Deliberate steps of Faith

While I was on leave this week, I had the pleasure of driving a canal boat. Easy I thought, well until you come upon another boat! Then all manner of doubt comes into my mind.  Thankfully my mate was there to guide me to avert a ‘contact’ with the other boat.

Afterwards I was mindful of Thomas. It is not explained why Thomas was absent when the Risen Jesus first stood among them. But because Thomas was absent earlier, the focus shifts to him eight days later when Jesus appears again, highlighting the particular way in which he came to faith.

We call him ‘doubting Thomas’ because he set seeing and touching the wounds of the Risen Jesus as the condition for his belief. Yet it does not say that Thomas touched the wounds. It seems that he did not need to in the end, because as with the others, he saw and he believed.

When we call him ‘doubting Thomas’ we use the term ‘doubt’ as if it defines him, but surely, if anything defines him, it is his unambiguous declaration of faith. We do not need to know the circumstances that kept him away from the others on that first evening of the week. The delay allows us to recognise the hand of God at work in Thomas. We see how God brought him to the point where he could articulate the fullest statement of faith of all the disciples: ‘My Lord and my God’.

When the Risen Jesus first stood among them, he said to them, ‘Peace be with you,’ showed them the wounds in his hands and his side, and then they recognised him. His wounds seem to serve as markers of his identity, but they are far more. When Jesus said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side’, his very response shows that in fact it is Jesus who has touched Thomas.

At the last supper, when Jesus talked to his disciples about going away, and when he said to them, ‘You know the way where I am going’, Thomas had said to him, ‘We do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ When Jesus replied that no one can come to the Father except through him, we are meant take both halves of that statement seriously. Left to ourselves, we cannot go to God and yet we live in the hope of going to him by his grace and mercy. This is the extraordinary weight of Jesus’ words, ‘except through me’.

In that room at the last supper, in the hearing of Thomas, Jesus called himself the Way. It was to be the first name given to his followers. Outside their community, the word was commonly used to refer to the great highways criss-crossing the Roman Empire, connecting cities, busy with soldiers and traders, administrators and travellers. But whether it be a great road paved in stone, or a humble track across open country, what makes it a way is the shared intentional movement and the shared belief that it leads to a destination.

My path may or may not have been well-trodden. Perhaps there have been twists and turns. Sometimes, I may have stalled or even strayed. And perhaps there are wounds suffered or inflicted. Yet his way is there before me even now. And I have come, at least in part, to know the way to the place where I am going.

Thomas saw the Risen Jesus and came to faith, but the particular way in which he came to faith, speaks to all of us who have not seen and yet believe. We do not see his wounds, nor do we touch them; rather it is Jesus who both sees and touches our wounds. As once with Thomas, so too with each of us, our Lord and our God would bring to completion the work he has begun within us. He would continue to draw us away from all that estranges us from him, and take us to himself.

Poor vessels that we are, we sometimes fail to understand that we too are God’s work. Even if our steps falter along the way, he is with us, and he would bring us home, for this is why he came and stood among us: ‘that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing we may have life in his name.’

Every blessing

Father Paul