Sermon on April 12, 2026
“Doubting Thomases”
By: The Rev. Ernie Lewis
Today we find ourselves in a locked room where some of Jesus’s closest followers are huddled together as they try, in the midst of their grief and fear, to make some kind of sense of his death and the rumors of his resurrection as reported by some of the women in their group who were closest to him. (Even in those long-ago times dead people didn’t routinely come back to life!)
Yet, right in the middle of their discussions and to their utter astonishment, Jesus himself appears!
They’re all present except Thomas who, when told of Jesus’s appearance, insists that he is unable to believe the “wild” story unless he can personally, physically, see and touch the wounds on the body of Jesus: the wounds of the spikes in his wrists and the stab wound in his side.
For that, of course, Thomas’s name has become synonymous down to this day with someone who instinctively discounts something that seems obvious to everybody else!
“Doubting Thomases”, we call them dismissably.
But on a subsequent occasion, in that same crowded room, Jesus again appears. Thomas is present. Jesus invites him to do exactly what he has said he needs to do if he is to believe.
“Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt, but believe.”
In the Sanssouci Gallery in Potsdam hangs a painting by the 17th Century painter Caravaggio, famous for his portrayals of “real life” rather than the stylized formulae favored by earlier painters. It captures all the emotion of that moment!
Jesus stands before Thomas, his hand brushing his own garment aside and gently holding and guiding Thomas’s hand, index finger extended, into the unhealed wound on his side. Two other disciples lean in over his shoulder watching in stunned, silent awe.
There’s gentle, intimate tenderness in that guiding hand. There’s no condemnation! No “I told you so.”
There is also the sense that the observing disciples are experiencing a moment of profound emotion and confirmation!
There is no chiding, no accusation, only gentleness in Jesus’ words and actions directed toward Thomas at that moment and who seems able only to stammer out, “My Lord, and my God!”
Jesus, however, then gently reminds him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Perhaps he’s remembering that incident a short time earlier when he announced his intention to go to the home of his friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus in Judea. His disciples urged him not to go because of the danger of the rising opposition of the Judean authorities and threats to his life.
When he expressed his intention to go anyway, it was Thomas, the very same Thomas, who urged his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
Only Thomas seems to have had a clear-eyed vision of what lay ahead and committed himself to living into it to the fullest, even if it meant his own death.
It was a defining, astonishing moment!
And yet, a question lingers, doesn’t it?
Why was Thomas missing from the group gathered in that room after the crucifixion when Jesus first appeared?
I wonder if it might have been something like that strange phenomenon we call “Survivors Guilt”, experienced not uncommonly by people who walk away unharmed from terrible tragedies in which many other people have died. They develop a sense of terrible depression and guilt that they have survived. Did Thomas perhaps remember his having urged the group to accompany Jesus into the city where his death would occur? Was he afraid to gather with them? We will never know.
In any case, Thomas’s affirmation, “My Lord, and my God”, “brings history and faith together in a rush”, says Bishop N.T. Wright.
The resurrection constitutes a “new creation”!
Bishop Wright continues,…..”as such, it is open to, and indeed eager for, the work of human beings – not to manipulate it with magic tricks nor to be subservient to it as though the world of creation were itself divine but to be its stewards. And stewards need to pay close, minute attention to that of which they are stewards in order to better serve it and to enable it to attain its intended fruitfulness.”[1]
Last week, Pamela+ commented in her sermon that the first witnesses to the Resurrection were not the faithful women gathered at the tomb, but the dust, the binding cloths, the spices, and the stone as it rolled away from the mouth of the burial cave. Creation and its creatures were the first to recognize and proclaim the appearance of that “New Creation”!
Creation has been made new in the resurrection of Jesus!
Jesus’s death and resurrection must never be seen by anyone as JUST making it so that Christians can go to heaven when they die.
It’s much, much more then that!
It signals the dawn of an entirely new Creation!
Now! Here!
As St. Paul has written in his second letter to the Church at Corinth, “So if anyone in in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” [2]
In a sense, we must all “die” to ourselves, in order to be raised to life in that new creation.
Thomas’s need to touch, to feel with his own senses, in his own body, his fingers and hands, the resurrected body of Jesus, means for us, and for all creation something new! It is something to be seen, touched, heard and personally experienced!
It means that we live in a Resurrection Creation!
It’s a “touchable” and “feel-able“ Creation.
We are “Resurrection People”!
We need to be about the business of living fully into that reality!
There is so much in our very broken world that seems to contradict that reality these days, but it is still the reality!
We are still “Resurrection People”!
We are still part of a New Creation!
Though we can’t physically examine Jesus’s hands or put our fingers in the wound in his side, we can kneel before him and affirm, “My Lord, …and my God!”
When we come together to the table Jesus has set before us, we take into our own bodies the symbols of his death – his body and blood.
When we rise from this table, we are reckoned raised with him.
We are new creations and there is work to be done!
God grant that we may live into that reality and make it our own!
Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed!
Alleluia!
[1]Wright, N. T. “Surprised By Hope” HarperOne, p712008
[2] 2 Corinthians 5:17
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