If You're Doubting the Resurrection, You're in Good Company

Maybe you've been sitting with a question you haven't said out loud yet.

You believe, or you're trying to. You show up. You sing the words. But somewhere underneath all of that, there's a quiet wondering: Is the resurrection actually true? And if I'm not sure, does that make me a bad Christian?

Here's what the Gospels actually show us: doubt is not the exception in the Easter story. Doubt is woven into every account, in every Gospel, among every category of witness.

When the women came back from the empty tomb and reported what they had seen, the disciples dismissed it as nonsense. Two followers of Jesus walked with the risen Christ himself on the road to Emmaus and remained unconvinced until he broke bread with them. When Jesus appeared in a room full of his disciples, Luke says they thought he was a ghost. Matthew describes a moment when Jesus was physically standing before the eleven, and the text says plainly that some still doubted, right there in that moment, in his presence.

Thomas is the one we remember. But Thomas was not the outlier. He was simply the most honest.

Why Doubt Makes Sense

The resurrection claim is genuinely, historically staggering.

Before Jesus, there were other Jewish leaders who had gathered followers and proclaimed the arrival of God's kingdom. Rome killed them, every one. And when Rome killed the leader, the movement ended. Every single time. Nobody went home and claimed the dead leader had risen bodily. Nobody kept proclaiming that the executed man was alive and reigning at the right hand of God. That idea would have been absurd to anyone in the first century, including to Jews who believed in resurrection, because resurrection was understood as a corporate event at the end of the age, not something that happened to one person in the middle of history.

When Jesus died on Good Friday, what his disciples had every reason to think was: It's over. We were wrong. We go home now.

They did not go home. And the claim they made instead, that Jesus was bodily, physically alive again, had no precedent and no category. Even they didn't believe it at first. Even though Jesus had told them plainly what would happen.

What Jesus Does with Doubt

Thomas said, "I will never believe." Jesus did not rebuke him. Jesus did not shame him. Jesus came back specifically for Thomas, stood before him, and gave him exactly what he needed to move from unbelief to belief.

What Thomas does next is fall to his knees and make the greatest Christological confession in the Gospel of John: My Lord and my God. The man we remember for his doubt is the first person in John's Gospel to say out loud what the whole book has been building toward from its first verse.

Doubt was not the end of Thomas's story. For Thomas, it was the beginning of the deepest, truest thing he ever said.

Faith You Haven't Earned

After all of this, Jesus says something remarkable, something addressed not to the room he was standing in but to everyone who would come after: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

That is us. We were not there. We will not touch the wounds.

The Apostle Peter understood this. Writing to communities who had never seen Jesus bodily, who were suffering for their faith, he does not tell them to try harder or to stop doubting. He marvels at them: Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory (1 Pet 1:8).

To love someone you have never seen. To trust a testimony about the most unbelievable event in human history. Peter does not treat that as the bare minimum of Christian faith. He treats it as something extraordinary.

Faith is not something we generate by resolving all our doubts first. Faith is something we receive, a gift from the God who raised Jesus from the dead and poured his Spirit into us.

You Don't Have to Have It All Figured Out

If you are carrying doubt, you are in good company. The disciples doubted. The claim is genuinely incredible. And faith in it is not always easy or settled.

What matters is that you haven't walked away from the testimony entirely. What matters is that you're still asking.

The disciples who doubted were the same disciples who eventually fell to their knees before the risen Christ. Doubt is not the end of the story.

Jesus calls the faith of those who have not seen him blessed. Not deficient. Not second-rate. Not a consolation prize for people who came along too late.

Blessed.

We'd love to have you join us at St. Dunstan's. If you're wrestling with questions about faith, resurrection, or what it means to believe, you are welcome here, exactly as you are. Click the button below to plan your visit. You can also read, watch, or listen to Fr. Michael's full sermon on this topic over on his Substack if you want to go deeper.