Worship and Doubt

Trinity Sunday, Year A

Sketch of the Trinity, William Blake

Genesis 1:1-2:4a | Psalm 8 | 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 | Matthew 28:16-20

The readings for the Sunday of the Holy Trinity were not assigned to convince us once and for all of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity but because they give witness the mystery of God. The reading from Matthew includes the trinitarian formula, 2 Corinthians mentions the three persons of the Trinity, and the first creation account uses the divine plural in the creation of humanity, “Let us make humans in our image …” (1:26)

The passage from Matthew is known as the Great Commission. Matthew ends his gospel not with his own words but with the authoritative words of Jesus. Verses 18 to 20 form a cohesive unit. Verses 16 and 17 serve as their introduction.

I grew up in the church and thinking back to my youth I remember this passage only as the passage of the Great Commission. As such it was authoritative, so much so that we missed its introduction.

The eleven had followed the command of Jesus to come to Galilee (28:7) and this is the first encounter between Jesus and the eleven following the resurrection. Matthew tells us that “When they saw [Jesus], they worshipped him; but some doubted.”

In the greater context of the gospels this is not entirely surprising as the disciples often meet Jesus with fear rather than joy. This was true when Jesus met them in the storm (Matt 14) as well as on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt 17). In Luke the disciples assume Jesus to be a ghost (24:37) while the doubt of Thomas (John 20) has become proverbial.

Still, at least ancient interpreters had difficulty with the statement that worship and doubt could coexist. In order to solve this problem some assumed that perhaps more than the eleven had been present and that it must have been those unnamed others who had doubted. Other interpreters changed the tense of doubting to suggest that doubt was a thing of the past (as in ‘then they doubted, but now they worshipped’).^[1] However, without assuming things we are not told or changing the text, the only question is whether all of them doubted or just some of them. The answer to that question seems inconsequential because either way, worship and doubt remain side by side.

On a day such as Trinity Sunday it would be easy to reduce doubt to an intellectual problem that then would require an intellectual solution, yet that is not what is going on here. It is good for us to remember what the disciples had lived through. Their whole world was turned on its head for the three years they followed Jesus. Suddenly at the crucifixion everything they had come to believe about Jesus seemed nullified, and now they are back to what had taken them three long years to start to live into.

But not only did they have to again come to terms with the fact that God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; that God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; that God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are (1 Cor 1), they also had to understand that the cross is God’s means of salvation.

Ulrich Luz writes that for Matthew the faith of the disciples is not a certainty beyond all doubt but that their faith lives in the space between trust and discouragement, between certainty and doubt. Little faith is not suddenly overcome and left behind but continues to be the reality in which the disciples live.^[2]

This is evident also in the episode of Peter sinking into the lake waters; yet despite his small faith Peter is chosen to be the one on whom Christ will build the church.

When our eldest was seven years old, the parents of one of her friends were getting divorced. Thinking that I needed to alleviate any fears she may have had, I said to her, “Do not worry. Mama and I will not separate.” Our astute seven year old replied unimpressed, “How do you know?” Of course, I did not and now had to admit it.

Thinking about it now, I understand that in my desire to alleviate potential fears I was dealing with my own unstable childhood. But that being said, I had no certainty. And not having certainty can be a good thing, for certainty can make us complacent.

And complacency may be the problem of the West’s last 50 years. We took democracy for granted and thought that our standard of living and our conveniences could only ever increase. But now that things don’t look as rosy as we had hoped and we worry about the future, complacency is no longer an option.

Frederick Buechner famously said “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”

And this brings us back to the question of whether the doubt of the disciples applies to all of the eleven or just to some of them. If Buechner is right, and I think that he is, then I prefer the idea of all disciples worshipping and doubting, for their doubt keeps them engaged in love toward the world and in the work of the Kingdom. It is those worshipping and doubting disciples that Jesus commissions.

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^[1]Ulrich Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (Mt 26-28), EKK, Benziger and Neukirchner, 2002 Düsseldorf, Zürich, Neukirchen-Vluyn, page 438-39

^[2]Ibid, page 440

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