At the Very Same Time--June 1, 2026

 

At the Very Same Time--June 1, 2026

"Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.  When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted." (Matthew 28:16-17)

We don't get to divide the world into two separate piles of "wholly devout, unwavering believers" on the one hand and "impious, incredulous doubters" on the other.  At least not if we take the Gospel seriously.  We are always simultaneously both: the faithful and the fickle, the devout and the doubtful, the trusting and the skeptic.  And that means our belonging in the family of Jesus isn't a reward for being staunch believers with unquestionable and unquestioning faith.  Our belonging comes because Jesus has claimed us, knowing full well that even in our best moments our sincere worship is laced with honest doubt, too.

That's a detail we sometimes overlook here in these final verses of Matthew's Gospel, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship.  Often we are quick to skip ahead to the so-called "Great Commission," when Jesus charges his disciples to go and "make disciples of all nations," which sends us galavanting off to share our faith with others, tell people the Good News and to "bring a friend" to church with us (if we dare to do any of those things).  But before we get to that high-minded mission, let's spend a moment with the introduction Matthew gives us to this final scene of his movie.

When Jesus had appeared at the empty tomb at the beginning of Matthew 28, back on what we call Easter Sunday, the risen Christ told the women at the tomb to pass along the message to the disciples to meet him in Galilee, and now here they are assembled at the particular spot Jesus had told them about.  They see him--and in Matthew's telling, this is the first time they have seen him alive and risen from the dead--and their response is two-fold: "they worshiped him, but they doubted."  Both, presumably at the same time.  And perhaps that is completely understandable, because this moment must have been simply overwhelming.  The last these disciples had seen Jesus was either the night of his arrest in the garden before they abandoned him, or from the cross as he died--and now he was alive!  It seemed quite literally too good to be true.  They were overjoyed and dumbfounded at the same time. They were beginning to realize that if indeed Jesus was risen from the dead, he wasn't simply a good man, a wise rabbi, or a new prophet.  Maybe he wasn't even merely a human messiah coming to set up a kingdom. It was beginning to dawn on them that this Jesus really had been "God-with-us" all along, and the thought blew their minds.  It was an impossibility that was happening right before their eyes--either Jesus really was the presence of God in their midst, and therefore worthy of their utter worship, or it was all an illusion.  So they do two things at the same time: they worship, and they doubt.  They believe, and they question. I suspect you and I would do the same thing as well in their sandals.

And honestly, I think that's part of the point of why Matthew tells his story this way.  He's not trying to get us to sort each other into piles of "good Christians" who only believe and "bad Christians" or impostors who only doubt.  I think he's reminding us, as he's shown us throughout his gospel's account, that we are always both believers and doubters--"ye of little faith," as Jesus so often calls his disciples in Matthew's storytelling.  This is an important part of getting the translation correct in these verses for today, because other English translations (including the one I grew up with in church, and maybe you did, too) tried to segregate doubt and worship into different categories of people.  I grew up hearing these verses saying, "they worshipped him, but SOME doubted," as if there was a subset of doubters.  But the Greek of Matthew's Gospel doesn't say that.  There's no word "some" in there, and the verb "doubted" presumably takes the same subject as the verb "worshipped."  In other words, the clearest reading of this passage in Matthew's original Greek is saying that the same ones who are worshipping Jesus are the same ones who are also doubting, in that very same moment.  

Thta's important to be clear about, because that's us. We are always wobbly-faithed, struggling to believe, hesitant to trust, wrestling with the impossibly good news right before our eyes, doubtful-believers.  We are Peter, simultaneously calling out to Jesus, "If it is you, Lord, call me out onto the waves to walk on the water to you," and starting to sink the moment we see that we are doing it.  We are the disciples all swearing up and down that we will never abandon Jesus and then bailing out on him when the authorities come to arrest him in the Garden.  We are the ones confessing that Jesus is the Messiah and the very Son of God, only to rebuke him for insisting that his way of being those things is to lay down his life on a cross rather than conquering the world in triumph. We are always struggling to believe Jesus' good news that he is welcoming sinners, outcasts, and mess-ups into the Kingdom of God and then doubting it could be true as we scowl and shoo away the folks we think are "too bad" for God to love.  This is us: the faithful followers and double-talking doubters, all at once.

It is always a temptation in church life to want to weed out the folks we don't think should make the cut: the ones who can't articulate their faith with the precision we might wish for, the ones who don't show up on Sundays as often as we would like, the ones whose families, style of parenting, or politics don't match our own, or the ones who, we tell ourselves, "just don't fit in." It is always alluring to want to draw a line between the good and dedicated True Believers (and we always put ourselves in that category, don't we?) and the unworthy, uncommitted Reprobates, Sinners, and Doubters.  We do that because that lets us believe that we've earned our spot in God's good graces because of our excellence in believing, the strength of our faith, and the high quality of our devotion, rather than admitting it's not something we've achieved.  We want to tell ourselves we deserve our spot in heaven, because we believed the right things, and we believed the fervently enough, rather than hearing the real Good News that God's trustworthy grip on us is what holds us, rather than the strength of our grip on God.  But that's how it really works for the followers of Jesus: our grip on him is always rather precarious.  

Ultimately, though, we don't put our trust in the strength of our belief in Jesus; we put our trust in Jesus himself.  And Jesus himself is the one who holds us, who won't let us go, and who still holds onto us at our points of deepest devotion and committed worship as well as our points of greatest doubt and deepest disillusionment.  Even when those are all happening at the very same time.

Lord Jesus, hold onto us today--all of us--in this mix of doubt and faith, struggle and worship, where we find ourselves today. Assure us that no matter what, you will not let us go.