Friday, July 3, 2020 – Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle       (today’s lectionary)
My Lord and my God!
I imagine a four dimensional tapestry created with temporal and spatial, human and divine threads, all held together by Christ.
Through him the whole structure is held together and grows.
In him you too are also being built together
Into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
Of course this story of the apostle Thomas is one of the threads.
Our simple study of history, reveling as it does in the tapestry of time and space, becomes quickly sublime when human and divine life is woven in as well.
In all those places at all those times, all that we see and hear and feel transmutes into a wonderful structure of four dimensions when we listen for God, when we too seek to touch God’s wounds, when God finds us and we find him.
Thomas’ doubts about Jesus’ resurrection serve us well. Pope Gregory said of Thomas:
“The Lord permitted the apostle to doubt after the resurrection, but He did not abandon him in doubt.”
Thomas, who earlier said to his friends, “Let us go and die with the master,” could not follow Jesus into the strange world of resurrection. He did not believe.
“But the unbelief of Thomas benefits our faith more than the belief of other disciples. By his doubt and by his touching Jesus’ wounds, Thomas became a witness to the resurrection.”
After the disciples dispersed from Jerusalem, he traveled and witnessed to people in Persia and then as far away as Madras in India, where he was lanced and martyred. No doubt his inadequate and utterly human response to the story of resurrection, with his refusal to believe and failure of faith,  stood him in good stead when he took the message to others. He must have echoed Jesus’ words many times to others:
Blessed are those who have not seen, but still believe! Don’t be like I was!
Unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands
Unless I put my fingers in
Unless I put my hand into his side (O for Pete’s sake!),
I will not believe.
Can you get any more graphic?
The story then is suspended. Jesus does nothing, not for a week. As when Lazarus died, Jesus let the doubts fester for awhile, let the questions hang. But then Jesus did come, and he came straight to Thomas.
Peace be with you.
Here, do your darn’dst. Stick in your fingers, push in your hand.
Jesus made a clear request:
Change your mind, Thomas.
Do not be unbelieving, but believe.
We too use the words of Thomas, over and over in our liturgies, in our songs and in our lives:
My Lord and my God!
There are days when Little Big Man and others of us will say, “This is a good day to die.”
But no, not for Thomas, not today.
THIS is a good day to live.
           (Eph 2, Psalm 1176, John 20)
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