Feast of Saint Thomas, Apostle

Lectionary: 593

Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

The Gospel of Saint John ends with Saint Thomas’s declaration of faith. It expresses astonishment and belief, feeling and creed. It confirms an undeniable intervention that must change a man’s life – that of the Apostle Thomas – and the life of everyone who believes what the Apostles have seen, heard, and touched.

The Gospel means nothing if we do not believe that God has intervened in human history, that an unexpected, unprecedented revelation has been given to us.

While the Gospel agrees profoundly with our human nature, fitting like a hand in a glove, it is also like human nature in that it could not be predicted or foreseen. (For that matter, despite their resemblances, the human being is incomparably different from other great apes. Our evolutionary arrival could not have been predicted from the development of other simians. It was more miraculous than necessary or inevitable. In that respect, I agree with creationists.)

Christians, also, come from an unexpected place; we will always be a peculiar people despite our insistence that we feel perfectly at home in this world. While others suppose they belong here because they were born here, we were sent here from Jerusalem. And if some people suffer the dislocation of culture shock or future shock in an increasingly complex world, we are not as surprised by that discomfort. Jesus describes our strangeness in John 3:8

“The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Thomas’s astonishment reflects not only the unexpectedness of Jesus’ resurrection. Our potential as human beings was suddenly exploded beyond all comprehension. A man is God; and not just "a god." He is the Only Begotten Son of God. 

That potential was there, like the potential of a glove to be filled with a hand, but no one ever saw it. They saw pharaohs and emperors who pretended to be gods. But they died like ordinary men and their "divinity" was little more than political expedience. A way to prop up fallible human governments.

The man whom Thomas had known stood before him as "my Lord and my God." And there was no doubt this was the same man. Revealed as the conqueror of death, Jesus shows that our human nature has divine possibilities for holiness, generosity, patience, courage, and compassion -- powers despots could only fake. If the human being is a glove to be filled by a hand, autocrats are gas-inflated latex gloves full of bombast.

Saint John begins his First Letter with more about the Revelation to Thomas: 

What was from the beginning,what we have heard,what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerns the Word of life—for the life was made visible; we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was made visible to us—what we have seen and heard we proclaim now to you,so that you too may have fellowship with us; for our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We are writing this so that our joy may be complete.

When we celebrate the Mass, eating his flesh and drinking his blood, we also encounter our divine potention; and we must echo Thomas's astonished credo: "My Lord and My God!"