by CCW | 21 December 2016 21:00
“Drive the dark of doubt away”. These are the familiar words from the Hymn to Joy, set to Beethoven’s masterpiece Ode to Joy in his Ninth Symphony, by the American author, Rev’d Henry Van Dyke. Darkness and doubt seem so inescapably entangled. And yet there is the wonderful paradox of The Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle which coincides with the winter solstice and heralds the Nativity of Christ. Light and darkness, doubt and certainty, faith and understanding are all wrapped up in the readings of this day.
Thomas the doubter, it seems, but equally, it is the Thomas the questioner whose questions belong to the mystery of Advent, itself the season of profound questions which challenge and illumine the mysteries of faith. “Art thou he that should come or do we seek another?” John the Baptist asked in the wilderness of prison, the victim/victor of truth which speaks to power. “How shall this be seeing I know not a man?” asked Mary, being “troubled at this saying” of the Angel’s salutation at the Annunciation, “cast[ing] in her mind what manner of salutation this should be”. A crescendo of questions pour down upon John the Baptist in the Gospel for The Fourth Sunday in Advent about him, questions which he turns about to point us to Christ as “the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world”.
And here, on The Feast of St. Thomas? Just as The First Sunday in Advent recounts Christ’s triumphal entry in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday with the question “Who is this?”, so the Gospel for The Feast of St. Thomas takes us to the Resurrection accounts in John’s Gospel by which Jesus makes himself known; in short, a testimony to the Incarnation through the Resurrection. Thomas hears about Jesus making himself known to the other disciples behind closed doors. He says that “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 questions what others have said. He demands to know for himself.
We are in darkness and doubt at many times in our lives and in our culture and day. We are, perhaps, not quite so “assured of certain certainties” (T.S. Eliot, The Preludes) any longer about progress and prosperity and the presumption of “the end of history”. Yet the quest for certainty is a true quest, it seems to me. The question is about what kind of certainty and in what kinds of ways. The greater wisdom of our philosophical and theological traditions of thought speaks to such things.
Anselm, following upon a long tradition going back to Plato and Augustine, looked for a single argument worthy of the idea of God himself as proof of God’s existence, as it were. He does not think that he invented it; no, the truth possesses us and not the other way around. “God,” he says, “is that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. That is the light that darkness cannot comprehend, cannot overcome. Others, like Aquinas following Aristotle, point us to the necessary existence of God through the contingencies of nature without which the world is not thinkable. Descartes, in a more modern mode, indeed, one of the principal figures in the emergence of modernity, seeks for certainty in an age of skeptical doubt and darkness only to find it in the self as thinking being which depends utterly upon the reality of God for any kind of content to its knowing both in terms of mental realities such as mathematics or the reality of the natural world. The soul and God are the two most important things to know for Calvin in his Institutes as well.
In a way, these approaches counter the later tendencies to domesticate divinity and which hold God as a mystery too far, such perhaps as in Kant. The Feast of St. Thomas reminds us of the radical demand of the soul to know God, a desire that can only be met by God himself. “Except I see”, says St. Thomas. His questioning is a genuine and real questioning about the reality of God with us, of Christ in the flesh of our humanity. His feast opens us out to the radical meaning of the Incarnation. It concerns nothing less than the redemption of our humanity, the redemption of the world. Schiller’s poem, Ode to Joy, composed in 1786, the inspiration for Beethoven’s musical score and the basis of Van Dyke’s hymn, speaks about the affirmation of nature. “Even the worm”, he says, has been granted sensuality/ and the Cherub stands before God.” As another Thomas points out, namely Thomas Aquinas, it is the doubting of Thomas the Apostle that provides for us the greater certainty of faith, a faith which seeks to know and in that desire encounters the Christ who wants us to know the mystery of divine love, the love which redeems and renews, the love which “drive[s] the darkness of doubt away”.
Thomas’ encounter with the Risen Christ behind the closed doors of the Upper Room in Jerusalem on The Octave Day of Easter gives rise to the most wonderful words of faith, “My Lord, and my God,” Thomas says, to the Christ who makes himself known to him. They have become words which are part of the so-called private prayers of priests at the moment of the elevation of the host at Mass. “My Lord and my God.” They are equally the words which belong to our coming to the mystery of Christ’s nativity. We behold through the witness of Thomas our Lord and our God wrapped in swaddling bands and lying in a manger. Venite adoremus Dominum.
What Thomas wants to know is what our humanity seeks, the wonder of God in the mystery of his being with us. His witness is about faith seeking understanding and that is the challenge for us and for our world and day. “The darkness comprehendeth it not,” as the King James’ translation of the Greek wonderfully puts it. There is the darkness of doubt that leads to despair, to be sure, but there is the doubt which seeks to know, a seeking which leads to light and enlightenment. Such is the witness of Thomas.
Fr. David Curry
The Feast of St. Thomas, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/12/21/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-thomas-3/
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