Sermon for the Feast of St. Thomas
“My Lord, and my God”
The Collect for the Feast of St. Thomas in the week of the Fourth Sunday in Advent reveals the significance of Thomas for our approach to Christmas. It is about doubt leading to certainty. As such it helps us to think about doubt in a more positive and even metaphysical way that belongs to the larger traditions of philosophy and religion. The doubt of so-called doubting Thomas is really about the forms of intellectual inquiry, about wanting to know and in ways which challenge our assumptions about what we think we know. Thomas, the Collect observes, was “doubtful” about Christ’s Resurrection. No body, no incarnation, therefore no resurrection, we might say. Hence the reason for this feast and Gospel in the days leading to Christmas, to the Incarnation. Resurrection and Incarnation are indubitably and necessarily connected, it seems.
Descartes in the early seventeenth century uses doubt in an hyperbolical way in the quest for certainty. He highlights the uncertainties or the doubtfulness about what we can know simply through our senses in order to bring us to realize that our knowing anything at all depends upon the knowledge of ourselves as thinking things which in turn depends upon the knowledge of God as good and not a deceiver if we are to have any knowledge whatsoever whether of mental or physical things. Calling into question what we ordinarily take for granted leads us to a deeper understanding of the metaphysical principles upon which thought and being depend. Perhaps we can see the biblical Thomas as a kind of precursor of such forms of philosophical inquiry.
For 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 and which the Collect seems to suggest. The doubt of Thomas is “for the more confirmation of the faith”.
That “greater” or “more confirmation of [our] 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 the 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 that 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.
