The Shadow of a Doubt
Sunday mornings. I wake up early, somewhere around 4:30 AM, long before Sue ever stirs. I go to the kitchen and turn on the coffee pot, open the dining room blinds and wait for the sunrise to flicker and the sound of the morning paper hitting the front porch. Let the rest of the world sleep in. I don’t. Sunday is my big day, the day I stand before a congregation of people who are willing to swap thirty minutes of their time for some conviction and hope.
Most weeks I have ample time to go around, but occasionally I don’t. Sometimes in the dawn – tinted, pre – pulpit hours, the seeming absurdity of what I believe hits me. The fear that God isn’t. The fear that “why” has no answer. The valley of the shadow of a doubt.
To one degree or another we all venture into the valley. In the final pages of Luke’s gospel, the physician – turned – historian dedicated his last chapter to answering one question: How does Christ respond when we doubt him?
For both the dejected Emmaus bound disciples (Luke 24: 13 – 35) and the frightened upper room disciples (Luke 24: 36 – 49): A meal is served, the Bible is taught, the disciples find courage, and we find two practical answers to the critical question, what would Christ have us do with our doubts?
His answer? Touch my body and ponder my story. We still can, you know. We can still touch the body of Christ. We would love to touch his physical wounds and feel the flesh. Yet when we brush up against the church, we do just that. The church is his body. And it is made full and complete by Christ. He fills all things everywhere with himself.
Ephesians 1: 23 says; “Which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all.”
Paul claimed the church exists and functions only by reason of its vital relationship to its head, Christ Jesus. As the resurrected and exalted Christ, he is without need and is independent of anything. Yet as head, He is incomplete without the body, which is the church that fills up Christ. So the body and the head are one in the truest sense.
Christ distributes courage through community; he dissipates doubts through fellowship. He never deposits all knowledge in one person but distributes pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to many. When you interlock your understanding with mine, and we share our discoveries…When we mix, mingle, confess, and pray, Christ speaks.
The adhesiveness of the disciples instructs us. They stuck together. Even with ransacked hopes, they clustered I conversant community.
Luke 24: 14 states; “And they walked together of all these things which had happened.” They kept going over all these things that had happened.
Isn’t this a picture of the church – sharing notes, exchanging ideals, mulling over possibilities, lifting spirits? And as they did, Jesus showed up to teach them, proving true, Matthew 18: 20; “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”