The Courage of Thomas

Faith does not ask us to believe in fantasies. It asks us to remain when certainty has disappeared.

“Let us also go, that we may die with Him.”

— John 11:16

Thomas has been remembered as the doubter.

Perhaps we have remembered him wrongly.

Long before he placed his hand near the wounds of the risen Christ, Thomas had already revealed something essential about his heart.

When Jesus turned toward Judea again, the disciples understood the danger. They reminded Him that the authorities had recently sought to stone Him. Jerusalem was no abstraction. To walk toward it was to walk toward hostility, suffering, perhaps death.

And Thomas said:

“Let us also go, that we may die with Him.”

These are not the words of a timid man.

They are the words of someone who loves Christ enough to follow Him even when he believes the road ends in death.

Thomas does not understand.

He follows.

Perhaps this is why his later anguish should be treated more gently.

When the others tell him that they have seen the Lord, Thomas cannot simply take refuge in their enthusiasm. Something in him refuses consolation purchased at the price of reality.

He had watched hope die.

He had seen what men could do to a body.

He knew about nails.

He knew about wounds.

And therefore he would not believe in a resurrection that somehow passed around the wounds.

“If I do not see the mark of the nails…”

We often hear unbelief in those words.

There may also be love.

Thomas does not want a Christ without wounds.

He does not want an idea of Jesus.

He does not want the disciples’ longing projected into an apparition of consolation.

If Christ is alive, then let it be Christ who is alive.

The Crucified One.

The wounded One.

The One whom Thomas had been willing to follow into death.

There is something profoundly desert-like in this.

The Fathers were suspicious of religious fantasy. They warned relentlessly against images born from the imagination, consolations eagerly seized, experiences desired because they relieved the terrible nakedness of faith. They knew how easily the heart can worship what it wishes to be true.

The elders of the spiritual life tell us much the same thing: do not manufacture light because you are afraid of the darkness.

Remain.

Wait.

Call upon the Name.

God does not need our imagination to make Him real.

Thomas remains in that terrible place for eight days.

Eight days between the testimony of others and the encounter that becomes his own.

We pass too quickly over those days.

The others rejoice.

Thomas cannot.

They have seen.

Thomas has not.

And still he remains among them.

This may be one of the most beautiful things about him.

He does not understand, but he does not leave.

He cannot say what the others are saying, but neither does he abandon the place where Christ had gathered them.

There is a fidelity deeper than certainty.

Sometimes faith looks like this.

I cannot see.

I cannot make myself believe what I have not yet been given to see.

I will not manufacture consolation.

But I will remain.

The desert knows this faith.

The monk who remains in his cell when prayer has become dry knows it.

The person who continues to whisper the Name when the Name seems to disappear into darkness knows it.

The caregiver who rises again to perform the same small act of love, without revelation or resolution, knows it.

The grieving heart that refuses both despair and easy consolation knows it.

Thomas knows it.

And Christ comes.

He does not rebuke Thomas for wanting reality.

He gives him reality.

“Bring your finger here.”

Look.

Touch.

Here are the wounds.

The risen Christ does not erase Calvary in order to prove the Resurrection. He reveals Himself through the places where He was pierced.

This is Christianity stripped of fantasy.

The wounds remain.

And Christ is alive.

Perhaps this is why Thomas’s confession is so great.

“My Lord and my God.”

Not an explanation.

Not a theory.

Not even an account of what has happened.

A surrender.

Thomas had once said, “Let us go and die with Him.”

Now everything has been reduced to four words.

“My Lord and my God.”

The Fathers understood that mature faith becomes increasingly simple. It ceases trying to possess God through explanations. The heart passes through purification, disappointment, bewilderment, and sometimes the collapse of everything it thought faith would feel like.

And what remains is not nothing.

God remains.

Thomas teaches us that there is a doubt born from indifference, but there is also a questioning born from reverence for truth.

There is an unbelief that flees God.

And there is a refusal to accept substitutes for God.

We should be careful not to confuse the two.

Sometimes the person who cannot accept an easy answer is closer to faith than the person who accepts one merely because it brings relief.

God is not offended by our refusal of fantasy.

He asks something more difficult.

Stay near the wounds.

Do not flee the darkness.

Do not invent resurrection.

Wait for Christ.

And if all you can say while you wait is what Thomas said before he understood anything—

Let us go with Him—

then go.

Even toward the place where everything seems to be ending.

For the strange mystery of the Gospel is that Thomas was right.

We must go and die with Him.

But Thomas had not yet learned the rest.

The One with whom we die is the One before whom, finally, we fall to our knees.

The wounds are still there.

But death is not the deepest thing.

Christ is.

And sometimes faith begins again when, having lost every lesser certainty, the heart looks upon Him and has nothing left to say except:

My Lord.

My God.