When the other disciples approached him with the good news of Easter, ‘We have seen the Lord’, their message did not resonate with him in any way. Thomas stood in the light of Easter, yet that light did not dispel his darkness. If his fellow disciples were full of Easter faith, he was full of doubt. They claimed to have seen the risen Lord; Thomas declared that he would not believe until he not only saw the Lord but touched his wounds. Thomas may resemble many of us today. Like Thomas, the light of Easter may not have penetrated us. We may find others who live in the joy of faith and their whose prayer life grows stronger through the joys and pains of life. But this may not be the case with many of us. We may find it difficult to have a strong faith when shadows fall across our ways. Yet Thomas reminds us that our faith journey can have different moments. We can journey from faith to doubt and back to faith again. The example of Thomas suggests that we can journey through doubt into a deeper faith. Thomas could not have made that final confession, ‘My Lord and my God’ unless he had first passed through the crucible of doubt. The gospel reading also tells us that even in our doubt the Lord remains faithful to us. The risen Lord accommodated himself to Thomas’s doubt, assenting to his requirements to touch the Lord’s wounds. The Lord didn’t wait for Thomas to come out of his doubt; he came to Thomas in his doubt. The Lord is always coming to us as we are, calling on us to ‘doubt no longer but believe’. If we keep struggling to be faithful to the Lord as he is faithful to us, he will pronounce the beatitude upon us that is the final beatitude in the gospels, ‘Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe’.
03.07.2021 St. Thomas – John 20:24-29
- Post author:Fr. Sibi Choothamparambil
- Post published:July 2, 2021
- Post category:Father Posts