NOTES for Joh 20:19-31
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.