So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."  (John 20:25)

(Flipping coin and calling heads each time as I speak) I’m not a betting man - aside from the lottery and the occasional raffle, usually for guitars. I do have some passing understanding of statistics and probability. Back in 1927 a guy called Heisenberg discovered that probability is part and parcel of nature - that with some things we can measure the results will never be certain. It’s called the Uncertainty Principle. And we understand that as human beings. One of the first plays I ever acted in started like this, with one of the central characters flipping a coin over and over and getting heads every time - it’s one of the things that tips him off that he’s not actually a real person but a character in a play.

Of course, some things are more likely than others - to the point that they’re virtually certain. I don’t expect the Earth to stop spinning any time soon, or for this coin not to drop to the floor if I let go of it. Similarly, on my way out of a room, if I hit the light switch I rarely look back to check it’s gone off. Another near-certainty is that when someone’s dead - especially if it’s after being nailed to a cross - they won’t be coming back. Which brings me to Thomas.

Poor Thomas. For centuries he’s been known as “Doubting Thomas” and generally not in an approving way.  Most often, when people have looked at what Jesus says to Thomas, “You have seen and you have believed. Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed” as a criticism of Thomas; faithless Thomas, bad Thomas, Doubting Thomas. Except that doesn’t quite work. The other disciples believed when they saw Jesus - especially, I imagine, when he showed them the holes in his hands and his side.

Of course Thomas doubted what the others told him. It was, literally, incredible. Some people like to dismiss the Gospel accounts of the resurrection of Christ on the basis that people of that time were “primitive” or “unscientific” and therefore prone to believe anything. Nonsense. They knew how the world worked, probably better than you or I do. How many of you know how many days after a new moon to plant crops, what signs to look for when you’re looking for good pasture for flocks?  They had dice and coins - do you think they didn’t have a pretty good idea of the chances of them coming down 6 or heads? And they knew fine well that dead people didn’t come back.

Thomas’s doubt isn’t faithlessness nor blameworthy - it was human; especially for someone who had expressed himself willing to die alongside Jesus and who probably felt doubly wretched about his death. His doubt was human and comprehensible - do you think Jesus didn’t know that? Should we imagine that God, who entered his creation in the life of a human being, to live alongside human beings, didn’t know that?

That’s why Jesus’s response to Thomas is important. He doesn’t cast him away as somehow “unworthy”; he says “Come to me. See.” He doesn’t reject him in his doubt and uncertainty - he meets him in it. And why not? This is Jesus - the Son of Man who has lived and died as a human being; who has known his own times of doubt, of sweating blood at Gethsemane and questioning whether there was some other way than the Cross; of crying out “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”

You and I - human beings - are not God. Einstein once challenged Heisenberg with the phrase, “God does not play dice.” God knows all that is, all that ever was, all that ever will be. He alone has certainty in this world. You and I, we can’t even be sure which way a coin will fall if we flip it into the air. To be human is to know uncertainty and, therefore, to know doubt. And that applies to our religious beliefs - though not necessarily faith - as much as to anything else.

And maybe that’s as it should be. We live in an uncertain world where it’s not always clear what we should do or how we can best serve God or each other; where we can’t be certain what the right thing to do is and that all we can do is roll the dice and hope for the best. There are times when we feel it would be brilliant if God gave us some unmistakeable sign that we’re doing the right thing - that we could be certain.

I’m not sure I want that kind of certainty. Too often people have taken up the sword or the gun because they’ve had an unwavering certainty that what they were doing was right. Too often they have strapped explosives to themselves because they were certain that it was God’s will. Too often they have imposed their certainty on others in ways that have been barbaric. The temptation to that certainty does not come from God.

Not from the God who gave us brains to think and question and reason. Not from the God who came into this uncertain world and suffered the kind of random violence that makes so many its victims. Not from the God who, in the risen Christ, met Thomas in his uncertainty and doubt and said, “Come see”.

This is, for me, one of the tenderest, most moving moments in Scripture. It’s the key reminder that God doesn’t call us to belief - at least not in the sense of a set of doctrines that we have to believe without question or without doubt - but to faith; to trust and to love. It’s the reminder that Christianity isn’t a set of a dozen impossible things to believe before breakfast.

It’s a relationship with God. It’s a relationship with the God who came into an uncertain world to live the life of a human being and who embraced Thomas in his uncertainty and doubt. And it’s trust in that relationship that is faith.

Trust that whatever happens God is beside us all the way. Tomorrow I go back to work and all the kids will be back too. How will the COVID figures change? I don’t know. Nobody knows how the dice will fall. A couple of weeks ago I booked a holiday for the October. Will I get to go? Who knows? Nobody knows how the dice will fall.

In a world of uncertainty and doubt all that God asks of us is that we come to him with our uncertainty and doubt; that we come to the Father who loves us beyond limit of time or chance, a love that will not let us go however frightened or doubtful or uncertain we may be and however the dice may fall.

We live in an uncertain world and sometimes all that gets us through that is knowing that we are not alone. That’s what Thomas found in his encounter with Christ. And it’s what we can do for each other. In this uncertain world sometimes the dice land badly, but we can be with each other in those times. In this uncertain world sometimes the coin comes down tails and suddenly wealth can become poverty, success can become failure, but we can be with each other in those times. In this uncertain world sometimes the way ahead can suddenly seem so dark and we can be filled with doubt and fear, but we can be with each other in the darkness.

We can all be Thomas sometimes and we can be Christ to each other.