3 July 2020
Feast of Saint Thomas, Apostle
Just over two months ago, on Divine Mercy Sunday, I offered a reflection on Thomas, which you can find at: https://www.magisspirituality.org/ignatian_reflection/20-04-19/. I recommend revisiting that reflection, which focuses on Thomas’s desire to see Jesus’s wounds.
Even before the famous resurrection scene in John 20, Thomas had already been challenging Jesus with questions about the logic of Jesus’s proclamation (see https://www.magisspirituality.org/ignatian_reflection/17-05-12/ on John 14). But it seemed that the real breakthrough for Thomas was actually having all of his attempts to reduce God’s logic to his own logic blown open by the awesome grandeur of Jesus’s resurrection in the flesh, which Jesus revealed to Thomas personally on that eighth day after he first appeared to the other disciples. Jesus did not come to Thomas right away: perhaps Jesus wished to give Thomas a week to really taste the impotence of his own logical system and experience internally the difference between the frustration of his own lack of faith and the joy of the faith that animated his friends, a joy which they had offered him (as the Church), but he had refused. But once Thomas let his system be blown open by Jesus, he never turned back to the categories that once held him bound. Let us then ask Thomas to point us to the risen Lord, especially in those places where we still try to limit God into our own systems, so that Jesus might explode those categories for us as profoundly and definitively as Jesus did for Thomas.