“My Lord, and my God”
The Apostolic Saints are part of the Advent and none more so than Thomas, “called Didymus,” whom we more commonly call ‘Doubting Thomas.’ In the darkest time of nature’s year, there is another form of darkness that deepens nature’s darkness into something even more strange and fearful. The darkness of doubt leads to despair, the death of souls and communities, of cultures and churches.
Thomas’ feast day falls always within the season of Advent. He is the advent saint par excellence not just because his day of commemoration falls always within Advent and so close to the winter solstice and to Christ’s holy birth, the birth of God’s Son into our world of darkness, but because his doubting leads not to the darkness of despair and death but to the light of faith and hope. The doubting of Thomas provides for “the greater confirmation of our faith,” as another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas, reminds us.
The propers for his feast-day illumine the radical nature of Christ’s Incarnation. Ephesians reminds us of the fellowship of faith, that we are “fellow-citizens with the saints,” that we are “of the household of God,” “an holy temple in the Lord,” “an habitation of God through the Spirit,” and that Jesus Christ himself is “the chief corner-stone,” the structural and animating principle upon which all these images of indwelling depend.
John’s Gospel takes us to the death and resurrection of Christ for this is the crux of the story of Thomas. “On the same day at evening,” the evening of the Resurrection, the disciples with the exception of Thomas (and Judas, too, we might recall, lest we become complacent about our denials) were huddled together in fear behind closed doors. Jesus appears to them. Thomas, simply described as one of the twelve, was not present but when they told him what had happened that evening, he would not believe, as he says, “unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my fingers in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
And so, eight days later, again behind closed doors, Christ appeared again in their midst. This time Thomas was there. Christ appeared for Thomas’ sake! And for ours, especially in the darkness of Advent. Behind closed doors, Thomas’ faith in the risen Christ is confirmed and opened to view. “My Lord and my God,” he cries and so may we.
His doubt becomes the means of the certainty of faith: “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed,” Jesus says. If you don’t come to Church with questions, I can only wonder if you are really here.
“We shall not see Christ crucified a second time,” Augustine observes, though we see him crucified again and again in the human atrocities of our atrocious world in the sad, sad tales of human depravity, of sin and wickedness; the events in Newtown, Connecticut, are only the latest example. What adds to that darkness is our denial of sin and evil. Why? Because we do not want to face the Advent message. What is that message? That without the darkness there can be no light.
I do not mean that the light of God and his truth depends upon the darkness of sin and evil. It is rather the other way around. Sin and evil are entirely privative; they depend upon the truth and the good which they deny and attempt to negate. No. What I mean is that without our awareness of our own sin and darkness we cannot really come to the light. Thomas is the great Apostle of the Advent because his doubting is actually a form of questioning, an holy questioning that places him, ultimately in the presence of Christ. That is the power and the truth of holy questioning. It places us with Christ. Doubt that seeks to know leads to the certainty of faith. Doubt that denies the possibility of knowing leads to death and despair.
The Feast of Thomas reminds us of the inescapable connection between Christmas and Easter, between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. We forget that we only come to Christmas in a kind of reversed engineering, working back from the reality of the resurrection to the reality of the nativity; from the stories of the Resurrection to the stories of the Nativity. It could hardly be otherwise. The Resurrection, after all, at least the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection makes no sense apart from the Incarnation. As another saint, the saint of the Christmas mystery of the Incarnation, we might say, St. Athanasius, puts it, “Christ borrowed a body that he might borrow a death.” Through his death and resurrection we are born into new life; the new life begins for us in the story of Christ’s nativity.
What Thomas proclaims behind closed doors in Jerusalem eight days after the Resurrection are the words of faith and adoration which we may say at Christmas as we gaze upon the holy child. “My Lord and my God.” It, too, has become part of the priest’s prayer at the elevation of the sacrament during the Prayer of Consecration at the Eucharist. You probably thought I was mumbling! Dominus Deus, Deus Meus. They are Thomas’ words. Through his witness they are our words.
“My Lord, and my God”
Fr. David Curry
Eve of St. Thomas
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
December 20th, 2012