Sermon: Thomas the Apostle

Preacher:

Chris Hollingshurst

Date:

Thursday 3rd July 2025

Venue:

Guildford Cathedral

Service:

Choral Eucharist

The Thomas of today’s gospel reading has been, for centuries, held under a collective judgement and disapproval, poor man. Doubting Thomas, the one less believing than the others. Somehow a failed disciple. A man who misses the mark.

That seems harsh when we know that a week had passed between when Jesus first appeared to his disciples in the upper room and when he appeared again when Thomas was with them.

Thomas hasn’t wandered off and left the group in his disbelief and disappointment, has he? He has, as we say, ‘hung in there’. After all, Thomas’ devotion to Jesus has been expressed earlier in John’s gospel, when (recorded in chapter 11) Jesus is planning to return to Judaea. The disciples are warning Jesus that the religious leaders are wanting to harm him, specifically to stone him - to which Thomas responds ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.)

For all his probable regrets as well as his doubts, Thomas’ remaining devotion has at least made him want to believe the other disciples that Jesus is indeed now risen.  And wanting to believe is always a good start.

When it comes to it, Thomas is the one who is honest enough to wrestle with, to question, the nature of what the others were given (as it were) on a plate. Perhaps he is the only one honest enough to articulate what at least some of the others were still feeling.

Perhaps this ambiguity was true for at least some others in the upper room but surely also for some who encountered the newly risen Christ elsewhere. For example, Luke’s gospel (in chapter 24) records the Emmaus Road disciples as (and it’s a great turn of phrase) ‘disbelieving for joy and still wondering’ – so Thomas isn’t even the only one!

We humans veer so easily between utmost certainty and utmost doubt. It seems to me that a position forged from falling from over-confidence on one hand, and picking ourselves up from doubting everything, is actually where we want to be. And a theology forged in the library of life experiences helps us to see this.

Thomas doesn’t want second-hand resurrection passed on via the others. He longs for his own encounter, his own meaning. And Jesus meets him exactly there—not to rebuke him, but to invite him to come closer: “Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out and touch.”

It is through the wound that Thomas comes to faith. “My Lord and my God!” is the Gospel’s clearest confession of Christ’s divinity, but it is a confession initially obscured by doubt, born not of immediate certainty, but arrived at in intimacy.

Resurrection does not erase suffering or pretend it didn’t happen. It transforms and dignifies it. When Christ appears before the disciples in that upper room, he does not hide his wounds.

He says, “Here is where I was broken - and still am. Here is love, still wounded, still alive.” It is in this that Doubting Thomas becomes Convinced Thomas. His exclamation ‘My Lord and my God’ was the most sure, instantaneous response of any of the people to whom the newly risen Jesus revealed himself. It suggests, I think, that Thomas had pondered the implications of what the others had told him about the first appearance in the upper room.

So convinced was he, tradition tells us, that Thomas travelled to southern India to proclaim the resurrection; and the Mar Thoma churches there bear his name.

I wonder how we are hearing this account of the Resurrection and Thomas’ response today… What draws us in? What speaks to us, I wonder?

Are we convinced? Do we have doubts but nevertheless want to believe? Do we, in Habakkuk’s words, need to ‘keep watch to see what God will say to us and what he will answer’?

And will we through questioning in love and in trust reach the assurance that leads us to say, ‘My Lord, and my God!’