April 2026

Here Christ speaks to Thomas in the first weeks after the resurrection. He has just appeared to Mary Magdalene outside the empty tomb and then to the disciples (minus, crucially, Thomas). All this is before Pentecost, and fear is still strong. Thomas, often known, as Doubting Thomas, gets a bad press. When Jesus appears to the others we are told He was at pains to show them His wounds. He knew they would require proof – or signs – of his continued corporeality. Thomas only asks for what the others have been granted, for that which most of us would ask.

It is perhaps not really God with whom Thomas has trouble, but his colleagues. It is his fellow-disciples whom he refuses to credit with truth-telling without corroboration. Faith and trust and belief are always relational as is worship. In all the years of sermons and talks that I have heard about Thomas and his alleged shortcomings, about Thomas as an example of faithlessness that we can safely reject (it’s not us it’s him, etc), I’ve no recollection of hearing anyone talk about this.

Yet of course it is us, not him. Or rather, it is us as well as him. We are explicitly told that this section of John, indeed the whole of St. John’s gospel is intended for us: ‘these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’ (v.31).

We are the ones who are blessed when we believe without seeing. We are also the ones whose faith is sometimes conditional. Yet we also prove God’s existence absolutely and every time we behave like Him. For Jesus is in all of us just as Thomas is. Fear and utter belief co-exist in each of us by Grace; it’s never a question of either/or but of both/and.

Jesus himself seems to have had no trouble with this; this was why He came. His words are not ones of criticism but encouragement. ‘Believe!’, Jesus says, meaning: here, take my joy, share my strength, share my sufferings, feel the ferocity and love of my own faith in you and return it. May the words of this Saying and the prayers of the Fellowship offer you God’s encouragement and reveal to you His belief in your faith, this Easter and always.