In John chapter 20, beginning at verse 24, we read: Now Thomas called the Twin, one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” So he said to them, “Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger in the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.” And after eight days His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, “Peace to you!” Then He said to Thomas, “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.” And Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.
This is Easter Sunday, or Pascha as many Christians around the world call it. This is a day to proclaim with joyful and absolute certainty the resurrection of Jesus. The tombstone was rolled away. The tomb itself was empty. Jesus rose from the grave bodily. This is what we proclaim at Easter. The tomb was empty. The throne is now filled. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
But not everyone believes that today. And not everyone believed that when it first happened. In particular, in the Gospels, we meet Thomas—Doubting Thomas, as he is known to us. What do you make of Thomas’ doubts? The other disciples had seen the risen Christ with their own eyes, and they tell Thomas, “We have seen the Lord.” But Thomas says, “I won’t believe it until I see it. I must see the risen Lord myself with my own eyes.”
Do you sympathize with Thomas? Or do you find it easy to criticize him for not believing the testimony of the other disciples? Jesus says in verse 29 of this passage, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” Thomas missed out on that special blessing that comes from believing the eyewitness apostolic testimony. Thomas doubted. But it is interesting what takes place here. After Thomas meets the risen Lord, the pendulum swings all the way from doubt to the strongest possible certainty—indeed, to the loftiest possible confession of faith. Thomas sees the wounds on Jesus’ resurrection body, and he cries out, “My Lord and my God!” He does not just say, “Wow, the man Jesus is alive. The man Jesus rose from the dead.” His eyes could see that. But he makes a confession that goes far beyond the visual evidence as he exclaims that Jesus is indeed God in the flesh. “My God, my Lord.”
And so this passage starts with Thomas doubting because he has not seen the Lord with his eyes. It ends with him making a confession of faith that goes far beyond what his eyes alone could see. In fact, it is the supreme confession of faith, the ultimate confession of faith in John’s Gospel, the ultimate confession in the New Testament of who Jesus is.
What are we to make of this? If we take that journey from doubt to certainty, from doubt to faith that Thomas makes, what do we find? How do we get there? We should look at three things in this passage. We should ask and seek to answer three questions from this passage in John 20. First, what do Thomas’ doubts mean? Second, what do Jesus’ wounds mean? And then third, what does Thomas’ confession mean? So doubts, wounds, confession.
First, Thomas’ doubts. What do Thomas’ doubts mean? Why does Thomas doubt? He doubts because he does not have the evidence yet. Thomas had not gone to the empty tomb with the women or with Peter and John. He had not been with the group of disciples on the evening of that Sunday when Jesus rose from the dead and when He came into that locked room and appeared to them all. The disciples did tell him what they had seen. They told Thomas that Christ was risen. But Thomas did not yet believe. He needed convincing. He needed proof.
When Thomas asks to see the risen Christ and even to put his finger into the nail prints, he is really just asking for the same proof, the same evidence that the other disciples have already received. The other disciples did not believe either until they saw the empty tomb, until they saw the risen Christ, until even they saw the wounds in His hands and on His side. The other disciples got hard evidence. Thomas wants the same.
At this point, Thomas is not just doubting. Thomas is most certainly heartbroken. He is hopeless after the crucifixion of Jesus like the other disciples. He has been sucked into this vortex of despair and misery. Indeed, that might be why he is alone, why he has isolated himself from the other disciples, why he was not there on those first appearances that the disciples received on the day of Jesus’ resurrection. As Thomas heard this news from the other disciples, he wanted it to be true. He was hoping that Jesus would be raised from the dead like they were saying. He wanted it to be true. But he was not going to be taken in. He has to have proof. He has to have evidence. He knows the good news is really only good if it is true. And indeed, for faith to be worth anything, faith has to be based on truth. It has to be based on fact. It has to be rooted in reality.
Thomas saw the violent and tragic way Jesus died. And he is thinking, who can believe in Him after that unless there is real proof that He rose from the dead? Thomas knows that faith and reason cannot be separated. He knows that blind faith is no better than no faith at all. He wants a reasonable faith. Thomas, like the rest of us, knew that when people die, they usually stay dead. It would be very unusual, obviously, for Jesus to come back from the dead. It would be a miracle. Thomas did not want to be like the queen in Alice in Wonderland who said that she could believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. For Thomas, faith cannot be a form of wishful thinking. It cannot be based on wishful thinking. He is not a gullible fool. He is honest. Indeed, his doubts are an expression of brutal honesty. Thomas is being brutally honest about the brokenness of the world. He will not pretend. He will not pretend that the world is anything other than the kind of place where a perfectly innocent man can end up executed on a tree by the religious and political elite and with the approval of the masses. Thomas will have nothing to do with a shallow faith that ignores the dark and tragic.
What do Thomas’ doubts mean? For us they mean this: the Christian community, the church, our churches, ought always to be places where doubts can be expressed, where doubts can be voiced so they can be dealt with. As Christians, we are not interested in pressuring people into believing something without arguments or without evidence. We do not ask people to check their brains at the door when they come into the church. A dogmatism that does not allow even the discussion of doubts or questions will always backfire.
A great example of this is the story of A.N. Wilson, the British journalist and historian. Wilson grew up as a Christian. He grew up in a Christian home. But then he went off to Oxford and while at university he renounced his faith as was fashionable to do in the 1970s. Wilson became an atheist. And indeed he became a rather prominent atheist because of his widely read publications. But about five years ago, around Easter 2009, he published an article in one of Britain’s leading newspapers, the Daily Mail. In this article he announced that he had reconverted to the Christian faith. One of the things that led him to reconsider Christian faith is that he became weary of the dogmatism of the atheist community. He found among his fellow atheists, not a group of free thinkers who were willing to follow reason wherever it led them, but a bunch of dogmatists. He found that his fellow atheists would not allow doubt to be discussed. Wilson eventually concluded that atheism itself was a form of blind faith. He describes a time when Christopher Hitchens quizzed him to make sure that he did not have any lingering belief in a divine being. Because there could be no room for doubting that there is no God. The atheist community just would not allow that kind of doubt. It had to silence that kind of doubt and suppress it. But slowly, as Wilson recognized this, he began to doubt his atheist certainties. Regarding his old atheist friends, he wrote: “Sadly, they have all but accepted that only stupid people actually believe in Christianity and that the few intelligent people left in the churches are there only for the music or believe it all in some symbolic or contorted way which, when examined, turns out not to be belief at all. As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed but totally irrational.” Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat. Wilson’s doubts about atheism led him back to faith, led him to faith in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. In the past, he had questioned the truth of Jesus’ resurrection and suggested that it should not be taken literally. But the more he read the Easter story, the better it seemed to fit and apply to the human condition. That too is why he now believes it. Easter confronts us with a historical event set in time. We are faced with a story of an empty tomb, of a small group of men and women who were at one stage hiding for their lives and at the next stage were brave enough to face the full judicial persecution of the Roman Empire and proclaim their belief in a risen Christ. There is no way to account for the evidence without concluding that Jesus rose bodily from the grave.
Wilson is not some anti-intellectual fool. He is not naive. It is just that after years of atheism, he found himself compelled by argument, compelled by the evidence, compelled by reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. It was the atheists, not the Christians, who could not deal with doubts or hard questions. Wilson doubted his way into faith. He learned to doubt his atheism. He started to doubt his doubts about the Christian gospel, about the Christian message. And as he doubted his atheism and doubted his doubts about the gospel, he ended up a believer.
Christians are people who have nothing to hide. We like it when everything is out there, when it is out in the open. We have no interest in silencing doubt, in suppressing doubt. We have no interest in silencing hard questions. We want to discuss doubts. We want to seek to answer doubts. We want honest discussion and argument. Christian faith always thrives in that kind of environment where there is a free and open and honest discussion. And Christian faith thrives in that kind of environment because the Christian faith provides really good answers to life’s big questions. The Christian faith provides really solid answers to the big historical questions about what really happened. Indeed, the Christian faith has answers to doubts like those that Thomas expressed. Like the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the patron saint of doubting believers, said: faith enters the world through doubt. Doubt in the form of honest and sincere questions, that kind of doubt really can open the door to faith. And that is where Thomas is.
A week after Jesus rose from the dead, the next Sunday, the next Lord’s Day, the disciples were again meeting in a locked room together. This time, Thomas is with them. And as on the previous Sunday, the risen Lord appears in their midst. Jesus greets them with a word of peace. Why peace? It is because peace—shalom in the Hebrew—really sums up the messianic hope as described by the prophets. When the prophets of the old covenant talked about a Messiah who was to come, how God would send a king and a savior into the world, and that He would come and restore the people to right standing with God, and He would reestablish the rule of God’s people over creation, and He would turn the wilderness into a garden, and the garden into a garden city, the prophets summarized that whole package of future blessing with that one word, peace. When Messiah comes, He is going to mend the torn fabric of creation. He is going to reweave the torn fabric of creation. This fallen creation is going to be restored. And that whole complex of images that the prophets used to describe the coming kingdom of the Messiah can all be summed up in that one word, peace. Peace means that peace with God is restored. God is no longer at war with us. It means that creation’s order and harmony are restored. It means we can now have peace with one another. The word peace means the cosmos has been redeemed. The risen Christ speaks peace because He embodies God’s peace. He embodies all that God has promised to do for His people and indeed for the whole creation. What God has promised to do for the creation has already happened to Jesus and so it is sure to happen to those who belong to Jesus.
A word of peace is what despairing Thomas needed to hear. Jesus comes announcing peace because in Him peace is here. Peace has arrived. Peace becomes His signature greeting because wherever the risen Christ goes peace is sure to fall. So He speaks the word of peace to all the disciples. Then He speaks directly to Thomas. He says to Thomas, “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.” Jesus comes to meet Thomas where he is. Thomas has questions—honest questions. Jesus comes to answer those questions. Thomas has doubts. Jesus comes to absorb those doubts and answer those doubts. He says to Thomas, “Thomas, you’ve got good questions. I’ve got even better answers.”
Why was it so important for Jesus to show His wounds? The wounds serve to prove it is the same Jesus who died on the cross who is now raised. He really did die and the same one who died has now returned from death. Thomas would not have accepted a risen Christ that did not somehow show signs of the tragedy that happened the week before. A Jesus without scars would not be the Jesus that Thomas knew and loved. The Jesus that left Thomas was heartbroken when He died the way He did on the cross. Without those wounds there would be no way for Thomas to know it was really the same Jesus. The wounds satisfy Thomas’ doubt.
But there is a whole lot more going on here. Why would the resurrection body of Jesus carry with it the scars of His death? Jesus now has a glorified body. He did not just return to the same kind of body He had before He died the way that, say, Lazarus did. Lazarus raised earlier in the Gospel of John was going to die again. Not so with Jesus. He was raised up into a new kind of physicality. A glorified physicality. It is the same body but now it is transformed. So apparently Jesus could do things like move freely from heaven to earth as He pleased. He could appear inside locked rooms when there was no way to explain how He got inside. And most importantly, in the body that Jesus has now He is never going to die again. Jesus lives in His resurrection body right now. He has for the last almost 2,000 years. And He will be in that same body for all eternity to come.
Why does this body, this perfected transformed resurrection body of Jesus, carry with it the scars of His pre-resurrection life? One answer the church has traditionally given is to say that Christ has His wounds so that when He appears before His Father in heaven to intercede for us, He does so with signs of His sacrifice. He eternally presents to the Father His once-and-for-all sacrifice on the cross. The wounds speak peace. They represent and symbolize that peace between God and His people.
But there is even more. We sang about it this morning in that hymn, “Crowned Him with Many Crowns.” There is that line: “Behold His hands and side, those wounds yet visible above, in beauty glorified.” The wounds of Jesus are now beautified. They are glorified. The wounds are signs that Christ has overcome, that He has conquered, that He has entered into His glory through suffering. He has entered into His beauty and His glory through suffering. The scars are eternal signs of His victory over death, over sin, over Satan. They are signs of God’s power to work through suffering and use it for good. They are signs that God can take what is ugly and beautify it. God can take what is ugly and glorify it.
The resurrection body of Christ, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, is really the prototype for our own future resurrection body. The wound marks on His resurrection body tell you what God will do with all the pain and suffering you endure in your body in this world. If God glorified the wounds of Jesus, He will glorify your wounds as well. Those wounds on Jesus’ resurrection body are really bodily proof of Romans 8:28. God makes all things work together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. In your resurrection, your whole life history, scars and all, will be taken up into your resurrection body, your resurrection life. And all the things that have wounded you or scarred you in this life, all of your suffering in this life, physical or otherwise, will be made beautiful and glorious. All that suffering, all that scarring, all that wounding that you are enduring right now, all of it will be glorified and transformed into signs of your victory in and through Christ Jesus. And that is why as Christians we do not want to suffer, we do not seek it out, but we can endure it. We can endure any form of suffering that the world throws at us, whether it is a disease or persecution or great disappointment with this or that. We can endure it and endure it patiently—even joyfully—because we know those scars, those wounds are going to be glorified. They are ugly now, but they are going to be transformed into beauty. The resurrection does not erase your life history as if nothing bad ever happened to you. It transforms even the worst things that have happened to you into something glorious. We cannot even fathom what that really means. We cannot fathom how that is going to work. But this means we can be sure that everything bad that happens to us in this life, all of our suffering, somehow works for us an eternal weight of glory. That is what resurrection does. It turns suffering into glory. It takes ugly wounds and scars and it beautifies them. If the resurrection turned the wounds of Jesus into glory and beauty, you can be assured the resurrection will do the same with you. That is our hope. That is what the wounds of Jesus mean.
Finally, what about this confession Thomas makes? What is the meaning of Thomas’ confession? Thomas wanted proof Jesus rose bodily from the dead. He got that proof. But then what conclusion does he draw? He does not merely say, “Oh wow, the man Jesus really has returned from the dead. You guys were right.” He certainly believes that, but he confesses much, much more. His eyes have seen the risen Christ, but with his mouth he confesses more than his eyes behold. When he sees the risen Christ, wounds and all, suddenly everything comes together for him. All the puzzle pieces that have been lying in disarray on the table now all at once snap together into a beautiful and coherent whole. Suddenly, in a flash, he understands who Jesus is. And so he exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” He jumps from the fact of the resurrection to this confession that Jesus is Yahweh in the flesh. He is the Lord incarnate.
This is what Thomas should be remembered for. This is what he should be known for. He is not Doubting Thomas. He is Confessing Thomas. He is the first one, the first one to explicitly make this full confession in John’s Gospel. John’s whole Gospel, the way John has written his Gospel, it is all supposed to lead us to make this confession with Thomas. Thomas is the first one to land in the right place.
What does this confession mean? It means Thomas recognized Jesus as God in the flesh. It means we have come full circle in John’s Gospel. In chapter 1, as John introduces his Gospel, before he really begins telling the story of Jesus’ earthly ministry, John introduces Jesus as the Word who was with God and who was God in the beginning. And then he goes on to say He is the Word made flesh. He is the Word made flesh in order to reveal God. And John says, no man has seen God, but in Jesus the glory of the invisible God has been made visible. If you want to see God, you look at Jesus. And here when Thomas makes this confession, we see that in the resurrection, the full divine identity of Jesus is revealed. Indeed, the full divine glory of God is revealed in Him. Thomas realizes that in seeing Jesus, he is seeing the unseeable. When Jesus makes Himself visible to Thomas, He is making what is invisible visible. Thomas realizes that when he sees the risen Christ, he is beholding the glory of God before his very eyes.
What does Thomas’ confession mean? It means we cannot just focus on the what of the cross and resurrection. We have to focus on the who. Who is it that undergoes death? Who is it who comes out of the tomb on the third day? The risen Jesus bearing the marks of His horrific and shameful crucifixion in His hands and on His side is none other than the one true Lord and God of all. The Creator and Maker of everything. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God of Israel. This is God in the flesh.
Thomas was a faithful Jew. He knew the Shema of Deuteronomy 6, that there is one God. But now he confesses that within this one God, within the life of this one God, there is another person, the man Jesus. Thomas’ confession here is the beginning of a truly Christian theology. That is to say, a Trinitarian theology. It is the beginning really of a fully Christian Christology. Thomas may have been chronologically at least the first to really begin to figure all of this out and put it together. The first to begin to give theology an explicitly Trinitarian shape. Because he confesses that the God of Israel has revealed Himself in this man, Jesus.
Thomas’ confession really not only explains the resurrection—death could not hold Jesus because He has life in Himself. He is the author of life. He is the eternal Son of God. Thomas’ confession really also explains what happened at the cross. That at the cross, the one true Lord and God is the one who died. God is immune to death in Himself, immune to suffering, but when God became man in Jesus, He assumed a mortal form. And as the God-man, He chose to suffer and die for us in order to defeat death for us and then rise again from the dead in order to bring us into the peace and beauty and glory of His new creation. That is what it means to confess Jesus as “my God, my Lord.”
That language, “my God, my Lord,” that is the language of personal relationship. It is the language of personal friendship. It is love language. You use those kinds of possessive “my” language when you are speaking about someone you love and who you know loves you in return. As soon as Thomas saw the risen Christ with His cross wounds, he realized the depth of God’s love. He realized Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love for His people. He recognizes now that all Jesus did as the God-man, He did because He loves us. He gave Himself for us because He loved us. And that this is something that only God could do. Only God could love this way.
That language, “my God, my Lord,” that is the language of possession. That is the language of a lover and the beloved. What does Thomas’ confession mean? It means God loves us and He has the scars to prove it. Jesus is the battle-scarred God who has gone to war on our behalf to fight against our worst enemy and who indeed has given His life in order to deliver us from death and bring us peace. Jesus is God with scars. He is the battle-scarred God, scarred to save us, scarred from the work of saving us, wounded from the work of redeeming us. How many wounds does Jesus have to show you for you to know that He is your God and your Lord who loves you, who has saved you? Thomas believed. He believed because he saw the wounds. Blessed are you who have not seen and yet believe.
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