The gift and wisdom of St Thomas

A sermon for the second Sunday of Easter, from Mthr Cara Greenham Hancock

St Thomas’s encounter with the Risen Lord, seven days after the Resurrection, sets out the gospel in miniature. In the Incarnation of Jesus, God came to be with his people in ways which were personal and relational: he came to touch and to be touched, to be involved in the lives of the people whom he loved. As Fr Russell’s Holy Week homilies so powerfully set forth for us, this extended to and included sharing in the loneliness, suffering, and death which is the lot of humankind, in order to heal and free and redeem us, to unite us with his own abundant life.

 Which is to say: that there is nothing abstract in the mission of Jesus, nothing which is not about the encounter of our Lord with those he loves in the real circumstances of their lives.

 Enter Thomas, to demonstrate what this might look like. Thomas, in the passage from the Gospel we hear each year on this day, is joining the other disciples a week after they have had their own transformative experience of the risen Jesus, who had come to them where they were huddled behind locked doors in fear and confusion: on Easter evening, Jesus had come to them with his gift of peace and joy, his gift of the Holy Spirit. Now, one week later, today, in comes Thomas. We don’t know why he wasn’t with the others in the locked room last week. We don’t need to know. What we do know is that he has questions – he is careful, considered, he remembers that Jesus has warned of false prophets and false Messiahs.

 Dear Thomas. Wise and faithful man.

 St Thomas grasps a crucially important idea: that the key to recognising the Risen Jesus, if and when he meets him, will be his wounds. He knows that the Resurrection, the overturning of death, is not a reversal or a rewind on death, but a coming through it. Jesus is gloriously risen, alive – and he still bears his scars. When Thomas hears the rumour of Jesus’s resurrection from the other disciples, he doesn’t ask for an “explanation”, nor does he scoff and say ‘impossible: dead people don’t rise from the grave’ – Thomas is not a coldly rational cynic demanding better data. Rather, Thomas is someone yearning for an encounter with the friend he loves and misses. Thomas says “when I see the wounds, when I touch the wounds, I will believe.”

 The wounds of Jesus are the tokens of his love – the extent to which Jesus desired to enter into solidarity with humankind, and the enormity of the price he was willing to pay to rescue the people he loves and longs for. The wounds of Jesus are the witness both of his love and of our salvation. Thomas’s conviction that he will recognise Jesus by his wounds reflects profound theological understanding, because it reflects a commitment to love, and to truth.

 Thomas asks to see the wounds – to have a direct and intimate encounter with the Lord. The Christian faith, it cannot be said often enough, is not about intellectually assenting to a series of propositions: it is an encounter with the living God of love who comes to us, seeking us out, to heal, redeem, and transform us. And the wounds are the key. By these glorious wounds are we healed, by these glorious wounds is the love of God poured out for us.

 So, yes, Thomas has questions. Thomas knows that to simply take the report of the other disciples on face value: “Jesus is risen? Oh, thanks, good to know” – would be to fail to grasp the meaning of the resurrection. A resurrection which is only a piece of information is not enough: Thomas demands a resurrection which is a relationship, an encounter.

 And while Thomas’s reputation down the centuries may have been brought into question, his name scandalously linked to the epithet “Doubting”, the idea that Thomas is of weak faith, someone to be looked down upon, is not what we see in Jesus’s response to him. Jesus responds to Thomas first by saying “peace be with you” and then by fulfilling Thomas’s desire: he shows him his wounds, he invites him to handle, to touch, to come close and be in relationship.

 And then we have the sublime moment, the climax of this passage. Thomas, gazing upon the glorious wounds, knows that indeed, all that he had hoped and longed for is fulfilled. Thomas says: “my Lord and my God.” This is an extraordinary proclamation: it is stark, and profound, and true, and unmatched anywhere else in the gospel. “My Lord and my God,” says Thomas, as he looks at the wounds. He makes the sublime confession of the full divinity of Jesus, explicitly saying that Jesus is not ‘just’ the Messiah, not ‘just’ the Son of God, but the fullness of God’s presence. He knows that Jesus is God by the scars he bears, by the love they demonstrate.

 My Lord and my God.

 There is an old pious custom of praying those words during the mass, as the people of God behold the host and then the chalice being lifted up, the body and blood of the Lord: a tradition to make Thomas’s confession our own at that moment, to pray silently “my Lord and my God” as we gaze upon him. We have access to the presence of Jesus just as much as Thomas did – and never as an abstract idea, but as an encounter with the living God, the God whose love for us is so powerful that it brought him to share in our life, and to give his life that we might share in his. Just as Jesus came to Thomas in the upper room to fulfil Thomas’s desire for an encounter with his Lord, so too does he come to us at the altar, to fulfil our desire to see, to touch, to meet with the one who loves us, and who pours out his life for us. We, just as much as Thomas, are granted to chance to gaze upon him and confess: “my Lord and my God.”

 Our access to our Crucified God is through his wounds. They are the source of our life. They are the witness to God’s deep solidarity with, and presence in, every moment of human suffering. They are a token of Jesus’s immeasurable and unconquerable love for us. And they are a proof of God’s absolute triumph over suffering, death, and violence. Our God is wounded, but these wounds are glorious, and by them we are saved and given life.

 May we allow St Thomas to be our teacher – may we be wise and loving enough always to trust in the wounds of the Lord, and rejoice in the life and love which flow from them for us. Amen.