Hamilton Barber

Jesus, you are the Lord of everything, The heir to the cattle on a thousand hills, and yet, when you broke five loaves and two fish, the first thing you did was give thanks.  Teach me how to thank the Father as you did.   Everything won’t always go my way. My plans won’t always pan out, my ideas won’t always win, my efforts will not always succeed, but I know yours will, so teach me how to thank you and trust that your way is better.    When I am anxious, may I thank you for my breath. When I am tired, may I thank you for my rest. When I do not like myself, may I thank you for how you made me. When I do not love my neighbor, may I thank you for how you made them.   Whatever I do,  may I glorify you. Whatever I say,  may I honor you. Wherever I go, may I tell others of you.   May the overflow of my gratitude lead me to make more of you.   Whether I am surrounded by family or I am alone, teach me how to love the people you’ve given me to love, how to be grateful for you giving them to me, how to wear my gratitude like a blanket I can give to those who need the warmth.   May my thanks be immediate and lavish– generously given and never expected in return– may it be the light by which those people who look at me see you.   Amen.

Oh, God who makes,  who spent six days at work, who carved and sculpted the earth, who refined and appraised and saw: See me, too, as I ready my hands, As I make my plans, As I set my alarm and blink away weariness in the quiet morning. See me as my list grows, as my responsibilities deepen, as my obligations expand. See me not as the sum of what I can produce but as the person I am: as a being with fears and dreams, as a child of the King.   Oh, King who came as a carpenter, who did not give himself the comfort of easy living, who knew the value of a job done perfectly: Know me, too, as I do my very best As I finish what is set before me, As I learn how to begin well  and follow through and finish honorably Just as you do.    Oh, Lord of the harvest, remind me whose ravens bring the bread And remind me that sometimes they bring opportunity instead. May I waste neither, And may I find rest knowing You have created me to find joy in my labor.   Amen.

Let’s talk about the doubting disciple.  I don’t mean Peter, who sank into the sea. Or Judas, who sold his Lord for cash. Or Mary, who thought Jesus’ body was stolen.  I mean the one you’re pretty sure I’m dancing around: Thomas—the Doubter. Thomas gets this little title from what he says in John 20:24-25: Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” I can’t help but think some of you feel the same way. Maybe you don’t buy all of this Jesus stuff as much as you might like to. You would if only you could see him. Touch him. You just need a little more than what you’ve gotten so far. I have good news: there’s more to Thomas than meets the eye, and he tells us something about how Jesus works that encourages people like you and me. The tales of a believer John wasn’t interested in telling a complete story about Jesus’s life. He wanted to prove something about who Jesus was. John 20:31 tells us the goal of his book, “That you may believe Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.” So John carefully selected every account for that purpose.  Thomas appears three times in the book of John. His first appearance is in John 11. Jesus is in Jericho, preparing to go to Bethany to raise Lazarus from the dead, but his disciples aren’t thrilled about the plan. John 11:8 reads, “Didn’t they just try to kill you there?” They debate the semantics of some of Jesus’ words. They assume some conclusions about sleep and death. There is some back-and-forth, but eventually, silent Thomas speaks up in verse 16: Let’s also go, so that we may die with him. John wants to tell us something about Thomas: he was devoted to Jesus, even to the point of dying. Thomas’s second appearance comes the night before Jesus died. Jesus has just finished washing his disciples’ feet when he says, in John 14:1-4, “I am going away to prepare a place for you. If I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come back and receive you to myself, so that where I am you may be also. You know the way to where I am going.”  This time, there’s no discussion. Jesus’ puzzling final statement, “You know the way,” hangs in the silent air. But then it’s Thomas who speaks for the group: “Lord, we don’t know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” (John 14:5) When everyone else sat dumbfounded, Thomas brought an honest question to Jesus. It wasn’t enough to sit, not knowing; Thomas needed clarity. This tells us something else about Thomas: he was a genuine seeker. An honest asker. He would rather speak up and wrestle with the truth than sit silently in the dark.  The doubt of a believer These two encounters between Jesus and Thomas laid the foundation for the third, climactic moment in their relationship. A lot has happened in the past week or so: Thomas has had his feet washed by his Master. He has seen Peter slice the ear off a temple guard and fumed as Judas sold out their group. Then, he watched Jesus be carried away in shackles, heard about his beating and crucifixion, and learned about His lifeless body left in a tomb. This is speculation, but I imagine all this was too much for a quiet, thoughtful, devoted man to bear. After Jesus died, the rest of the disciples were together, but Thomas wasn’t with them. Some grieve with companions; Thomas needed to be alone. The man he said he would die alongside had died without him. His brothers and sisters were being actively pursued. He was haunted by the details of his Master’s death. So he was by himself when Jesus came to them and when they told him Jesus was back, it wasn’t that he was unwilling to believe them.  It’s that he was unable to.  This man, prone to introspection, rooting out the truth with questions, and quiet, unassuming devotion, simply did not have enough evidence to give him hope. So, he doubted. For people like Thomas, it’s not enough to hear there’s something to believe in. He had to know for himself. He needed to be sure that the planks lining his ship of belief weren’t rotten, or else he could be sure of only one thing: that it would sink. The belief of a believer Thomas’ conditions for belief were crystal clear: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” (John 20:25) Jesus knew this. That’s why, a week later, in an upper room crowded with Jesus’ closest friends, He singled Thomas out and told him two things: First: Have some peace. Second: Touch my hands. Jesus knew what Thomas needed, and, in typical Jesus fashion, he cut to the heart of the matter without wasting any time. That’s the thing about Jesus: he knows your conditions for belief. When you look around your upper room surrounded by people who do not struggle with the doubt you shoulder, He knows what you need. Yes, it’s a blessing to believe without having seen, but it’s beautiful to be greeted by Jesus with peace, with an invitation to touch him, experience him, and know him in the exact way you need to believe in him.  Jesus knows you. And Jesus knows what you require. Even a man who watched Jesus walk on water had doubts, and Jesus invited his investigation. And He invites yours.  The reality of doubt is that it exists. No matter who you are, you’re going to encounter it. Some of your doubts will be massive; others will be tiny.  Tim Keller wrote in The Reason for God, “A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask the hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.” Jesus is a safe place to bring your doubts because all he requires is as much faith as you have in as much of him as you know. Sometimes, “all of the faith you have” is as plentiful as a widow’s mite. It’s as loud as a whisper. It’s as big as a mustard seed. But with Jesus, that’s enough to move mountains. Bring whatever you have–even if it is empty hands and more questions than you think there are answers to–and watch what he can do with it.

Read Socrates and Jesus: Part One. Sometime before he was standing before Pilate, Jesus said something difficult to the people who believed that he was who he said he was: You are truly my disciples if you remain faithful to my teachings. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. John 8:31-32 He said that you will know the truth. The Truth. What is Truth? What a slippery question. In the 1800s, Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier coined the term “Epistemology,” which comes from two Greek words: episteme, meaning knowledge and understanding, and logos, meaning the study of. So, epistemology means “the study of how we know things.” Ferrier, standing at the end of a long line of people asking questions about Truth (which he represents with the word Knowledge—notice the capital letters), came to a conclusion. If we are to Know (K) something, we must have a true (T) belief (B) about it. He gave it like an equation: K = TB Let’s put it in an example. I am currently typing this from Atlanta, Georgia. If I told you, “I am in Atlanta,” we could credit that to my account as knowledge. It turns out that my Belief of my location (Georgia) is True. Amazing. Case closed. Knowledge and Truth solved. Unfortunately, there are two problems with this definition. It needs something else. If Knowledge is simply the act of collecting true beliefs, Truth is as simple as memorizing the dictionary. You can find all kinds of “true” things in there. Loads of things that are not wrong. That kind of knowledge is fine for statements like “I know that I’m sitting at my desk,” but it doesn’t really cut it for bigger things. Try it on for “I know that God exists.” It falls a little short. The question is, what can we add to “True Belief” in order to equal Knowledge? One camp says that it’s Reliability. Knowledge = a Reliably True Belief. Here’s what that looks like. You’re standing with a friend in a field, and she is a professional archer. You watch as she strings her bow in a particular way, notches an arrow the same way she has thousands of times before, draws, adjusts her breathing, gauges the wind, lets the arrow fly, and nails the bullseye in a hay bale fifty yards away. Then you watch her do it again. And again. Nine shots out of the ten she takes are perfect bullseyes: we can say she is a good archer because she can reliably hit the bullseye. So imagine her surprise when it’s your turn. You step up, do your best to imitate her steps, lose your arrow with a wish, and watch as it slams the hay bale dead center. You try to match those motions yet again, and, much to your surprise, you watch yet another perfect shot sail toward its target. In this little isolated incident, an onlooker would see two people who are both equally good at archery because you both produce reliable results (from their point of view). But you know, deep down, that there’s no way you should be considered an archer of your friend’s caliber. Like our archers, Knowledge seems to need something more than what someone could stumble into. We can’t afford to be guessing and hoping on those bigger propositions, those “I know that God exists” propositions. That’s handy because there’s another camp in this debate. They think that what you need is not reliability but justification. Knowledge only counts if we understand the steps it took to get us there. Knowledge = a Justified True Belief Here’s what this looks like. Your two friends, Smith and Jones, are going in for an interview with their boss, where only one will get a raise. Smith has every reason to believe that Jones is the person who’s going to get the raise, due in part to his boss saying, “Smith, you’d better step it up. Jones is a shoo-in.” Smith had not stepped it up; he knew that Jones would beat him out. As they walk in, Jones notices a nickel and a penny on the ground and bends over to pick them up. He pockets the change and continues on his way, but Smith thinks strangely, “Imagine that. The guy who gets this raise will have six cents in his pocket when he gets the news.” His belief is perfectly justified: he’s been told that Jones is a shoo-in for the raise, and he watched Jones pocket the change from the sidewalk. Much to his surprise, though, Smith is the one who gets the raise. Even more surprising was when he went to pay for lunch afterward, he noticed he had put yesterday’s change in his pocket and had forgotten about a nickel and a penny. Smith’s knowledge that “the one who gets the raise will have six cents in his pocket” was absolutely true….but it feels a little anticlimactic. He just got lucky. Turns out, knowing the Truth is kind of tricky. The spiral has begun. The number of pages devoted to trying to understand Truth grows daily, and it seems we’re no closer to understanding it than when we started. Skeptics will argue, “Knowledge? Truth? You can’t even know you’re not just a brain-in-a-vat experiencing a dream.” Anti-skeptics will counter, “I can touch my two hands together and experience it as a real thing. That’s good enough for me.” Coherentists will say, “Truth-gathering is like building a ship at sea. You’ve got to find what can keep you afloat for a while until you can step back and start replacing all of the rotten boards.” Optimists will say, “Truth may not be knowable right now, but everything is eventually knowable, and the act of learning it is the engine of progress.” Nihilists will say, “Yes, but the truth is nothing but a construct of consensus and convention.” For every point, there is a counterpoint. For every justification, there is a string of necessary justifications. The closer we get to what Truth is, the farther away from our grasp it seems to be. It is a sloping asymptote on the way to, but never reaching, understanding. Still, there is an echo of a promise made two thousand years ago pinging around the chambers of our hearts: you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free. What is Truth? What is Truth, indeed? Perhaps Truth, after all, is impossible. Five hundred years before Jesus’ and Pilate’s conversation on the morning of Jesus’ execution, Socrates stirred up trouble in Greece. But this kind of thinking didn’t start with Socrates. Almost two hundred years before Socrates, there was a different Greek named Parmenides who was doing his own work with Truth. He argued something remarkable: There is not, nor shall there be, anything besides what is. Again, you can feel Pilate’s sighing, sarcastic eye roll from here. Riddles and aphorisms. This will get us nowhere. It’s just pedantry and pretension. Even though it is tedious, consider the implications of such an idea. You can’t conceive of something that doesn’t exist—even if it only exists as a thought. You can’t devise a color that you’ve never seen; you can’t invent a sound you’ve never heard. Once conceived, they exist in your mind; if you make them, it exist in the “real world.” I think that God might agree. Consider what He told Moses to tell Pharaoh: “I Am that I Am,” He said. “Tell them that I AM sent you.” (Exodus 4:13-14) This was the name God chose for Himself. In two words, it encapsulates everything that God is: He was not born, He Is. He did not become, He Is. He does not change, He Is. In the beginning, God was, and He created the heavens and the earth. And He began speaking. He continued speaking—to people, through people, around people. He went out of His way to break into the creation He spun from nothing and taught them who He was. Eventually, the psalmist would write, “The sum of your word is Truth” (Psalm 119:160). The end result of the very Word of God is Truth. That’s what it adds up to; that’s what each part points toward. What’s more amazing still is that this Word was there with God in the beginning (John 1:1). That this Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). This Word, now wrapped in flesh, called Himself Truth (John 14:6). Can you explain this business of the Word becoming flesh? Can you fathom how this Jesus could be both fully God and fully man? Could you describe the Trinity, the holy mystery of three-in-one? We can try. But we fall short. And that’s okay. St. Augustine wrote in On Christian Doctrine, “A person who is a good and true Christian should recognize that Truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found.”¹ Years later, CS Lewis would write, “My idea of God is not divine. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.”² Truth is God’s truth, wherever you find it. Even if you don’t understand it. Where the Believer is wrong, God Himself comes to shatter untruth and replace it with Himself. Regardless of whether you know it, you can know the One who calls Himself Truth—this man who stood before Pilate and declared His purpose for coming to earth: to bear witness to it. The same man who stood on a shore in Galilee and answered Peter’s incessant questioning. He dismissed the idea of trying to justify doctrine, of trying to prove something impossible, and simply encouraged him with a challenge… you follow Me. We can grapple with Truth if we want. We can try to reason our way to it or brute force a way to discern it. But before we do any of that, we must look up and see that Truth Himself is still reaching out His hand toward you and saying the same thing He has said for two thousand years: Follow Me. Then you will know the Truth, which will set you free. ¹Augustine of Hippo, Saint Augustine: On Christian Doctrine ²C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: The Seabury Press, 1961)

Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare hadn’t written a single word. The Spaniard Ponce de León had only just landed across the Atlantic and named the land La Florida. Queen Elizabeth I wasn’t even born yet. Five hundred years is a long time. Five hundred years before Jesus appeared one morning in Pilate’s courtyard, a chubby, bearded rabble-rouser was causing a ruckus in Greece. Socrates is said to have been short with stubby features and balding, and his contemporary descriptions describe his gait as a duck. He was a bit of a sagely bridge troll. At his home in Athens, there was a famous temple at Delphi where the oracles lived. Leading up to the entryway to this temple, the words γνῶθι σεαυτόν—“Know Thyself”—were engraved into the stone. When engraved, it meant something different than the modern reader would think. It was a tribute to the god Apollo, meaning “Know your station in life. Let gods be gods, let kings be kings, and don’t try to upset someone else’s position in the social sphere.” Socrates flipped this aphorism on its head and then paired it with one of his most famous assertions: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” He took “Know Thyself” from knowing your place regarding community and implanted meaning “know who you are internally.” He turned it from extrospection to introspection. Value systems weren’t the only thing he upended. One of the more enduring institutions he changed was instruction itself. He had this way of teaching that was incredibly annoying, which we have come to call the Socratic Method. In this method, direct instruction is nonexistent; the teacher doesn’t instruct. They question. Each sentence the student speaks is answered with a question. Questions after questions—asymptotes on the way to understanding. So even though he was famous for this line of questioning, there’s one dialogue he has that stands out as a little bit strange: in it, he gives a direct answer. He’s conversing with a man named Glaucon, in which they are trying to get at the root of what a philosopher is. Eventually, Glaucon asks, “Whom do you mean by ‘genuine philosophers’?” Socrates answered him straight up: “The genuine philosopher is one whose passion it is to see the truth.” You can see Pilate’s eye roll from here. Greece rolled its eyes at Socrates, too. He was eventually sentenced to death for corrupting the youth and teaching against the gods of the state, but his ideas endured. They inspired his student, Plato. And Plato’s student, Aristotle. And then the entirety of the Christian tradition, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution. We even see Socrates’ influence in Scripture. He’s all but named! Notice Acts 17:16-18 (emphasis mine): While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply troubled by all the idols he saw everywhere in the city. He went to the synagogue to reason with the Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles, and he spoke daily in the public square to all who happened to be there. He also had a debate with some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. When he told them about Jesus and his resurrection, they said, “What’s this babbler trying to say with these strange ideas he’s picked up?” Others said, “He seems to be preaching about some foreign gods.” Here’s Paul in Socrates’ birthplace five hundred years after Socrates taught there, and he’s debating with two types of people: Epicureans and Stoics. The Stoics were disciples of a man named Antisthenes, who was, you might have guessed, a student of Socrates. The Epicureans developed out of the Stoics, opposing their lines of thinking. Socrates birthed both of them. And Paul was there, in the birthplace of Western thought, going toe-to-toe with their best thinkers and delivering the good news about Jesus. Every bit of this informs the hand-wave Pilate gave Jesus on the morning of his execution. The Socratic Method had already spread far and wide; professional philosophers were already arguing loudly in public places; pedantic discussions flashed their bright red warning lights. One of these types, Pilate’s dismissive answer suggests. I won’t argue about what truth is on a Friday morning.  Pilate’s sarcastic “What is truth?” is a parody of the Socratic Dialectic that he was undoubtedly familiar with and most definitely annoyed by. A sigh of resignation and over it. This man standing before him is just an annoyance, muddying up his Friday and causing a ruckus about truth. But his question is even more bothersome than you might think. Click here to read part two of Socrates and Jesus.