Advent Programme 2: “My Lord, and my God”
“My Lord, and my God”
The Feast of Thomas closely aligns, at least in the northern hemisphere, with the winter solstice; the shortest day and the darkest night of the year. Its spiritual significance builds on that coincidence with nature to bring us to Christ, the Light and Life of the world, who comes to bring us out of the darkness of doubt and fear. Yet the story of so-called ‘doubting’ Thomas in the Gospel properly belongs to Easter and to the affirmation of the Resurrection, but his day of commemoration belongs to Christmas and thus to the affirmation of the Incarnation, to the bodily reality of Christ without which his suffering, death, and resurrection are illusory and meaningless. What Thomas says to the Risen Christ, who appears to him behind closed doors, “My Lord, and My God”, the Church says at Christmas about the Babe of Bethlehem, “My Lord, and My God”, the Word who is God and Lord made flesh, God with us. It is what we may say devotionally at Communion, too, at the elevation of the host. His words affirm the radical meaning of God’s engagement with our humanity in the intimacy of the body of Christ sacramentally.
The Feast of St. Thomas underscores the profound interconnection and interplay between Christmas and Easter, between Advent and Lent, in the dynamic and dialectic of their relation. John Donne wisely notes about Christ that his “Christmas Day and Good Friday are but the morning and the evening of one and the same day”. Each mystery is inconceivable without the other; they belong to the whole reality of Christ as Lord and God with us.
Thomas is the patron saint of scepticism which is a necessary part of our coming to faith and understanding. We may be apt to have a negative or sceptical view of scepticism and think that it undermines the assurances of belief. But belief that is mere assertion is empty and weak. What Thomas reminds us is the need for our serious engagement with the things of God being made known to us and thus to the questions about our knowing. It belongs, in other words, to the paradigm of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.
Neil Postman, an American philosopher and educator (d. 2003), argues for the development of a scientific or what he also calls a sceptical outlook as part of modern education and as one of the gifts of the Enlightenment, a period which some Christians often scorn and vilify as undermining or disparaging the Faith. Scepticism belongs instead to the deep quest for wisdom, to the idea of questioning. Quest and questioning go together; it is about the desire to know, something which Aristotle claims belongs to human nature. Without the questioning, we might say, there can be no real knowing. The questioning assumes the faith that things can be known which is not the same thing as saying that we know everything. Instead, it is the presupposition for our knowing.
