I Want My God My Way!!

This weekend, as is the case every second Sunday of Easter, we read about Thomas who goes from refusing to believe, to accepting the resurrection of Jesus as the corner stone of his life. I always remind people that I don’t believe that Thomas doubted, I believe his anger that Jesus died on the cross prevented him from believing. Thomas is the other side of the command, if you are the Son of God get down from that cross. It is the same rebuke, but from another perspective. It is this reality that shuts Thomas down, making him angry at Jesus’ death.

The reality is that Thomas is not unique in his reactions. It is a common reaction in which people who claim to be atheists really become so because God did not act as he was supposed to act. This is what Thomas does. God did not act as He was supposed to act, therefore, the person I know as Jesus is not God.

However, if God acts only as we want Him to act, is He in fact God? This is the reality of God. God is real and in time we learn that since we are not God, we do not fully appreciate His answers to our prayers. We want him to answer our way, but we don’t see that God answers us in ways that He understands and we may not. No one understood how the Son of God, if He was who He said He was, could possibly die on a cross, but He did. When he rose, now He does what no one could possibly anticipate. He also changed our own self image as people who live forever and gave us the ability to become fully human and fully alive. This is the God who acts in ways that we don’t always understand.

The lesson of Angry Thomas is when God does not do what we demand, He shows himself as God. When we have a temper tantrum because of this, we show our need to grow in order to understand just how much God is greater than our ability to comprehend Him. Otherwise, we live our lives as Angry Thomas’s, People who refuse to believe because God does not act like our own puppet.