A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Thomas, the name means twin, one of the 12, was absent. When Jesus came into the room, of course, this is the rev after the resurrection. The other disciples who were assembled in the room with the doors all shut and so forth, the other disciples kept telling him, that is Thomas, we have seen the lord. Thomas' answer was, I'll never believe it without probing the nail prints in his hands, without putting my finger in the nail marks, and my hand into his side.
Well, a week later, the disciples were once again assembled in the room. And this time, Thomas was with them. Despite the locked doors, Jesus came and stood before them. Peace, he said, be with you. And then turning to Thomas, he said, take your finger and examine my hands.
Put your hand into my side. Do not persist in your unbelief, but believe. Thomas replied, my lord and my god. Then Jesus said to Thomas, you became a believer because you saw me. Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed.
And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. This phrase, my lord and my god, I believe help thou my unbelief. And this about is one of the main things, almost the only thing we know about Thomas the apostle. But that's plenty.
It's plenty. In those few words, there's a awful lot of background and also even facing the future, speaking of the time when it happened. Well, the first and obvious thing is that Thomas was a skeptic. And for my part, I would I'm entirely with him. See, some people seem to think that, well, golly, why didn't he believe like the rest of them?
The point is he didn't, and he had what reason did he have to believe? He didn't see the resurrection. He had no evidence of the resurrection. All he had was the testimony of his companions. And such a thing as a body coming out of a grave was simply unthinkable.
That is coming out of by itself. And so the man said, I I can't believe that kind of nonsense. I'd have been with him a 100%. So would have you been with him if you if you were thinking at all. I say hallelujah to Thomas.
He contributed much more by his skepticism than the rest of them did by being willy nilly, swallowing anything that came across the board. I admire Saint Thomas for what he did. What did he did so that was wrong? Where would why should he have believed the resurrection? Just because a couple of these of his associates told him about it?
Ridiculous. And so that's the first point that what that that Thomas' skepticism, when it changed to his utter conviction and acknowledgment of Christ's resurrection, is tremendous. It's tremendous. Now the second point of what I'm so that what I mean is, here he he passed from being a skeptic to being a firm believer. But you see, what did he believe?
He could not say, I believe that you are present here. You can't believe what you have and what you know by your senses. Experiential knowledge is one thing, but what you take on faith, credibility is a totally different thing. It's something that you don't know. It's an assent to something you don't know and without evidence because of a reliable witness.
Witness. Happens every day in a court of law. And so Thomas, that's the first thing. He acknowledges because he now sees and feels and hears and maybe smells Christ. But there's much more to it than that.
Because the second thing is that Thomas's statement, my lord and my god, help thou my belief unbelief. That is the clearest, most explicit statement in the gospels about the divinity of our lord. I said most explicit statement in the gospels, the four gospels, about the divinity of Christ, that Christ is the son of god, lord and master of the universe. Now that's the second very important thing there. Because the the fact that Christ has risen from the dead, that doesn't automatically mean that he's god as far as Thomas was concerned.
But when he sees Christ, when he feels Christ, when Christ notice, Christ says, don't he Christ shows knowledge of his absence on the first time around. Notice that. Because our lord said, now you can believe me. Put your hands in my in my, the nail prints. Put your hand in my side where the spear went in.
And so Thomas can no longer say, yes. I believe you have risen, lord. But his his statement about the divinity is a matter of faith, belief, and credibility. Now the third thing, and this may be as important as the other two, is this, that that Thomas's statement here, his acceptance of our lord's divinity as a matter of faith, he didn't see the resurrection. All he had was our lord's appearance to it.
Now so his ascent to our lord's resurrection as god because he took it on the testimony of a of witnesses, that became the belief of the early Christians. They didn't have a direct contact with the resurrection. You don't have a direct contact with the resurrection. It's not a matter of knowledge in the sense of set of experiential knowledge or of induction or deductive reasoning. As far as we here in Garrett Park in 1991 are concerned, our whole ascent to the resurrection of Christ is an act of profound faith as much as our belief in the real presence of Christ in that tabernacle right now.
We don't have any experiential knowledge of that. And Thomas's acceptance of that, the way he did it, became the foundation of the way the early, most primitive Christians had their accepted the resurrection as the proof for Christ being God. So in this little phrase of Thomas, it's a terribly dramatic scene. Just imagine. Here he is alone surrounded by all the apostles and other people, very likely our blessed mother was there.
Here he's standing alone, and there is Christ. No one expected it. The doors were all locked. Christ appears to him. And then notice, he is the one.
Thomas doesn't say, lord, let me put my hand in your side. He had already said that, and Christ shows knowledge of that. Christ tells him, come on, Thomas. You're the one who said, I'll bleed if I can touch you. Well, here I am.
Put your hands in the nail holes. Put your hand in the in the slash of my side where the spear went through. Go ahead and do it. You can imagine Thomas's reluctance to do it. I'll bet he shrunk back.
He wished he was a million miles from there. I'll bet you a dollar. Did he put his hands in? Did he put his hands in Christ's eye? I don't know.
He probably didn't. He didn't need it anymore. And so these three points, how you how Thomas became a firm believer, how he makes this statement of Jesus Christ as true God, how his act of faith in the end about Christ's divinity, not about his resurrection, but about his divinity, became the theme of the early earliest days of the church. These, see, all of this is in that little phrase, my well, not just in this phrase. You have to go back to to Thomas' reaction to the disciples when he did not believe when they told him.
In other words, he did not believe simply on the credibility of his companions. And he told them so. But then comes the incident in today's gospel. It's it's absolutely tremendous. Tremendous.
And there's no doubt about this text, about its authenticity or how you translate it. Translate it any way you want. It comes out the same way. It's not one of those texts like the last supper text. It's not ambiguous.
And so let us hearten to Thomas. Don't be a remember, there's nothing wrong in a healthy skepticism. Nothing wrong at all in a healthy skepticism. Healthy skepticism. Show me.
There's nothing wrong in it. On the other hand, we have to be humble before truth. We have to be willing to work to find the truth. See, some people are I I mean it. You tell them, look.
You come to me with a problem. Look. Read Newman, idea of a university, development of doctor, one of his sermons. Do you think they ever do it? No.
That would mean having to go to a library and finding a book and and and actually reading a book. And who's gonna do that today? If it's not on video, who cares? I'm telling you the way things are today. This has happened time and again to me.
Time and again. So people expect the truth to be served up on a silver platter. They come to me and say, I want to give me the truth. Folks, the truth is not an easy thing. To pursue the truth is difficult.
It requires labor. Instruction. It requires background. It requires a lot of things. And one of them is doing it.
The labor, the sweat, the the the tantalizing aspects of it, these are not easy. But remember, when Christ came to bring the good news to mankind, he didn't expect every human being to be a theologian or a philosopher or a scholar. All he expected to be notice, not a single one of the apostles was any of those things. None of the apostles were educated men. Maybe yeah.
I can say that. I don't think a single one was. So when on the one hand I talk about the difficulty of finding truth, remember, I have to take it all back because in the last analysis, we have the living church. We have the voice of Christ, a living voice, not a printed voice, not a computer voice, but the living voice of Jesus Christ speaking from the oracle of Peter on the rock. And that's where it is very simple, very easy to find the truth.
Our lord said to Peter, on this rock, I will build my church. Going therefore, teach ye all nations, baptize them. Behold, I'm with you all days to the world. Now that's either true or it ain't true. But if it's true, then all we have to do is to know where the rock is, to find Peter, and to listen to him.
We don't have to go through all the tortures of pursuing the truth as old man Socrates did. We have the truth served up by the living voice of Jesus Christ in Peter, the rock. In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.