Acts 5.12-20

John 20.19-31

The LORD says to Thomas: ‘Because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who believe though they do not see.’ There is another way, a blessed way, of coming to believe in the LORD Jesus as LORD and God that is not based on physical sight. The Church tells us what that other way is: ‘Let us purify our senses, and we shall see Christ shining in the unapproachable light of His Resurrection!’ And, we hear the LORD saying in the beatitudes: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God!’ We can discover the theology of this ‘other way’ of coming to believe in Christ, the way that is based not on seeing with our physical eyes but on purifying our senses, by contemplating the mystery of the Holy Orthodox Church.

The Orthodox Church is the Body of the risen Christ who was crucified, dead and buried. In Her liturgical and sacramental worship, in Her biblical doctrines and ascetical disciplines, and above all, in the lives of Her saints, the Church is the incarnation of Christ risen from the dead. The most pure Body and precious Blood of this incarnate God who is risen from the dead is given to us as our food and drink at every Divine Liturgy.

That means that the Church is the very same Body of Christ whose hands and feet and side St Thomas saw and handled with his hands (cf. 1 Jn 1.1).

This Jesus is the Beginning in whom all things came to be. He is the End in whom all things find their purpose, their perfection, and their destiny (Rev 21.6). He is the Wisdom of God in whom is Life, the Holy Spirit who is the Light of men (Jn 1.4). He is the only-begotten God, He Who is (cf. Ex 3.14) in the bosom of the Father who alone has made the Father known (Jn 1.18). Of this LORD Jesus, the WORD of God who became flesh (Jn 1.14), and who was crucified, dead, and buried in the flesh, the prophet Isaiah said: ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; upon Him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with His stripes we are healed.’ [Isa 53.5]

So, when St Thomas placed his finger into the nail prints in Jesus’ hands and feet, and when he thrust his hand into the LORD’s side where He was pierced by the spear, he was touching the only-begotten God who, through the pure blood of the Holy Virgin, became bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh. That means that when the LORD suffered on the Cross in the flesh, God suffered with us, not outside of us or apart from us. God the Son suffered in our flesh because in His Incarnation, He made our flesh – our soul and body and mind – His own. Through His Incarnation, the eternal God became one with us in our wounds and our bruises, even to the point of death on the Cross, i.e., even to the point of our accursedness and forsakenness.

That means that in our suffering, our soul is touching the print of the nails in the LORD’s hands and feet as did the hand of St Thomas, and that in our suffering, our soul is thrusting its mystical hand into His side where He was pierced by the sword.

For, it was when St Thomas touched the LORD where He had suffered in the flesh that he came to believe in the risen Jesus as His LORD and God; so also, it is when our soul in her suffering touches the suffering of the LORD who suffered in our soul and body, that are seized with wonder that the God of all is a God of such extreme humility and compassion that He would, freely of His own desire, become bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh so that He could destroy our death and root it out from inside of us,  so that we who before were dead in our sins and trespasses and altogether separated from God, could become one Spirit with Him. This ineffable humility and love of God is the unseen that we begin to ‘see’ when we behold the nail prints and the wound of the sword in the body of the LORD; for they are the visible signs of how profoundly the LORD suffered with us, who is now risen from the dead, having trampled down death by His death. And when our soul touches the merciful compassion and extreme humility hidden in the LORD’s suffering with us and for us, this is when we come to believe in Jesus, or rather, this is when we fall down to our knees in love for Jesus as our LORD and our God, even though we do not ‘see.’

Let us note well that St Thomas did not come to belief through philosophical deduction or scientific reasoning. His ‘My LORD and my God’ did not express an idea he had just reached. It expressed the outpouring of his soul suddenly overcome with love and wonder for this God who became flesh in order to become one with us in our suffering, even to the point of death on the cross. St Thomas’ ‘belief’ is not a strongly held mental opinion. It is a love for the LORD Jesus that saturates his whole soul, body, mind, and strength, a love that makes his heart new, a love that now defines his life on this earth, that now begins to govern his every word, thought and deed. It is a belief of love and wonder that now sees the Unseen Mystery that it couldn’t see before. Jesus Christ is the LORD God, the Creator and Judge of all, who has revealed Himself to us, and He has revealed Himself to us not in an abstract school of thought, but in the flesh; and, in His suffering in the flesh, in His suffering in our flesh that He made His own, in His suffering the Cross and death and burial in order to become one with us in our suffering and death, because He who knew no sin longed to become sin for us so that we might become one Spirit with Him who became bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh.

This is the theology hidden in the Church’s cry: ‘Let us purify our senses and we shall see Christ in the unapproachable light of His Resurrection.’ Our senses are purified, and we begin to see Christ in the unapproachable light of His resurrection, and to love Him as our LORD and our God, when we join our suffering to His suffering, and begin to see that in our suffering, we are uniting ourselves to Christ who suffered for us in our flesh. We join our suffering to the suffering of Christ when, for His sake, we choose not to give in to the pleasure of anger, or lust, or jealousy, or greed, self-pity, entitlement, blame-shifting, self-justification, and everything else that is not worthy of the LORD; but instead, we choose to turn our suffering into the means whereby we may touch the LORD Jesus Christ and become joined to Him in His suffering that He suffered in His Body in His love for us. Then, our suffering becomes the way of purifying our senses, because it becomes the way, not of nursing anger or self-pity or the rest that destroys our soul, but of deepening our love for this God who was incarnate that He might suffer with us and deliver us from death and make us one with Him in His unapproachable Light and Glory.

Let these seven weeks of Pascha, now, be a time for us to purify our senses: to live in the mystery of His Body and Blood risen from the dead, that is now our life, and that is given to us as our food and drink. We live in the risen Christ when we turn our eyes away from looking at the vain images of the world that is passing away, that we might look with the eyes of our soul on the mystery of Christ God crucified for us, risen from the dead, and learn to believe in the LORD Jesus Christ; that is, that we might learn to love the LORD Jesus Christ with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and begin to see Him with the eyes of our heart shining in our own souls in the unapproachable light of His Holy Resurrection. Amen!