Thomas hadn’t been there the night Christ first walked through the walls. The apostles told him about this astonishing development the following week, but to Thomas it probably sounded too good to be true. After the terrible death of their leader, his companions had been distraught, as had he. Alive again? Wishing could make impossible things seem true. “Unless I see the marks and reach into the wound on his side,” Thomas told his friends, “I won’t believe.” I don’t think Thomas was being stubborn; just honest. He not only needed to see a miracle, he needed to immerse himself in it.
From His place in whatever mysterious dimension He now occupied, Christ heard Thomas’s confession of disbelief. He walked through the walls again, presented Himself to Thomas and invited Thomas to do exactly what He knew Thomas wanted to do—Believe. The others had seen Christ materialize before their very eyes. Thomas had missed that transcendent experience. Now Christ was allowing him to take a deep, experiential plunge.
The apostles were among the very few people who would ever see and engage with the risen Christ in metaphysical form. The rest of us—billions of us now—have come to believe in Jesus the Christ without physically seeing or touching him. We handle objects that honor the sacred; we consume the elements at the Eucharist and celebrate the divine with others of our tribe. However, many of us also have had, in one way or another, transcendent experiences that seem to originate from outside of the material world. Little miracles. Sometimes big miracles. It’s really a rather large miracle, for example, that this building and the other structures on the Grace campus are here at all. They were built with material assets but also with Faith.
Faith suspends, for a time, our doubts. I think that for most of us, it’s impossible to suspend our spiritual doubts 24/7, even if we have had the blessing of a transcendent experience. Christ enters the room of our spiritual self, and we are inspired, perhaps even commissioned to serve, but then we might not “see” Him again for a while. We may remember, we may retain the inspiration, we may remain devoted to the spiritual foundation upon which we build our lives, but most of us need to nurture that devotion frequently with concrete reminders. I certainly do. For me, the reminders are in the services I attend each week, but also in the stories told by the stained-glass windows, in the music, in the architecture, in the seasons of the church and the holidays we observe each year. They’re also vibrant in the community we have created in our home church of Grace, where we do our best to live in harmony with the laws of love that Jesus preached.
Christ told Thomas not to doubt, but to Believe. But what, exactly, was it that Jesus wanted Thomas to believe? something beyond comprehension for which Thomas had no words. He could only say, “My Lord and my God.” The astonishing thing that God did for the world opened a dimension that had never before been accessible to humanity: an immeasurably greater grace, the unknowable realm of the incomprehensible being who loves us and will bring each one of us home —not just some of us, but all of us.
–Lin Weber, Licensed Lay Preacher
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