My Lord and My God
And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.
These are the last three verses from John Betjeman’s poem, “Christmas”.
Thomas is the Advent Saint who brings us to the mystery of Christmas. John Betjeman’s poem captures perfectly the underlying impulse of Thomas’ so-called doubting; it is really a kind of questioning and, as such, in pursuit of understanding. A Resurrection story, it recalls the appearance of Christ to the disciples who were huddled in fear behind closed doors on the evening of Easter Day. Thomas was not present with them. When he hears their report that “ we have seen the Lord,” he famously says, “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.”
The Feast of St. Thomas falls just before the festival of Christ’s Nativity. The Resurrection and the Nativity are completely intertwined and it is the same question, a question about the reality of Christ’s embrace of our humanity, soul and body, that belongs to the radical truth of the Incarnation. Thomas’ question helps us to think about its radical meaning. The birth and passion of Christ reveal to us both the nature of God and a fuller view of our humanity. In a way, Thomas’ question is about the reality of Christ’s humanity and in turn his divinity.
But just as we tend to reduce Christmas to things sensual and sentimental, to the ways in which we constantly attempt to domesticate divinity, to make God conform to us, so Thomas’ questioning reveals the danger of reducing God to us and our expectations, and to one form of human thinking. The marvel of the Gospel for his feast lies in the encounter in which Jesus appears again behind closed doors to the disciples on the eighth day, the Octave Day of Easter. Only this time Thomas is present. Jesus addresses himself directly to Thomas and his questions.
“Thomas,” Jesus says, “ addressing him by name, “reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side.” But most powerfully of all he says, “be not faithless but believing.” Faith is itself a form of knowing. We all have faith that things in some sense or another can be known but in what kind of ways? It can’t be by reducing things simply to empirical facts, to things and objects but neither can those things be dismissed as nothing. They are part of the partial forms of our knowing. Neither can it be simply by claiming that whatever is in our minds is real. The bodily reality of Christ’s Resurrection derives from his Nativity, from his taking upon himself our nature in all its fullness and truth.
“Faith our outward sense befriending makes the inward vision clear.” The mystery of Christmas and the mystery of Easter are one and the same; it is the mystery of human redemption. Through Christ we discover the deeper truth of God and a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. We are more but not less than our bodies; the mystery of Christ is all about that realization. We are made for God and that changes how we think about ourselves as embodied beings who are alive to the things of the spirit which redeem the material and physical aspects of reality. Hence the great wonder of this Advent feast which catapults us already into the mystery of Christmas in the great truth of Christ as the Word made flesh, as God made man “in Palestine” and who “lives today in bread and wine.”
We can only say with Thomas, “My Lord and My God,” words which I quietly say at every Mass at the consecration of the elements of bread and wine. Dominus Meus et Deus Meus. Faith allows us to see things in another light, the light which comes to us in the darkness of doubt and uncertainty, the light which awakens us to joy and to gladness. As another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas, notes, the doubting of Thomas provides for us the greater certainty of faith.
Paradoxically (and so too for Descartes) the means or methodology of doubt leads to a greater certainty predicated upon the greater mystery, the mystery of God himself, the God made man who does not cease to be God in becoming man. Such is the greater wonder for us about who we are in the sight of God. We are more though not less than our lives and experiences, more though not less than our embodied being in cultures and communities and families. Christ Incarnate embraces our humanity and shows us the wounds of our sin and suffering as embraced by him. He makes something more out of our doubt and despair, out of all the forms of our limited knowing, and out of all the forms of our sin and evil. Such is Thomas’s great insight into the overarching goodness of God. Such are his words of faith, “My Lord and My God.” So, too, for us in the mystery of Christmas to which his feast brings us.
“My Lord and My God!”
Fr. David Curry
Feast of St. Thomas, 2023