Exemplary Disbelief

And they all forsook him and fled (Mark 14:50).

Christians are, nowadays, so accustomed to esteeming the disciples as exemplary in the faith that it seems a surprise to notice that the New Testament Gospel accounts do not report any of the disciples as believers.

Attention has focused, of course, upon Judas' betrayal and Peter's denial, amidst the tumult of Holy Week, and then upon Thomas' doubting, in the aftermath of the resurrection. This has tended to minimize or suppress the fact that none of the disciples--nor, for that matter, any one of Jesus' family--can be said on the basis of the texts as these have been received to have understood Jesus or to have either comprehended or liked his teaching or to have recognized his works or to have acknowledged his authority or to have welcomed his vocation or to have believed Jesus Christ to be the Lord of creation.

The truth, poignant as it may be, is that the disciples were profoundly skeptical about Jesus. In their experience of his ministry they were variously enthralled, mystified, bemused, apprehensive, confounded, disillusioned. During Holy Week, their elation on Palm Sunday very quickly turns into consternation; by Good Friday they have become fearful and hysterical; by Easter they are both embittered and bereft. And through all of it they remain steadfast in their disbelief.

If, for us, the disciples can be said to exemplify anything, then they must be said to exemplify not faith, but incredulity. This represents, I suggest, the most significant identification of the disciples with contemporary Christians. If any of us are to claim a biblical attitude of faith in Christ, it is necessary first of all to cope with the exemplary disbelief of the disciples.

With respect to that, the events now commemorated as Holy Week culminate and consummate what has previously transpired in the disciples' sojourn with Jesus, even as these same events foreshadow or anticipate all that is yet to come after Holy Week.

The Gospels are redundant in verifying the reality--one might also say, the versatility--of the skepticism of the disciples about Jesus Christ as Lord. When, for instance, Jesus asks them, "Who do you say that I am?", the true response of Peter is found not in his impulsive reply, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God," but in his retraction of that confession, after Jesus began to show his disciples that he must suffer many things, be killed, and on the third day be raised (Matthew 16:13-21). Confronted with this version of the vocation of the Christ, Peter exclaims, "God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you" (Matthew 16:22-23). Thus Peter rehearses himself for Good Friday (Mark 14:66-72).

The disciples show a similar misunderstanding of Christ's kingdom when the assorted claims and disputes among them concerning honor and status surface, as when they argue which of them is the greatest (Luke 9:46-48); or as when the sons of Zebedee, James and John, seek the places beside Jesus in his glory (Mark 10:35-45); or as when Peter, not knowing what he said, proposes that the three tabernacles be built (Luke 9:33b). On Maundy Thursday, at the table of the Last Supper, the disciples are still indulging the same matters (Luke 22:24-27; John 13:1-11).

The disciples find themselves impotent to exercise the authority Jesus offers them (Matthew 17:14-21) for the same reason--their lack of faith--that they suspect his authority when he stills the tempest (Matthew 8:23-27) or when he walks the water (Matthew 14:22-33), and they remain no less bewildered about the nature of such authority when the fig tree withers one morning during Holy Week as Jesus and the disciples return to the city and the temple (Matthew 21:18-22).

Until the parade on Palm Sunday and the ensuing events of Holy Week, there is a cryptic, even enigmatic, aspect to the public ministry of Jesus. Until then, characteristically, he would in his teaching tell a parable and conclude the recital with the remark, "He who has ears, let him hear" (Matthew 13:9). And, typically, the disciples are reported to be astonished by the parables; at times they protest that he teaches in parables, and sometimes they seek from Jesus private explanations of parables (Matthew 13:36-51; 13:10-17). Yet their hearing does not seem to be clarified during Holy Week, though Jesus' utterances are then no longer so guarded. And when Jesus speaks directly to the disciples, very bluntly, plainly, and without parable, of his imminent passion, for example, Luke observes: "They understood none of these things; this saying was hid from them and they did not grasp what was said" (Luke 18:34; Mark 9:32).

In Jesus' ministry prior to the days of Holy Week, when his authority is recognized (when he is named Christ the Lord), or when his authority is exercised and thereby exposed (as in a healing or exorcism), Jesus commonly admonishes those privy to the happening to keep silent about it (Matthew 8:29-30; Mark 5:43; Luke 4:41, 8:56). But as the events of Holy Week unfold, Jesus omits this caution and, indeed, appears more and more intent upon showing his authority by word and action, from cleansing the temple to washing the feet of the disciples (Luke 19:45-46; John 13:1-20). Throughout their whole experience with Jesus, in Holy Week as well as earlier, the disciples are found misconstruing his authority, or doubting it, or, sometimes, opposing it.

Indeed, if one were to single out an episode in the entire relationship of Jesus and the disciples to typify the attitude of the disciples so far as faith in Christ is concerned, it would be Gethsemane (Mark 14:32-42).

And if one goes no further than this, there is a warning for people now in these New Testament reports of the skepticism or incredulity of the disciples (and of Jesus' family) despite their intimacy with Jesus. This should be enough to render people wary of huckster preachers or celebrity evangelists who assert that mere intimacy with Jesus of an intense, private, or exclusive nature is faith. This is a fascinating, tempting, simplistic, but unbiblical doctrine, and multitudes are seduced by it into fancying that to be, somehow, in the presence of Jesus is so compelling and so positive an experience that doubt of all sorts is dispelled quickly, conclusively, as if magically. Yet there is no basis in the New Testament for any such supposition or delusion; on the contrary, for all of their unique experience in the company of Jesus, the disciples did not believe him or believe in him. What seems most surprising and crucial, furthermore, is that the disbelief of the disciples persisted even after the resurrection.

One would have thought, after all that they had been through with him, all that they had heard and beheld, and, consummately, all that took place in Holy Week and after the resurrection, that all doubt would have been resolved and that the enigma which Jesus had been for the disciples during his ministry would, at last, have been transcended by their insight. But, according to the New Testament, the disbelief lingers, admixed with hurt and bewilderment, in the immediate aftermath of the resurrection. Luke's accounts of the post-resurrection episodes are both emphatic and caustic about this. Confronted with the risen Christ, the disciples still do not know who he is and only lament, "We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel" (Luke 24:21; Acts 1:6).

However obtuse or apprehensive or hysterical or skeptical the disciples may have been about Jesus, there was nothing of the sort among either the ecclesiastical or the political authorities. In Holy Week, as they confront Jesus, over and over again, they do perceive who Jesus is and they do recognize the dimensions of the dimensions of Christ's lordship (Matthew 21:45). Earlier, some of the people of Jerusalem had wondered: "Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ?" (John 7:26b).

In Holy Week, in their interrogations and testings of Jesus, and then again when Jesus is arraigned and brought to trial, and indeed when he is mocked and crowned with thorns, Jesus allows them to confess that he is the Christ: "And the high priest said to him, 'I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God?' Jesus said to him, 'You have said so' " (Matthew 26:63-64a). "Now Jesus stood before the governor; and the governor asked him, 'Are you the King of the Jews?' Jesus said to him, 'You have said so'" (Matthew 27:11).

The authorities thus confess who Jesus truly is. even in the midst of their intent to crucify him, just as earlier in his ministry Jesus had been recognized and acknowledged by the demons (Luke 4:41) and in the wilderness by the power of death incarnate as the devil (Luke 4:1-13). And one recalls how similarly the authorities regarded Jesus at the time of his coming into the world when Herod sought frantically to assassinate the child (Matthew 2:13-16).

In the drama of the redemption of the world in the Word of God, Holy Week is heavy parody. If in such events the disciples exemplify not faith in Christ as Lord, but doubt, and if meanwhile the public authorities, in spite of themselves, confess Christ as Lord, what are we, nowadays, to make of this?

If the authorities of this world--including the whole diverse array of principalities and powers, ecclesiastical, political, military, commercial--recognize Jesus as Christ the Lord, it is because his reign is active now and constantly disrupts and confounds their rule and exposes their power, which is no more than the sanction of death, as transient and fraudulent. If the disciples are ambivalent, recalcitrant, incredulous toward Jesus as the Christ and toward the reality of his reign in the world, it is because they anticipate some other kingdom--one associated merely with the emancipation of Israel or one which appears immediately or miraculously: another worldly regime or an otherworldly realm--and thence they are hindered in seeing the ridicule of such fragile and false hopes as these when Jesus processes into the city mounted on an ass, and their Palm Sunday expectations turn into demoralization and fear.

The kingdom of which Christ is Lord is not worldly but it is not otherworldly; for it is a kingdom in this world, an historical and political reality, which both devastates and consummates the apparently prevailing order and all of its regimes and putative regimes or revolutionary causes. The life to which those in Christ are called consists of living as a society, now under the reign of the Word of God, beholden to Christ as Lord of all of life within the whole of creation, until that day when his reign is vindicated and the fullness of the power of death is exhausted, and all persons, principalities, and powers are rendered accountable, and this history ends.

So I have not offered any of these remarks with intent to be harsh on the disciples, for I remember that on Maundy Thursday Jesus promises the disciples that they will be made sufficient in the Word of God to be the witnesses to Christ's reign throughout the world (John 14). That same promise is ratified when Jesus, risen, appears to the disciples (Luke 24:44-49). On the day of Pentecost that promise is fulfilled and it is attested in Acts that the disciples become worthy of the promise.

William Stringfellow was a lawyer, theologian, social critic, and a Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.