"My Lord and My God!"

Thomas, called Didymus, has done all of us a great favor.  He could not accept the testimony of others, but needed to see for himself.  He needed to put his own finger into the side of Christ, and touch for himself the print of the nails.  "I will not believe unless...." he said.  And did Jesus get mad?  No.  "Come, Thomas, He said; "come and place your hand here and your finger here."

And Thomas believed when he touched for himself the Living Christ: "My Lord and My God!"

When I was younger, I used to wonder what "Grace" was, what "Faith" was.  I kind of knew, in a rational way, what the words meant; it's just that the words referred to some abstractions that I could not put my finger on.  I could not touch grace and faith; I could not put my hand on the experience, the definition, the "flesh" of these words.  I would hear people say we need faith, and I was trying to "believe" in what I heard, but how does one conjure up "belief" when doubt is uppermost?

Jesus rose from the dead?  "Give me a break," Thomas must have thought to himself.  "What have they been smoking?"  "I SAW them put His body in the tomb and roll the stone across the opening.  That I know!"  "What I don't know is what they saw when I wasn't with them."

"Come here, Thomas," says the Lord.  "Come, put your finger here.  Touch Me and believe!"  And the love which originally drew Thomas to Jesus caught flame once again.  Everything else had disappeared with the Crucifixion, but the love remained, and once more, the energy between Jesus and Thomas flowed between them.  What Peter had seen and experienced in the Person of Jesus some time previously, Thomas experienced in full measure now:  You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God!

In New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton tries to explain his own concrete experience of faith--not unlike that of Thomas:

First of all, faith is not an emotion, not a feeling. 

 It is not a blind subconscious urge toward something vaguely supernatural. 

It is not simply an elemental need in man's spirit. 

 It is not a feeling that God exists. 

It is not a conviction that one is somehow saved or "justified" for no special reason except that one happens to feel that way. 

It is not something entirely interior and subjective,

with no reference to any external motive.

It is not just "soul force."

It is not something that bubbles up out of the recesses of your soul and fills you with an indefinable "sense" that everything is all right.

It is not something so purely yours that its content is incommunicable. 

 It is not some personal myth of your own that you cannot share with anyone else, and the objective validity of which does not matter either to you or God or anybody else....

 

[My note:  the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, for example, had to be objectively true,

not just a "feeling" or "sense" that that "must have been true."] 

 

[Continuing with Merton:]  Too often our notion of faith is falsified by our emphasis on the statements about God which faith believes, and by our forgetfulness of the fact that faith is a communion with God's own light and truth.  Actually, the statements, the propositions, which faith accepts on the divine authority are simply media through which one passes in order to reach the divine Truth.  Faith terminates not in a statement, not in a formula of words, but in God. [End of quote.]

 

Thomas could not accept the others' experience of encountering Jesus of Nazareth, whom he had seen die a horrible death.  His faith had to be a personal encounter with the Risen Jesus, the Jesus he had seen crucified.  And Jesus did not disappoint Thomas, as He will not disappoint us, either.  He did say, "Blessed are they who have not seen and yet who believe," but I don't think His words rule out a personal encounter with the Risen Lord.  That encounter may not take place in the flesh, with physical fingers and hands in the physical wounds of the Lord, but it can and will take place in a spiritual encounter.    On the road to Damascus, Paul saw a blinding Light, but he also encountered the Risen Lord. 

 

God will come to each of us at the most unexpected moment, but He will come. He will come through locked doors, if necessary, because He desires the communion with us that only "faith" -- a communion with God's own light and truth -- can bring to us.