If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
In the name of the Father…
There is a kind of sequence discernible in the Resurrection appearances in the gospels, a sequence in which we witness the disciples’s growing capacity to grasp the implications of the Resurrection of Jesus. It is a sequence in some ways comparable to the one described by the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross as the process by which humans come to terms with grief and loss: first comes denial, then anger, then bargaining, then depression and finally acceptance. The sequence in the gospels is not quite the same, nor is it quite so neatly delineated, and yet its distinct stages, as well as its moments of breakthrough, are, in many ways, just as readily identifiable.
As we might expect, the response to the Resurrection each of the disciples is capable of is in part determined by their proximity to the event itself, whether that be to the empty tomb or to the Risen Christ himself. The apostles do not initially believe the testimony of the women because they have not yet encountered the Risen Lord, only when he appears to them as well are they able to respond with faith.
And yet there is another, and a deeper, sense in which the disciples’ proximity to the Resurrection, their capacity to verify that it has in fact taken place, is not what finally determines their response to it. St Matthew makes it very clear that even among those to whom the risen Lord appeared there were some who doubted. Likewise, we have the extraordinary example of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, who are incapable of recognising the Risen Lord even though he walks beside them on the road. What matters, then, is not so much the disciples’ proximity to the Resurrection as their capacity to grasp something of its true implications, not least the uncomfortable spotlight it shines on their own sins and failings.
A kind of quantum leap in the disciples’s response to the Resurrection, for example, takes place in St Peter’s three-fold reconciliation with the Risen Christ on the banks of the Sea of Tiberias. If it were not for this incident at the very end of John’s gospel in which St Peter’s earlier three-fold denial of Jesus is so agonisingly recalled and forgiven, we might be tempted to think that at this late stage in the day the Lord’s Passion and death have been all but forgotten, that the disciples’s betrayal and abandonment of Jesus at his moment of greatest need is all going to be swept under the rug now that he has been returned to them. But no, that is not what happens. What St Peter is gently but firmly brought to see, as all the disciples will eventually have to face as well, is that the redemption held out to them by the Risen Lord is the redemption of the Crucified One, that only insofar as they recognise the Risen Lord as “the one whom they have pierced”, will the disciples be able to receive the redemption he has to offer them, only then will they have truly begun to come to terms with the reality the Resurrection confronts them with.
Where then does today’s gospel fit into this sequence? Because of the way his story has so often been told, we have tended to assume that the doubts of “doubting Thomas” are a simple matter of verification. Just as the apostles disbelieve the testimony of the women until they have seen the Risen Lord for themselves, so St Thomas disbelieves the testimony of the apostles until he has seen the risen Lord for himself. As a result, we have tended to place Thomas’ response to the Risen Lord at a relatively primitive stage in the overall scheme of the disciples’s response to the Resurrection. It is not that Thomas is more skeptical than the other apostles, it is simply that he is a few steps behind them. And yet, once we grasp something of what is going on between St Peter and the Risen Lord on the banks of the Sea of Tiberias, we cannot help but look back on the story of St Thomas, a chapter or so earlier, in a rather different light.
We cannot help but notice, for instance, that what St John presents us with in the story of St Thomas is, for the first time, a resurrection appearance in which it is the wounds of Christ that take centre stage, in which the painful reality of the crucifixion, and the disciples’ part in it, cannot be hidden from view, and this is true even before Thomas appears on the scene. “Jesus came and stood among [the disciples]” we are told “and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side”. And yet the disciples’s reaction to this stark reminder of the Lord’s Passion — “Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord” — gives no hint that it has produced in them anything like the kind of soul-searching that is shortly to be required of St Peter on the banks of the Sea of Tiberias.
With Thomas, however, it is quite a different story. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands” he tells them “and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” What we have tended to hear in these famous words of St Thomas is a statement of the apostle’s personal terms for verifying the fact of Resurrection, and it is hardly realistic to suggest that we have been wrong to do so. I wonder however, if there is more to these words of St Thomas than we have generally given them, and him, credit for, if what St Thomas is, quite literally, grasping towards with these words of his is the very insight that St Peter will shortly be forced to confront in his encounter with the Risen Lord, that it is only through a painful and humiliating reckoning with the wounds of Christ, with those wounds which in a very real sense the disciples have themselves inflicted, that they can be saved. What St Thomas is saying, in other words, with his forthright declaration is “Unless I am given the opportunity to confront the wounds of Christ, unless I am able to face up to the marks of my own failure and betrayal, then whatever belief in the Resurrection I can arrive at will be no more than a sterile matter of verification. It will not be a belief that saves.”
And if this is true then St Thomas’s response to the Risen Lord is not, as we have generally supposed, one or two steps behind the rest of the apostles, but rather several quite large strides ahead of them, just as his declaration “My Lord and my God!” surpasses anything the other disciples manage in the pages of the gospels.
And if St Thomas is out ahead of the other apostles, then there is a pretty good chance he is also out ahead of us.
And so as we continue to bask in the light and joy of Easter, in the presence of the Risen Christ, we do well neither to overlook nor to dismiss the conviction expressed in St Thomas’ great declaration, that if we are to come to a full and saving knowledge of the Resurrection Mystery, if we are to be a Community of the Resurrection, then we cannot escape our own encounter with the Lord on the banks of the Sea of Tiberias, our own confrontation with the wounds of Christ, our own reckoning with the Crucified One who is also our Saviour.
Amen.