Office of Communications > Weekly Reflection >April 4 , 2008

Maybe it was the Passover traffic or his post-passion depression, but Thomas wasn’t there when Jesus first visited his disciples.  Locked doors and risen body didn’t wash with him.  He wanted tangible proof, a forensic review before he was going to invest any more hope.  So Jesus returned, Thomas believed, and the rest is history.

Deep down inside, we’d all like that moment of irrefutable truth.  Without it, it doesn’t make sense – it’s a house of cards missing an ace.  But Jesus is long gone, Thomas long dead and we’re left behind holding the doctrinal bag.

John calls Thomas Didymous. In biology, the word means occurring in pairs.  Maybe there is a twin to the story itself, a second way of looking at it.  Chances are we are not going to get that close to a glorified body, but the wounds are still evident today if we want to see them.

War is debated as policy, but seldom is its dismemberment and death seen in all its horror.  Children waste away in famines and dysentery, but that won’t sell.  We joke about aging and Alzheimer’s, but we dare not step into a terrifying world where memory is so eroded you no longer exist.  There is emptiness and loneliness, but we turn our heads and whistle on, praying that the ills of the world, kept at a distance, will ignore us as well.

Maybe we need to face those wounds as Thomas did, touching them with the heart as well as the hand, feeling the suffering of another, not with some tactile sense, but with revealing empathy and vulnerable compassion.  When we do this, so close we can hear her whispered story or smell his foul disease, there are only two options, despair or belief, and few choose the former.  It’s a risk, but most turn out believers – understanding that every life matters; that the weight of the cross is always bearable when it is shared; that the Word that first created light in the darkness still does so today. 

Or to paraphrase a late night sage, “I am Thomas and so can you.”