NOTES for Joh 20:24-31

The first thing that comes to mind about Thomas is that he is a person like many of us, combining faith with little faith. But Thomas differs from us in this: although he was nicknamed unbelieving, he nevertheless possessed far greater faith than many of us who would like to compare our excessive rational skepticism, which eats away at the soul, with Thomas's desire to find firm foundations for faith. Let us not forget that Thomas was ready to follow the Teacher to the end, and he proved this by his whole life. But what is true is true: it was hard for him to trust immediately any news he heard; he wanted confirmation and proof.

There is truth in such caution: how many rumors there are about "spiritual manifestations" produced by a game of telephone or by hallucinations, or even coming from a poisoned source. Christ, by the way, did not reject Thomas's desire to be convinced through personal verification, and He gave him that opportunity.

There are iconographic depictions in which Thomas literally puts his finger into Christ's wound, but the Gospel text does not say that he used the opportunity given to him. It tells something else: immediately after Christ invited him to put his hand into His side, Thomas confessed Him as his Lord and God. Christ did not count Thomas's doubts as sin.

No doubts, not one difficult question, will in the end remain without God's answer. Only let doubts not become a pretext for the self-assertion of a proud sophist, who, like Pilate, rejects the possibility of knowing the truth, but instead arise from a conscientious desire to overcome the difficulties on the way to it.

How are we to understand these words of the risen Lord? Are those who saw with their own eyes the One raised from the dead not more blessed—those in whose lives this turning point clearly and irrevocably occurred, and who gained the irrefutable awareness that death had been conquered by the life of Jesus? And finally, why did the “other disciple,” whom we can easily recognize as Jesus' beloved disciple, not enter the tomb at first, having seen only a “hint” of the unexpected victory—the cloth that had covered His head? What would our faith be without the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, and what would Thomas's faith have been without his encounter with the risen Jesus? By setting these difficult questions before ourselves, we can try to grasp the essence of our relationship with the Risen One: the question of how experiential knowledge, the testimony of the Gospel, and faith as an incomprehensible contact with the One who conquered death relate to one another.

This verse is often mentioned when disputes begin about what it was like for those who saw the Passion of Christ. It is usually perceived as consolation for us, who did not see the living Christ: we did not see, but still believe, though our faith has fewer grounds than the faith of the apostles who saw the incarnate living God.

One does not need to see in order, after reading the descriptions of the Passion in all their vividness, to understand that the death of Jesus was tormenting and terrible. And then "blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" means something quite different. We are "blessed" not because the faith of those who did not see makes them saints at once. We are blessed, that is, happy, because we did not see the Crucifixion. It is easier for us to believe that Christ is risen, since we did not see His death, did not see how real it was. We can in fact never fully realize that our God was a corpse, that there was no more hope at all. Holy Week in our life is still already illumined by the light of the coming Resurrection, and this is our happiness, our blessedness.

This does not mean that we should not try to experience the pain of the Crucifixion as deeply as possible. Some saints are given to experience it with almost the same force with which the Mother of God experienced it; some are given stigmata. But they are also given faith such that no pain can obscure faith in the Resurrection.

We do not know everything that took place between Christ and His disciples after His Resurrection. On the one hand, this is very disappointing: we would so like to look in, to learn what He told them about His death, His descent into hell, and the Resurrection; to see Him perform some new miracles. He could have told them so many important and interesting things. But alas, no. The Evangelists preserve the mystery with great modesty; they show only what is sufficient for us to “believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing we may have life in His name” (Jn 20:31). The Holy Spirit who moves the Evangelists clearly wants to leave everything that happened during this period hidden, just as He leaves hidden everything that happened to Jesus in His childhood. This is not because it is some secret, special knowledge available only to the chosen. It is because everything necessary and sufficient for our salvation has already been told to us. One might even say that these Gospel verses are a special place for us, a place where the story of each of us is told: the story of how the risen Lord has already appeared to us. Perhaps, in His mercy, the Lord will later reveal to us in the New Jerusalem everything we did not see, but that comes later. For now, we should rejoice that we do not see how the Lord appeared to the apostles, because “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (Jn 20:29).

For some reason, popular imagination has made the apostle Thomas an example of distrust; the expression “doubting Thomas” has even become proverbial. Yet when he says to the apostles who had seen the risen Jesus, “I will not believe unless I put my fingers into the wounds of the nails,” he is driven by far more than mere distrust of an account of an incredible event. We must take into account that the Lord Himself does not rebuke Thomas, but actually shows him the wounds of the nails and the spear. As soon as the apostle Thomas heard this, he confessed Jesus not merely as the Messiah but as his Lord and God! No one before him had risen to such boldness.

We must suppose that it was important for the apostle to be convinced not only of the reality of the Resurrection, but also that the Body of the Risen One bore the marks of the Passion. First, for Thomas—and for us—this means that the Lord rose in the very Body in which He suffered for us. Second, it means that the sufferings of the Cross and the Resurrection are inseparable from one another. We need to know this when we hear, in particular, Christ’s call: “Take up your cross and follow Me.” For if the way of the cross does not lead us to resurrection and life, how can we walk it? And if this way of following Christ does not lead to life, how can we find it? The testimony of the apostle Thomas is therefore of exceptional importance to us all.

"Do not be unbelieving, but believing" (John 20:27). The meaning of these words pulses in this, or a similar, expression in the hearts of a vast number of people. Someone prays for relatives and loved ones who have not yet turned to God, someone prays for passersby, someone asks for faith for himself. But before anything else, these words were born in the heart of God. He brought us into life for fruitful cooperation with Him in love and, naturally, in faith in what He reveals to us. The Lord longs for our salvation more than anyone in the world, more than our relatives and even more than we ourselves do. And the one who believes in the Lord receives eternal life (see John 11:25-26).

That is precisely why He longs for faith for us. Every day He knocks at the doors of our hearts (see Rev 3:20). Every day, seeing the fire dying down, He sends miracles, great and small, repeating the words: "Do not be unbelieving, but believing."

What, after all, is this question of Thomas? Distrust? A desire to see everything with his own eyes? Or a kind of prudence, proceeding from the fact that spiritual life cannot be built on someone else's experience, even if that experience is connected with people whom you trust completely? And in such a context, what do Jesus's words mean about those who believed without seeing what Thomas saw?

Of course, it would be easiest to stop at the version of distrust, as many people do: Thomas's faith, they say, turned out to be the weakest; he needed proof, but Jesus is glad for any faith, and therefore allows Thomas to be convinced of His reality in the way that seems adequate to him.

But is everything so simple? After all, when it comes to spiritual life, we really can rely only on our own experience. Spiritual life, like life in general, belongs to each person in his own way, and however remarkable the experience of someone else's life may be, it cannot replace our own. This applies fully to spiritual life. And Thomas, refusing to take the other apostles at their word, is most of all proceeding from this very thing. He wants to see and experience for himself what the others saw, without relying only on their stories.

But what, then, does Jesus have in mind? Does He have in mind the other apostles? Hardly, since by that time all of them had already seen Him, while only Thomas was being asked to believe others at their word. About whom, then, is the Savior speaking? About those who will believe later? But people always become Christians in the true sense only after living through that personal encounter with the Risen One without which one can speak of Christianity only conditionally. How, then, can one believe "without seeing"? Evidently, only through the testimony of those whose witness reveals the life of the Kingdom brought into the world by Jesus. Such testimony can become the beginning of a spiritual path, although, of course, if the one who has begun it is consistent, a personal meeting with the risen Jesus will take place sooner or later in his life as well.

And Jesus, of course, understands that the Church remains the Church only as long as it is capable of such witness. And He calls blessed those who will have to enter this true Church.

When reading the accounts of the Resurrection, it becomes clear that despite everything Jesus had told them during His earthly ministry, the apostles were completely unprepared to meet the Risen One. It is no accident that John mentions the burial garments, the “linen wrappings,” which first made the apostles wonder whether something unusual was happening (vv. 1–9). Indeed, according to Jewish custom, the body was wrapped in a shroud so tightly that it was practically impossible to unwrap it without damaging the cloth. Yet the apostles saw this shroud not only intact but apparently even undisturbed, so that the cloth usually tied around the dead person's head, the “face cloth” of v. 7, remained lying separately, apparently in the place where the Saviour's head had been before the Resurrection. What had happened could not be explained otherwise than as a miracle. But the apostles apparently still had no very clear idea of exactly what had occurred.

Mary Magdalene did, of course, see the risen Jesus while still in the garden and immediately reported it to the apostles (vv. 11–18), but her testimony was probably not enough for them. The real encounter took place that same evening (vv. 19–23), and then the apostles were finally able to convince themselves that their Teacher was truly alive. It is no accident that Jesus allows them to look at His hands, feet and ribs (v. 20). The marks of the wounds were to convince the apostles that what stood before them was not a ghost, not a shade that had emerged from the tomb, as they might have thought after hearing from Mary Magdalene that the Risen One had not allowed her to touch Him (v. 17). This was extremely important, for the matter concerned not only the Person of the Risen One, but also the nature of the Kingdom. If it differed in no way from the world of shades and spirits, its influence on the world would be no stronger than theirs. Shades and spirits may sometimes make their presence known, but they are unable to exert a serious influence on the existing order of things, much less to change it radically, as the world is changed when it becomes part of the Kingdom.

But despite all its objectivity and tangible reality, the Kingdom apparently differs substantially in some respects from our world, which has not yet been transformed. It is no accident that the Lord still places Thomas's desire to feel Jesus' wounds with his own hands below trust in testimony (vv. 24–29). For what matters most in the Kingdom is determined by trust: trust in God, trust in Jesus, trust in one another. Trust is the foundation of everything. Without it there is no Kingdom. And it cannot depend on whether one can touch with one's hands what one believes in or the person one trusts. Not because this is forbidden, but because what matters most in the Kingdom cannot be touched with the hands. It can be touched only with the heart. Everyone who wants to live the life of the Kingdom must be ready for this.