by CCW | 21 December 2018 09:00
‘From darkness and doubt, Good Lord, deliver us.’ It could be a paraphrase of the Litany. We have heard, too, in the Exhortations to Communion about confession, even private confession, as belonging to our coming to Communion, “with a full trust in God’s mercy, and with a quiet conscience,” including “the avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness” (BCP, p. 91). There is a wonderful paradox that we commemorate Thomas, the one who is known as ‘doubting Thomas’ for through his doubt, our faith is confirmed all the more.
In the time of the longest night in the darkness of nature’s year, we look to the Light of Christ coming in the darkness when we will hear that “the darkness overcame it not.” Likewise with the matters of doubt and uncertainty in our souls. Advent is the season of watching and waiting in the darkness. What do we mean by darkness? Is it simply the absence of light? Are we bereft and left simply with our doubts and fears?
St. Thomas is the saint of the Advent even more so than St. Andrew whose feast usually but not always falls within the Advent season. The Feast of St. Thomas always falls just four days before Christmas; the only variable is whether if falls within the week of the Third or the Fourth Sunday in Advent, or when the 21st of December is the Fourth Sunday in Advent, it gets transferred to the following Tuesday (Dec. 23rd.) In any event, it is always in Advent.
It is significant that the Gospel reading is the Easter story about Thomas’ doubting the witness of the other disciples to the Resurrection of Jesus. “Except I shall see,” he says, except I touch, “put[ting] my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust[ing] my hand into his side, I will not believe.” It is a powerful moment. But behind the closed doors of the Upper Room, Christ appears again to the disciples and, most importantly, to Thomas. “Thomas,” he says, “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing.” It is a marvellous moment of truth and of our awakening to truth in the ways that belong to each of our forms of knowing.
We are not told whether Thomas did reach forth finger and hands and touch the Risen Christ. We are told that Thomas sought for a kind of empirical proof that the person whom he had personally known and followed, whom he thought was dead, was truly alive. The encounter with the Risen Christ confirms that reality. Thomas’ words are the great words of faith, “My Lord, and my God,” he simply says. It is a kind of break-through of the understanding. To see the real truth and substance of things in and through the flesh. The body matters. It is not everything but it is not nothing either.
Such is the Incarnation and hence the reason why Thomas’ feast prepares us for Christ’s holy birth. As Thomas Aquinas notes, his doubting provides the greater certainty for our faith, a teaching which forms the basis for the Collect. From doubtfulness about Jesus’ resurrection to faith in the resurrection, we are awakened to faith in Jesus Christ. “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.”
I like to think of Thomas’ doubting as being like the darkness of our unknowing. Something not simply negative but positive in the sense that the darkness also prepares us for our coming to the light of Christ. We need the darkness, as it were, to awaken us to the truth and knowledge of the light which we cannot conceive but only receive.
Thomas’ doubting is really a kind of questioning. In other words, a seeking to know, and therefore it accords with the forms of knowing that belong to our humanity. To Mary Magdalene, Jesus had just said in the very same chapter of John’s Gospel, “touch me not”; now Jesus says to Thomas, reach out and touch. That acknowledges the different qualities of soul and its powers of knowing that are appropriate to each person. For both there is an overcoming, the overcoming of sorrow, in the case of Mary Magdalene; of doubt, in the case of Thomas. And all to our benefit, to the awakening to faith in us and to a deeper trust in God’s mercy and all at the darkest time of nature’s year. The Feast of Thomas awakens us to a more profound understanding of the mystery of God and a deeper understanding of our humanity as “fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God”, of our being “an habitation of God through the Spirit,” as the Epistle reading from Ephesians so wonderfully reminds us.
Thomas’ words are the great words of faith that see within the veil of the flesh the invisible things of God. “Faith, our outward sense befriending makes our inward vision clear,” as Thomas Aquinas’ great eucharistic hymn, the Tantum Ergo of the Pange Lingua, puts it. Praestet fides supplementum, sensuum defectui. Faith supplying what the senses lack, really, and as such an acknowledgment of the limitations to our human knowing, on the one hand, and the recognition of the principle of divine knowing upon which all our knowing depends, on the other hand.
At mass, during the great Eucharistic prayer, you have perhaps heard me quietly say or mumble something at the time of the consecration of the bread and the wine. They are the words of Thomas said with respect to the sacrament, Dominus meus, Deus meus, “My Lord, and my God”. They are the words, too, that belong to our coming to Christ’s holy nativity when we behold the babe of Bethlehem, and say “My Lord, and my God.” Such is the witness of Thomas in awakening us to faith and knowledge in God’s being with us. Such is the light of faith that overcomes all the darkness of doubt.
Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Thomas
December 20th, 2018
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