Day: December 21, 2015

Sermons

Meditation for the Feast of St. Thomas

“My Lord, and my God”

Words of faith arise from doubt and uncertainty. The Feast of St. Thomas occurs on the shortest day and the longest night of the year in the week of the winter solstice that brings us to the Christmas festival of light and love. Somehow his feast helps us to think more deeply about the advent of Christ and its meaning, even to “melt the clouds of sin and sadness” and to “drive the dark of doubt away.”

“’What is Truth’, said jesting Pilate; and wouldn’t stay for an answer,” Sir Francis Bacon famously begins his celebrated essay On Truth. Like Pilate, Thomas asked a question of Jesus earlier in John’s Gospel just after Jesus spoke of “go[ing] to prepar[ing] a place for you … that where I am there you may be also. And you know the way where I am going” to which Thomas asks, “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Jesus responds famously “I am the way, and the truth and the life.” Unlike Pilate, Thomas, it seems, stayed for an answer and then again returned for an answer to his doubts and questions about Christ’s resurrection. “My Lord, and my God” are his profound words of faith that arise from the face-to-face encounter with the Risen Christ whose body bears the marks of his crucifixion.

It is that question and answer about the bodily reality of Christ that makes The Feast of St. Thomas an advent feast and catapults us into the mystery of the Incarnation. It serves as well to connect Christmas and Easter; the nativity and the resurrection are like two complementary mysteries, each illumining something of the deeper meaning of the other. The Gospel for his Feast day is the resurrection story of Jesus teaching the disciples behind closed doors and finally Thomas, too, about the resurrection, itself a testament to the Incarnation.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Thomas the Apostle

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everliving God, who for the more confirmation of the faith didst suffer thy holy Apostle Thomas to be doubtful in thy Son’s resurrection: Grant us so perfectly, and without all doubt, to believe in thy Son Jesus Christ, that our faith in thy sight may never be reproved. Hear us, O Lord, through the same Jesus Christ, to whom, with thee and the Holy Spirit, be all honour and glory, now and for evermore. Amen.

The Epistle: Ephesians 2:19-22
The Gospel: St. John 20:24-29

Cima da Conegliano, Incredulity of St. ThomasSt. Thomas’s name is believed to come from an Aramaic word meaning twin, but it is not known whose twin he was. He is included in all the lists of the twelve apostles, but he is mentioned most often in St. John’s Gospel, where he is called “Didymus” (“twin” in Greek) three times (11:16; 20:24; 21:2).

St. Thomas appears to have been an impulsive man. He says he is prepared to go with Jesus to the tomb of Lazarus even if it means death (John 11:16). At the Last Supper, however, he confesses his ignorance about where Jesus is going and the way there (John 14:5). In response, Christ said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

After the resurrection, Thomas was unwilling to believe his fellow disciples that Jesus had risen from the dead (John 20:24). He would not believe, he declared, unless he actually touched the wounds. Eight days later, Jesus gave “Doubting Thomas” the evidence he had asked for, whereupon Thomas confessed him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus then pronounces a blessing on all who have not seen and yet believe.

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