“My Lord, and my God”
In the wonder of God’s Providence, the Feast of St. Thomas, which falls on the 21st of December, on the longest night and shortest day of nature’s year (at least in the Northern hemisphere – a reminder to us of the conditions and realities of creation and where we are placed within it), was also The Fourth Sunday in Advent. Andrew and Thomas are the Advent Saints but, especially Thomas, whose feast always falls within the Advent season; Andrew’s feast day, the 30th of November sometimes falls just before Advent begins, though this year in the wonder of Providence it, too, fell on a Sunday, indeed, The First Sunday in Advent.
In the case of both Andrew and Thomas and in keeping with the logic of their place in the Sanctorale, the cycle of saints’ days that intersperse and shape and in turn are shaped by the seasons of the Church Year, their commemorations are transferred to the following Tuesday. Thus both Andrew and Thomas give place to what they themselves bear witness to and by which they are defined: the Advent of Christ. So tonight on the eve of Christmas Eve we commemorate Thomas the Apostle.
In an important way, the whole meaning of Advent (and so of Christmas) is profoundly encapsulated in Thomas’s words, “My Lord, and my God”, borne out of his encounter with the Risen Christ as recorded in the 20th Chapter of John’s Gospel. His words bring all of the questions of Advent to their fullness of meaning. Somehow so-called doubting Thomas, as the Collect suggests, drawing in part upon another Thomas, Thomas Aquinas, provides “the more confirmation of the faith” precisely through his being doubtful. Doubtful about what? Christ’s resurrection.
What does this have to do with Advent? Everything. There can be no resurrection without a body. The Christian Advent in its fullness of meaning is all about the body – Christ incarnate and born of the Virgin Mary. The encounter between Thomas and the Risen Christ in the Upper Room on the eighth day of Easter testifies to the truth of Christ’s humanity, the truth of the Word and Son of God made flesh. For what end? The resurrection is the redemption of our humanity and witnesses to the sacrifice of Christ so powerfully presented to us in the Gospel for the Feast of Thomas.
“Except I shall see”, Thomas says, and touch, too, we might add, “I will not believe”. He is questioning the report of the other disciples from the evening of Easter day when Christ appeared to them showing them “his hands and his side”. Seeing is believing we commonly say, defaulting to one form of epistemology or theory of our knowing, namely, what is based on the empirical, what is known through our senses, empiricism. Epistemology became the dominant form of philosophical thinking in early modernity, an emphasis on our knowing, but often at the expense of ontology, a regard for the intellectual structure of reality itself. But empiricism is only one form of knowing or epistemology usually contrasted or even opposed to rationalism, what we can know through our reason independent of sense experience. The opposition is often over-stated since both forms of knowing have their place and truth.
This may seem like a kind of intellectual digression but bears on the very radical nature of Revelation which does not negate the forms of human knowing but gathers them into a larger understanding. The 20th chapter of John’s Gospel provides a telling example. The story of Thomas which we heard tonight comes at the latter part of this chapter, a chapter which begins with the story of Mary Magdalene. In the same chapter, Jesus tells Mary not to touch – noli me tangere – and tells Thomas to see and touch!
Two contrary points of view, two contrasting forms of knowing but both circle around the center of the Risen Christ and the purpose of his coming: his resurrection as testament to human redemption. These stories do not contradict one another but complement each other through what is made known albeit in different ways, each according to the capacities or capabilities of the beholder to behold. In a way, they show us the radical nature of Revelation, to what is being made known to us in various ways about the truth of our lives in God.
We are not told, nor do we need to be told, whether Thomas reached hither his fingers and hand and thrust them into the wounded side of Christ. We are only told what Thomas said, “My Lord, and my God”. His words are words of faith, itself a kind of knowing that belongs to the possibilities of all knowing. In the risen and visible Christ he encounters the reality of God and, like Mary, he is transformed or changed by the encounter. Both are set into motion as apostles, Mary Magdalene as the Fathers famously say is apostle apostolorum, the apostle to the Apostles. Thomas, as the office readings for his feast day remind us, is the one whose dialogues with Christ in John’s Gospel bring out one of the great ‘I Am sayings’ of Jesus, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”. And to add to it, “he who has seen me has seen the Father”, he says to Thomas.
The whole of Advent really comes down to his words, “My Lord, and my God”. It testifies to the meaning of Christ’s coming and his words take on another dimension and application for us in our lives in faith. For at Christmas, what is wanted to be proclaimed by us about the child Christ is “My Lord, and my God”, the true meaning of the Word made flesh, of God made man. The radical meaning of Christmas is inescapably bound up in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, in the reality of his sacrifice. As we shall see in the mystery of Christmas, the Incarnation is real, it is not a play-act, a mere seeming. The wounds of the crucified belong to the reality of his humble birth. He is God and Man. And sacramentally, too, there is the application of Thomas’s words, “My Lord, and my God”, for us devotionally in the eucharist at the elevation of the consecrated elements.
God is not reduced to the sensible and material world, collapsed into it, as it were, rather God uses the things of the world and the forms of our knowing to gather us into his light and life. And so like Descartes and Calvin, we may discover that wisdom “consists”, as Calvin puts it “almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” And like Descartes, and Thomas, it seems, we may come to such knowledge through doubt, meaning the questioning that seeks to know and as such is open to what is made known to us by God, albeit in different ways, but especially through Revelation.
“My Lord, and my God”.
Fr. David Curry,
Feast of St. Thomas, 2025