Tomorrow's Gospel is taken from John Chapter 20. It's the dramatic story of Doubting Thomas and his radical honesty: ‘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.’
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio, c. 1602
I love the story for many reasons. Primarily it reminds me that my honesty (if I can drum up the courage) is not a stumbling block for God.
God wants me to be me.
But there are plenty of angles on the story and what follows is from a Catholic website called UNIVERSALIS.
I found it interesting.
Today's Gospel: What did Thomas disbelieve?
The evangelists are scrupulously careful not to over-interpret the facts. Their job, as they see it, is to report, ours is to believe and, believing, understand. Part of our trust in the story of the Transfiguration, for example, is the fact that no moral is drawn directly from it. It is, as a narrative element, entirely pointless, and the only possible reason for including it in the Gospel story is that it actually happened.
In today’s Gospel, the story of Thomas leaves open an interesting question: what exactly was it that he refused to believe?
Thomas might simply have been refusing to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. ‘When a man is dead, he is dead’. This, after all, is the attitude of the Jews and the Romans. But it is not what John says. John reports that the disciples said, ‘We have seen the Lord,’ and Thomas replied, ‘Without physical proofs, I refuse to believe’. There is no actual mention of rising from the dead as being the point at issue.
Consider a hypothetical pure, spiritual religion – something that fits well with what we think “religious” means when we aren’t really thinking. In such a religion, spirit is perfect, matter is imperfect (even if we remember to stop short of actually calling it evil). One might even say, spirit is relevant, matter is irrelevant; or spirit is real, matter is unreal.
On such a “spiritual” view, God’s condescending to become incarnate is already a big thing to swallow – which is why so many early heretics (concerned above all for the dignity of God) denied it. Another way of making the Christian story decent was to maintain (as some people did) that the real Jesus was whisked away by angels before the Crucifixion, and a phantom “Jesus” “suffered” in his stead.
But there is more, and this is where Thomas comes in. Even if one has watched the whole thing happen, or looked into the eyes of people who have, and can have no doubts about what did happen on Good Friday, there is still one resort left for those who believe above all in the purity of Deity. Jesus, having gone through the whole sorry business of suffering in the body (indeed, the even sorrier business of being in a body at all) brings the whole story to an end by rising from the dead – but rising from the body, not in it. Rising, he points us up towards – and, going up, he leads us into – a future in which, having left the body and all its inherent imperfection behind, we too can dissolve into pure Spirit.
That is all very spiritual and enlightened, but it is not the Christian story.
What the other disciples told Thomas, and (arguably) what he refused to believe, was that Jesus had resurrected into a bodily existence – a risen body, indeed, but a body nevertheless. The lesson Jesus taught to Thomas directly, a week later, was (in that case) not that he had risen, but that he had risen in the body.
The consequences are cosmic in scale. The body, it turns out, is not something to be superseded, or a mistake to be got out of with relief. Rather, it is a thing to be perfected, a thing we are going to be in for all eternity. Heaven will be full of bodies.
Whatever it was that Thomas disbelieved, his story reminds us that we have to remember not to over-spiritualize ourselves, but to establish relations with our own (and others’) bodies on the correct, healthy footing. Christians do not have bodies, Christians are embodied beings. Yes, it is true that on death we leave this body behind; but what this brings us to is just a lame, truncated, provisional, transitory state that lasts only until the general resurrection restores us as whole beings on a new level – one which, today, we can only point vaguely towards, or talk about in metaphorical terms, as St Paul does. But whatever our final state is, it is definitely a wholeness of body and spirit.
And that conclusion leads all the way back to our own existence here on earth and the way we should live it. The thing is, because I do not have a body (as a toy to be played with, or a garment that can have anything done to it without affecting the real me), whatever I do with or to my body, I do with or to myself. The same argument applies to you. It is impossible for me to do anything with or to your body, because you do not have one either: I can only do it, whatever it is, with or to you, yourself. From drinking to drug-taking to fornication, the separation of ‘my body’ from ‘me’ is an illusion. The reality is that what I do to my body, I do to me. My “lost weekend” is not lost, cut out, gone as if it had never been: it is just as much part of my life as all the other days of my life are. If we can rid ourselves of the illusion of separation and understand ourselves as a body-and-spirit whole, many temptations begin to be seen in their true light; and the Church’s teaching about carnal matters becomes, not something to be believed out of respect for authority, but the most obvious thing in the world.
The term ‘Theology of the Body’ is a new one, introduced by Pope John Paul II, but it is only bringing out the truth has always been there, the truth that Thomas had to be shown to make him believe it.
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