See and Not see, St. Thomas [Wednesday Advent 3]

 

READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Ephesians 2:19-22

• St. John 20:24-29

Grace to you all and Peace from God our Father and the LORD Jesus, the Christ.

 

Who speaks to us from our Epistle heard this evening saying:

“In Him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”

 

In Him. In the very visible and physical Body of God, St. Paul teaches.

Tonight we finally get to a saint from the Bible. Maybe that makes you more comfortable, knowing for certain that God wanted us to hear about St. Thomas and so He included him in His Word. Yet, even then, there is not much about St. Thomas in the Bible.

 

One text calls him the “twin” and very rarely does he stand out among the Apostles. Before the raising of Lazarus he does say, “Let us go die with him”. All this brings us to the same conclusion we reached with St. Lucy, that true saints decrease, while Christ increases. We would rather the mantle be on Christ’s shoulders, than our own.

 

But that is not what our focus will be tonight with St. Thomas.

 

Listen to a quote from St. Gregory the Great:

"St. Thomas' unbelief has benefited our faith more than the belief of the other disciples; it is because he attained faith through physical touch that we are confirmed in the faith beyond all doubt. Indeed, the Lord permitted the apostle to doubt after the resurrection; but He did not abandon him in doubt. By his doubt and by his touching the sacred wounds the apostle became a witness to the truth of the resurrection.

St. Thomas touched and cried out: My Lord and my God! And Jesus said to him: Because you have seen Me, Thomas, you have believed. Now if Thomas saw and touched the Savior, why did Jesus say: Because you have seen Me, Thomas, you have believed? Because he saw something other than what he believed. For no mortal man can see divinity. Thomas saw the Man Christ and acknowledged His divinity with the words: My Lord and my God. 

Faith therefore followed upon seeing."

 

Jesus gives such grace and mercy that not only is seeing believing but not seeing, also. Thank you , Jesus.

So it is that we see St. Thomas usually represented in church Art with a square or some other engineering instrument. Because he was the man who wanted to see and measure God!

 

How dare he, right? Who measures God? Not you. Not me? In fact, part of Job’s chastisement includes measuring, or rather his inability to measure properly. From Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know!” (38:4-5)

 

Not only has God determined the measure of all things, but He is Himself immeasurable. As He says in Romans 11, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!” (v.33). Even Jesus agrees when He tells us that no one has seen God at anytime, neither have they seen the Father (St John 1:18, 6:46).

 

But He does go on, no one has seen except He Who is from God, the one and only Son. And goes even further still in St. Matthew 11:27, “no one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.”

 

And John 14:9, “Whoever has seen Me, has seen the Father”

 

In this light, we not only return to St. Thomas, but all the Old Testament as well. When Abraham encountered the three men in Genesis 18, he knew it was the Lord God and told his wife to measure out three measures of meal to make cakes. And those three measures were enough because God is three in one.

 

Abraham is able to use human measurement in order to please God. Amazing. We usually think that we miss our measurements of God, we fall short of His glory. From Daniel 5, “God has measured your kingdom, and finished it; You have been weighed in the balances, and found lacking;” (v.26-27). And that is true, in our sin.

 

God is the measure of all things and He has chosen the path of man’s measurement of Him. That is His promise, for not only was man’s measuring of the manna from heaven enough for Him and the men had no lack (Ex 16:18), so also when God stands in the measurement of man, His own self, Jesus Christ, the Father accepts the offering of the Son on the cross.

 

God allows Himself to be measured, to be studied, to be handled and it leads to the truth of all things. God places Himself inside a box, a God-made-man box, and reveals His salvation to His Apostles. Such that with St Thomas’s 5 senses, he can cry out in faith, “My Lord and my God!”

 

In Christ, not only does St Thomas get to not see and believe, but he also gets to see, measure, and believe the entire history of God’s salvation which focuses on and has its completion in one man: Jesus Christ. 

 

St. Thomas gets to measure the two eyes that saw Light in the beginning. St. Thomas gets to evaluate the 10 fingers that formed man from the dust. St. Thomas gets to analyze the hands and arms that brought out the faithful from the all the countries where they were scattered and save them by faith alone (Ez 20:34).

 

The lesson of St. Thomas is that we get to take God at His Word and at His Body. The Lord presents Himself to you, for you to measure and find no lack in Him, because He has shown up as a man, to reconcile God and man, and to speak and commune with His people until the end of the age.