Takes-His-Job-Extremely-Seriously Thomas

Shelley Denison, Licensed Lay Preacher

Scriptures: John 20:19-31

I want to ask you a question.

This question is deceptively simple. Maybe your answer will seem immediately obvious. So obvious that perhaps you’ll wonder why this is even a question worth asking.

But, I invite you to sit with this question for a bit. Really allow yourself to consider the gravity of your answer.

Here’s the question:
What if Jesus really meant all of the stuff he said?

What if all of that stuff about mustard seeds and fig trees and who we’re supposed to call our neighbor and threading a needle with a camel and everything else he talked about was actually all true? The commandment to love God and each other? The call to drop our nets in exchange for discipleship?

What would that mean, really, for us and how we live our lives?

Because I think if we were honest with ourselves, we would realize just how high the stakes are.

We are all familiar with Thomas’s (in my opinion) unearned reputation. Unlike the others, he wasn’t there the first time Jesus met with the Disciples after His resurrection. And when they told Thomas that Jesus had risen from death, his response was a demand for proof: “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.”

We all know the traditional interpretation of this text. Doubting Thomas, we call him. The disciple of weak faith.

However, I want us to consider that Thomas’s demand for evidence didn’t come from a lack of faith. But rather from the fact that he knows what the stakes are. In demanding to see and touch, he is insisting that if this is real, it deserves to be treated as real.

Earlier in John, when they learn in chapter 11 that their friend Lazarus has died, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘Hey, we need to go to Judea to take care of this.’ His disciples, all understandably hesitant to put their Teacher in danger, push back: ‘But they’ll kill you if you go there.’

But it’s Thomas, the only named disciple in this exchange, who gets the last word. ‘Let us also go,’ he says to his friends, ‘that we may die with him.’

Sit with that for a moment. Thomas isn’t arguing. He isn’t negotiating. He has simply done the math, accepted the answer, and is ready to act on it. He doesn’t say Jesus won’t die. He assumes He might. What Thomas is saying is: so what? If this is where Jesus goes, then this is where we go.

This is not the statement of a person with a weak faith. This is someone who has counted the full cost of belief and paid it in advance, willingly, eyes open, with no expectation of a comfortable outcome.

So when we return to that upper room after the Resurrection, and Thomas refuses to believe without proof, we have to read it in light of this. Thomas is not a cheap skeptic who doubts because it costs him nothing to doubt. He has already demonstrated, in the clearest terms possible, that when he believes something, he believes it all the way to death. That is precisely why he cannot afford to believe it halfway.

To Thomas, discipleship isn’t a costume to be worn or a role to be performed when it’s easy. It’s the whole point.

And so when the other disciples come to him breathless with the news, we have seen the Lord!, Thomas doesn’t doubt them because he thinks they’re lying. He doubts because he understands the weight of what they’re claiming. If Jesus really rose from the dead, then everything changes. The nature of death. The meaning of suffering. The logic of sacrifice. What it costs to follow, and what that cost is worth.

If Jesus is who He says He is, then the call of discipleship is a summons to drop our nets and our pretenses and follow someone who has now walked through death itself and come out the other side. Thomas, of all people, knew that kind of belief doesn’t come cheap. And he wasn’t willing to give it away for free.

One of the most immediately identifiable depictions of Thomas meeting the resurrected Christ is a painting by the Italian post-renaissance artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The painting is called The Incredulity of St. Thomas.

A technique that Caravaggio is famous for is called tenebrism. This comes from the Italian word tenebroso which means dark, obscured, or mysterious. Tenebrism is the use of extreme contrasts between light and shadow. This technique is central to both the painting’s emotional power and it’s theological meaning.

I want you to notice where this contrast in light naturally draws your eye. It pulls your attention directly to the central action: Thomas’s finger probing Christ’s wound. The surrounding darkness eliminates all distraction, forcing an almost uncomfortable intimacy with the moment of doubt and verification.

The darkness surrounding the figures mirrors Thomas’s own spiritual state. He is in the dark until the moment of visceral proof. The light breaks through at exactly the point of contact: the finger entering the wound in Christ’s side.

The tight cropping and low viewpoint, which is enabled by the dark background compressing space, puts you at the scene almost as a fourth figure leaning in. Tenebrism creates a kind of tunnel vision that implicates the viewer in Thomas’s doubt. You are made to look, as he looks.

Other painters often treated this scene with open, airy compositions and idealized figures. Caravaggio’s tenebrism made it almost claustrophobic in its intimacy. Caravaggio makes doubt visible, and its resolution luminous. The composition suggests that faith, for Thomas, had to pass through darkness to reach light.

I propose that we officially retire the moniker, “Doubting Thomas,” and instead replace it with something like, “Takes-His-Job-Extremely-Seriously Thomas.”

In today’s reading from the book of Acts, Peter says, “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.”

Are you a witness? Do you take Jesus at his every last red-letter word? Unlike Thomas, we are unlikely to be called to die with Jesus, but we are called to live with him.

There’s something I love about this reading immediately following Easter Sunday. The fact that we are invited, alongside Thomas, to witness the resurrected Christ in his woundedness. Peter talked about the promise of “a new birth into a living hope” through Jesus. “An inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.”

Imperishable.

Undefiled.

Unfading.

Alleluia.