St Thomas - doubts assuaged

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Bishop David Walker

Good Morning

It had all happened so quickly that he hadn’t heard the plan to gather together that Sunday evening, so he’d missed the big moment. The moment they claimed when Jesus himself had appeared in the locked room and convinced them that it was genuinely him, back from the dead. “Not a ghost”, they said, “We gave him something to eat to prove he was real.” But Thomas wasn’t taking anything so momentous merely on the assertion of others. Did they understand what such a comeback would actually mean? He did. It would make Jesus God, endowing him with a divinity far beyond that claimed by those Emperors that the Romans pressed them to worship. They all died and stayed dead.

He’d made sure that next Sunday he was there with everyone, waiting to see if anything happened. And then it did. Was Jesus chiding him for demanding physical evidence, or thanking him for being the first to realise what such a resurrection implied? What he was sure about was that this would be the defining moment of the rest of his life. And so it had proved. Now, an old man, in a land far from his birth, he could look back on how he spent those long years seeking to draw to Jesus those who would never share his own privilege of having met the risen Christ in the flesh. “Blessed are those”, as Jesus had said to him that night so many years ago, “Who have not seen, but yet believe”.

Lord Jesus, may we, who rely on the evidence not of our eyes but of our hearts, ever live our lives as those who know your risen presence. Amen.