can trust anymore and in our modern world there is a greater hunger for proof, and yet, there are still times in our lives when we need to take things on trust.
The set Bible reading for this Sunday talks about how the risen Jesus appears to his disciples after we know that he has died. Seeing the risen Christ, hearing him speaking to them in the way he had before Good Friday would stretch the minds of even the greatest TV Detectives, so it should be hardly surprising to hear Thomas question what he was being told by his fellow disciples, he needed evidence. Over the years I have been guilty of criticising poor old Thomas for his doubting. We will never know why Thomas wasn’t there when Jesus appeared to the other disciples, where was he? What was he doing? Maybe if he had been there, he would not have needed to doubt, he would have seen for himself and would have been a first-hand witness.
As I get older, I find it less easy to criticize Thomas, what he was being told by the other disciples was beyond belief, putting myself in the shoes of Thomas, I might well have questioned the sanity of my friends if I’d been in the shoes of Thomas 2000 years ago. So much of our Christian faith is based on the fact that Christ who once was dead is now alive. Christians around the world will have said on Easter Day “Christ is alive! He is alive indeed! Alleluia!” it is a fundamental part of our faith but is beyond belief for most people. The whole Thomas story reminds us that there are things in life that are impossible to prove, and, on those occasions, all we have is faith.