We hope that you enjoy this article by the Australian Jesuit Fr Richard Leonard as much as we did. It was published in The Tablet on 9th April 2016.
Caravaggio, “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” (1601-1602)
In the Easter season Thomas makes two notable appearances, one much more significant than the other. The gospel story about doubting Thomas has to be one of the most misunderstood episodes in the New Testament.
If you are like me, for years you may have been consoled by Thomas doubting that Jesus had been raised from the dead. We have been told that Thomas doubted Jesus. But if we read the story very carefully, we realise it is not Jesus that Thomas doubts, it is the disciples. In fact, when Jesus appears to them a week later, Thomas has the opportunity to share in the experience of the Risen Lord, and like the others he immediately confesses Easter faith. Indeed Thomas calls Jesus, “My Lord and my God”, which is one of the greatest claims made in the Gospels. History has been unfair. He should be remembered as “confessing Thomas”, not “doubting Thomas”. There are, however, three elements to the story from which we should take great comfort.
The first is that Thomas does not doubt Jesus.
He doubts the early Church – and not just in regard to a minor issue of discipline or procedure. He doubts the central Christian message: that God raised Jesus from the dead. Some of us, too, at various times in our lives, can have doubts about all sorts of things in our faith. There are very few believers who get through life without asking some serious questions of God and the Church. These questions are good in themselves. They are necessary for a mature, adult faith. What we need to ensure is that we sincerely want to search for answers to these questions. Thomas is the patron saint of all of us who sometimes struggle to believe what everyone else in the Church seems able to accept, and he is an encouragement to us to have the courage and patience to wait and seek for the answers.
The second consoling fact we can take from this story is what we learn about the Church in its earliest days.
Even though the first followers of Jesus are filled with the presence of the Risen Lord and even though Thomas refuses to believe their witness, they remain faithful to him in spite of his doubts. We know this, because a week later, he is still with them. They didn’t expel Thomas from the group, or excommunicate him. They held on to him in the hope that he would experience the Lord for himself.
Sadly there are some today who argue that Catholics who struggle with their faith should “shape up or ship out”.
While every group has its boundaries and there are limits to which people can dissent and still be regarded as on the inside, we could take the earliest Church as our model and stay faithful to our doubters and help them come to see the transforming truth that has changed our lives.
The story of doubting Thomas was written for people like us, who do not have direct access to the historical Jesus. The birth of the Church is an ongoing act of God’s re-creation in every generation. It takes time, and people will be at different stages at different moments.
The third element of the story, when Jesus invites Thomas to put his fingers into his wounds, counters a purely mystical notion of what the resurrection is about.
Jesus bears the marks of his torture and death. His glorified body, though radically different, is also in continuity with how the disciples knew and loved him. They can recognise him through his words and his wounds.
The earliest Christian community focused strongly on the wounds of the Risen Lord for two reasons: to affirm the fact that Christ, now raised from the dead, was the same person who had lived among them; and also to make sense of the physical wounds being inflicted on them for Christ’s sake.
Words and wounds still make a claim on us today. We carry within us the death of the Lord. We all have our wounds, and some of the Church’s wounds are being laid bare very publicly right now. We also know that, for many of us, it is precisely when we are wounded most deeply by life, that our doubts in the presence of God can be the greatest.
The story of Thomas tells us that Christ can take our fears and doubts and transform them into a powerful Christian witness. That where we can only see our woundedness, hopelessness and death, Easter faith, hope and love can have the final word. When we touch our wounds through the wounds of Christ we may be moved to join in that great Easter cry: “This is the work of the Lord, a marvel in our eyes.”
