by CCW | 22 December 2014 21:00
The questions of the Advent season of questions culminate, it seems to me, in The Feast of St. Thomas, the Advent Saint par excellence. His feast falls, appropriately enough, about the time of the winter solstice, the darkest time of nature’s year, and yet heralds the coming of the Light of God in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. St. Thomas is an especially important part of the Advent preparations for Christmas.
And yet, there is a paradox. Rather than the intensity of explicit questions, such as the barrage of questions belonging to Sunday’s Gospel (Advent IV), known as the witness of John, meaning John the Baptist, with the heightened sense of wonder of the question, “who art thou?” which turn us to Christ, with The Feast of St. Thomas we are given a wonderful statement of faith which illumines the entire mystery of the Incarnation. “My Lord, and my God,” Thomas proclaims in the presence of the risen Christ behind the closed doors of the Upper Room in Jerusalem, eight days after the Resurrection. How does this story relate to Advent?
Because it illumines the radical nature of redemption which lies at the heart of Christ’s Nativity and to the deeper meaning of the Advent. Because it is the answer to the implicit question of Thomas which goes to the heart of the Christian faith. Because it challenges us all about our personal relation to God in Jesus Christ.
One of the darknesses of our world and day is the darkness of doubt and uncertainty about, well, almost everything, but certainly about God and religion. Thomas is traditionally known as doubting Thomas because of this Gospel scene. “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” He is not prepared to take on faith – on the authority of the other disciples – the news of the Risen Christ who had appeared to them. His eloquent though conditional sentence is a question about the reality of the Incarnate Christ and the truth of the Resurrection. He seems to be saying, ‘I will not believe unless I see and touch with mine own eyes, fingers and hands.’ He speaks to a kind of empirical necessity.
It is worth mentioning that this scene comes in the larger context of the resurrection appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalene as well where Jesus explicitly says to her, noli me tangere, ‘don’t touch me,’ whereas here Jesus responds directly to Thomas and says “reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side,” in other words, touch! The juxtaposition of these two contrasting responses to two different persons is itself a lesson about the nature of personal faith and the Christian Faith objectively speaking. Our faith, individually considered, is always “according to the capacity of the beholder to behold.” Long before the educational nostrums of differentiated learning and learners, this was well known.
Jesus’s further response brings out the deeper connection. “Be not faithless but believing,” and even more, “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
The doubt of Thomas is really a kind of questioning about the reality of God’s intimate engagement with our humanity, an engagement which opens us out to the reality of the mystery of God who cannot be contained to the limits of human knowing, on the one hand, and to the spiritual truth about our humanity and its differing capacities to apprehend truth and meaning, on the other hand. The so-called doubting of Thomas provides “the greater confirmation of our faith,” as another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas, reminds us.
That “greater confirmation of faith” is captured in Thomas’ words to Christ, “my Lord, and my God.” We are not told whether he reached out with fingers and hands to touch; we are only told what he says. Yet his words are testimony enough. They convey the reality of the encounter with the risen Christ. He can only be risen if he first was dead and he can only have died if he had a body. Christmas is all about that wonder and marvel of God becoming man, the Word made flesh. “Without forsaking what he was, he became what he was not,” as St. Athanasius puts the essential mystery of the Incarnation. With The Feast of St. Thomas we glimpse something of the larger nature of the mystery. The Incarnation of Jesus Christ is not just about Christmas; it embraces the entire life and work of Jesus Christ, the work of the redemption of our humanity.
What does that mean? It means that there is more, though not less, to our lives of faith than what meets the eye. It means the radical spiritual nature of our humanity that cannot be contained simply to the material and the physical aspects of our lives.
But there is a further wonder to The Feast of St. Thomas in Advent, it seems to me. His words give rise to our words of faith as we behold the mystery of Christmas. “My Lord, and my God,” is what we behold in the mystery of Bethlehem. It continues with us, too, in the holy mysteries of the altar. Thomas’ words inform the words of devotion and faith at Holy Communion. There is the tradition of the priest elevating the host and the chalice and saying, sotto voce, ‘Dominus Meus, Deus Meus’; in short, the words of Thomas beholding the mystery of God with us in the intimacy of the humanity of Christ, and now in the intimacy of the Sacrament, “my Lord, and my God.”
They are words of faith, words that are about our individual and personal relation to what has been made known to us in the objective motions of the Revelation of Jesus Christ in the witness of the Scriptures and in the tradition of the Church. Our personal connection to what the Church objectively proclaims. Therein lies the special role and place of Thomas in Advent. He provides the avenue of approach to the mystery of Christmas, the mystery of God with us to redeem and sanctify our humanity.
Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Thomas (transf.)
December 22nd, 2014
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2014/12/22/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-thomas-2/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.