Homily : Thomas Sunday

2nd Sunday of Pascha/Thomas Sunday

Homily: Fr. Thomas Frazer

“And Thomas answered and said unto Him, My Lord and my God.” (John 20:28)

Beloved in the Lord, brothers and sisters,

Christ is Risen!

We gather this Bright Sunday — the eighth day, the day beyond days — still wrapped in the white garments of Pascha, still breathing in the incense of the empty tomb. 

Holy Church in her wisdom sets before us not a triumphant figure, not one of the bold witnesses who saw and believed in that first hour, but Thomas — Thomas who was absent, Thomas who doubted, Thomas who demanded.

Why does the Church do this? Because she knows us. She knows the weight we carry in our own hearts, the questions that arise in the watches of the night, the moments when faith seems to us a rumor carried by excited voices, and we stand outside the locked room, alone with our grief and our reason.

Thomas had loved Christ. Let us not forget this. It was Thomas who, when the Lord announced His intention to return to Judea — to go where the Jews sought His life — it was Thomas who said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16). This is not the speech of a coward. This is a man whose love was fierce, and whose grief, therefore, when the Cross came, was also fierce. He had given everything in his heart to Christ, and the Cross had seemed to shatter everything.

So he was not present in that upper room on the first evening. Perhaps he could not bear to be with the others. Perhaps he wandered alone in Jerusalem’s streets, carrying a wound too deep for company, and while he wandered, the Risen Lord came and stood among the ten.

When they told him — we have seen the Lord — he answered with that famous declaration which the Church has never condemned as wickedness, but received as honest human anguish: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails… I will not believe.”

Eight days pass. Eight days in which Thomas lives alongside men who have seen what he has not seen. Eight days of their quiet joy and his unsatisfied longing. And then — the doors being shut — the Lord comes again. He comes for Thomas. Let this pierce your heart: the Lord waited. The Lord, who could have appeared to Thomas privately on the road, who could have sent an angel, who could have illumined his heart inwardly — waited eight days and came again to the gathered Church, that Thomas might believe not alone, but in the assembly of the brethren.

He offers His hands. He offers His side. “Be not faithless, but believing.”

Thomas, who had demanded physical proof, does not merely accept this physical proof. He leaps beyond it into the greatest confession in the Gospel: “My Lord and my God.” No other disciple, seeing the risen Christ in that room, uttered these words. It is the doubter who confesses most fully. It is the one who was lost who finds the deepest words.

Now, we who stand in these days as the True Orthodox — we who have known what it is to be separated from the larger crowd, to worship in communities small and sometimes scattered, to hold to the ancient Faith when the world and even much of what is considered to be visible Christendom presses us to relent — we know something of Thomas’s loneliness. We know what it is to stand apart from the supposed triumphant assembly and ask: Is it true? Are we certain? Is the Faith we hold truly the Faith once delivered to the saints?

The Lord’s answer to us is the same as His answer to Thomas. He does not rebuke the asking. He comes through shut doors. He shows His wounds — the wounds of the true Body of Christ, which are the marks of the martyrs, the confessors, the bishops who refused the Sergianist compromise, who refused the new calendar and the ecumenist betrayals — and He says: touch and see. Be not faithless, but believing.

The True Church is not made true by her size, nor by the recognition of earthly powers, nor by the comfort of great cathedrals. She is made true by the presence of the Risen Lord who passes through locked doors and stands among two or three gathered in His name and says: Peace be unto you.

Thomas went on to carry the Gospel to Parthia, to Persia, to India — alone, to the ends of the earth — having seen and believed. 

Let us therefore not be ashamed of our smallness, nor of our questions, nor of the wounds the times have inflicted upon us. Let us hold out our hands as Thomas did — not to demand, but to receive — and let us confess with all our heart:

“My Lord and my God.”

Indeed He is Risen!