Of the many visual depictions of the story of Thomas’ demanding to put his finger in the wounds Jesus suffered in his crucifixion, perhaps none is more well-known than Caravaggio’s 17th century painting, “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas.” It’s this painting and the use of the longstanding title suggesting disbelief that has sedimented this tradition of Doubting Thomas, the story that we tell every year, exactly one week after Easter Sunday. In Caravaggio’s rendition, Thomas looks less incredulous than befuddled, as a tender, even placid Jesus gently guides Thomas’ finger into a gaping wound on his side. Grotesquely, Thomas’ finger doesn’t just touch the wound, but goes into Jesus’ body. Thomas is wide-eyed, as astonished as Jesus is serene. Two other men are in the painting, presumably other disciples; they look at this scene of finger touching body, and their faces are stern, as if to communicate to Thomas, “Ok, are you satisfied now, Thomas? Leave poor Jesus alone! Hasn’t he gone through enough without your meddling finger probing his innards?!” Sadly, far too often, we in the greater Church are like these disciples, standing over, in judgment, insisting, demanding that we get on with the belief business, that we tow the correct dogma, that we have faith, sight unseen. After all, isn’t that how Jesus chides Thomas? “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
One of the reasons why I’ve come to love Messiah is that most of the time—we’re not there yet, but we’re getting there—rather than stand aloof in judgment over poor doubting Thomas, we are more inclined to be like him, incredulous, doubtful, but not for the lack of belief. We as a community are more inclined to wonder what fuels this doubt, what this doubt is about. Why does Thomas say in John’s gospel, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe?” Caravaggio gives us a clue in his painting: as Thomas’ finger slides into Jesus’ body, we see that his other hand clutches at his own side, as if in touching Jesus’ wounds Thomas is discovering a wound in himself that he has been bearing. Maybe then, Thomas’ declaration isn’t a demand for empirical evidence to assent to the reality of the resurrection. Maybe this isn’t the voice of skepticism, but rather the voice of a man in deep grief, of a person whose world has shattered, and who cannot begin to fathom how to rebuild his world. Maybe, then, doubt is not about unbelief, but instead the desperate, last-ditch expression of hope when all evidence points to despair. Maybe the opposite of doubt isn’t faith; maybe the opposite of doubt is hopelessness.
What today’s story teaches us is that doubt is the soil from which faith sprouts. Thomas’ world shattered the day Jesus died. Lamartine once said, “Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.” And you and I know that you don’t need to lose someone to know what it feels like when a world collapses: the phone call from the doctor telling you news of the biopsy, the late-night knock on the door from a police officer telling you about an accident, the tears on your coworker’s face when you meet her in her cubicle on the way to the printer. And beyond our personal relationships, when we turn on the nightly news or open our LA Times or OC Register, there is every reason to want to lock our doors. This month two years ago, a national uprising of people in Syria captured the imagination of the world; today, more than 70,000 have been killed in this horrific civil war, and 1.2 million people displaced. And 45 years ago, this past Thursday, a bullet ended the life of 39-year old Martin Luther King, Jr. The world around us each and every day brings the lie to that shiny, triumphant religion that tells the story that God wipes the slate clean, vanquishing all, making everyone and everything shiny and pretty for God’s chosen. That’s not the gospel, that’s prosperity theology. That’s not resurrection, that’s fantasy. But you and I live in the world that Thomas inhabits, where we wrestle with these hard bits of our reality, and in that reality bring resurrection, wounds and all, to the world. And that’s exactly where Jesus meets us, in that moment and place, in that time and space when our worlds are crumbling, and he says, “I’ve been there too. See? Touch where I’ve been wounded. And then touch your wound and live Easter.”
Henri Nouwen tells the Talmudic story of how the Messiah, our Liberator comes to us: Rabbi Yoshua ben Levi meets Elijah the prophet and asks him, “When will the Messiah come?” Elijah replies, “Go and ask him yourself.” Startled Rabbi Yoshua asks, “Where is he?” “Sitting at the gates of the city.” “How shall I know him?” Elijah says, “He is sitting among the poor covered in wounds. The others unbind all their wounds at the same time and then bind them up again. But he unbinds them one at a time and binds it up again, saying to himself, ‘Perhaps I shall be needed: if so I must always be ready so as not to delay for a moment.’” Jesus, our Great Wounded Healer, unbinds his wounds, and invites us to touch them, so that we can be Wounded Healers to others. So it was with Thomas’ doubt, so it is with ours, that in this doubt we encounter the touch of Christ healing us, not by wishing it all away, but by binding and tending to each other’s wounds. Jesus comes to us where we are, and embraces our doubts and touches us where we need him most. Asian feminist theologian Chung Hyun Kyung offers this poem by an Indian woman who received food assistance during a period of famine:
Every noon at twelve
In the blazing heat
God comes to me
In the form of
Two hundred grams of gruel.
I know him in every grain
I taste him in every lick.
I commune with Him as I gulp
For he keeps me alive, with
Two hundred grams of gruel.
I wait till next noon
And now know he’d come:
I can hope to live one day more
For you made God to come to me as
Two hundred grams of gruel.
I know now that God loves me—
Not until you made it possible.
Now I know what you’re speaking about
For God so loves this world
That He gives his beloved Son
Every noon through You
My sisters and brothers, Alleluia, Christ is risen, not shiny, new, and unblemished, but wounded, visible evidence of what the world has inflicted on him. And God doesn’t demand that we be any different: God meets us in our own woundedness and invites us to touch the wounds of Christ, and to feel ours. As we grasp the sides of our wounds and doubts from which resurrection faith springs, may we be wounded healers to our broken world, may we nourish a starving world so in need of Christ’s body and blood, in the form of bread and wine and gruel, a wounded God embracing God’s wounded people.
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