The Incredulity of St. Thomas: My Lord and My god

I want you to imagine the scene I’m about to describe. You see a group of eleven men huddled around a table lit by candles whispering. They are deathly silent, trying intently not to be heard. One man calls out to another, and you hear the name Thomas being directed at one of the shorter, balding men. You hear a slight breeze from behind you, and as you turn, it is Jesus who walks through the solid wood “although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.’ Thomas answered and said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.’”[1]We all know this story from the twentieth chapter of John’s Gospel, the story of doubting Thomas, who refused to believe in the risen Christ. The artwork from the Baroque painter Caravaggio asks us to consider the reality of an encounter with the Lord. Through St. Thomas, we encounter a God who is not dead but alive. 

One of the oldest devotions in the early Church was to the Holy Wounds of Christ, also expressed beautifully in the Anima Christi. You and I have our own wounds and scars that remind us of our unique stories. Like Jesus’s wounds, our wounds are no different in their ability to be signs and sources of healing. Our injuries are often ugly, scarred, or may not yet have begun to heal, so showing them to others is often perceived as weakness. We often have a natural tendency to hide our wounds because showing these wounds carries the risk of vulnerability. Thomas must have felt vulnerable when thinking about the death of Jesus just days before, how he and the other apostles abandoned the Lord during His crucifixion. Earlier in the gospel reading, he says, "unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks in my hand into his side I will not believe.”[2] Thomas wishes to see the wounds of Christ to convict himself that his friend is alive. Jesus meets Thomas’s request and offers his wounds as a sign, and it is easy to stop there, to just see this story as a man coming to be free of skepticism in the face of truth. However, staying merely at this surface level misses the more profound spiritual reality hidden within this story that Caravaggio so expertly captures in this painting. 

Suppose we start at the edges of the painting and work toward the center. We see that the shoulders of Christ, the shoulder of the other apostle wrapped in red, and the head of the disciple standing behind both of them all lead us to one central point in the dead center of the painting, the face of Thomas. Looking at the face of Thomas, we don't see the face of a man deep in thought or contemplation. The face of St. Thomas is wrinkled, and his eyes are nearly bugging out of his skull in shock and awe. St. Thomas is, to put it simply, surprised. We often forget the Apostles’ surprise and joy at seeing the resurrected Christ. We also take for granted that Jesus had to appear as it is depicted in the gospel passage. Truthfully that's not how it had to be; that's why Thomas is so shocked when our Lord guides him to his wounds. The resurrected Christ is a shocking sign of his divinity, and an encounter with Jesus is a life-changing event. Caravaggio captures the instant before St. Thomas makes his extraordinary declaration, "My Lord and My God!"[3] What are some ways you can make that own declaration in your lives?

The hand of Christ so near to the face of Thomas is guiding his hand into the wound. Jesus is always near each of us as our Good Shepherd, guiding us in our daily lives, sometimes even grasping us by the hand. Like Thomas, Jesus may urge that we look closer at those areas we do not want to see and that He wishes to heal. This attitude of obedience is vital in the healing process, just as our doctors instruct that resting before and after surgery assists in recovery. If we look closer at the hands of St. Thomas, there is dirt underneath his nails. They are dirty, rough, and worn. St Thomas's dirty hands are a reminder of our sins, and the dirtiness of our lives lived in sin that we bring to Christ and that he heals us from and makes us clean. If we continue to follow the hand of Thomas, we see that it is literally stretching the skin around the wound in Christ's side. I don't know about you, but when I have always thought about this gospel passage, I imagined Thomas was merely touching the wounds of Christ. This visceral realism is a part of the style of painting Caravaggio uses to accentuate the truth of the resurrection. 

I am reminded of this quote from the Catechism, "The Resurrection above all constitutes the confirmation of all Christ's works and teachings. All truths, even those most inaccessible to human reason, find their justification if Christ by his Resurrection has given the definitive proof of his divine authority, which he had promised.”[4] Caravaggio's depiction of Christ is not only a portrait of the resurrected Christ but a reminder of his passion and crucifixion. Caravaggio does not need to depict Christ bloodied and beaten to invoke the suffering Jesus undertook on the Cross. The bulging skin reminds us that the man depicted in the painting is indeed there, not an image or an illusion. If Christ has been raised from the dead, our faith is not merely an encounter with a set of dogmas or teachings but a person, the person of Jesus Christ.

We can place our hope in all that Jesus promises us to remain faithful at the moment, no matter how difficult life may be. Caravaggio does not hide the wounds of Christ but draws our attention to them, depicting them as they really are. As mentioned earlier, we are often afraid of our wounds. Still, it is the nature of our Christian faith the transform the dirty, the ugly, and the broken into beautiful things. Jesus himself did that on the cross; he took a symbol meant to terrify and disturb his followers, transforming it into a sign of our faith. We no longer view paintings or statues or representations of a bloody Jesus on the cross as some sort of macabre or gross imagery. Nevertheless, the virtue of Faith allows us to see beyond the superficial to see the beauty in the death of Jesus. The ugliest moments in our lives given over to Jesus can become our most beautiful, as we can rely on him and show the beauty of God's plan of healing and transformation.

Caravaggio’s painting communicates eternal truths about God’s desires and plans for us. The healing that Jesus brought to Thomas in the Upper Room is not limited to that particular time and place but is available to all of us at every moment. The Sacrament of Reconciliation offers a chance to engage Christ’s timeless sacrifice, his Paschal Mystery here and now in the present moment. Seek Him there and allow whatever grace is provided to deepen your connection to Him, just as Saint Thomas’s encounters strengthened him for the rest of his life. Just as Jesus showed his wounds to the Apostles, every Christian is called upon to witness their own battle scars and proclaim the hope that our faith in Jesus provides. The First Letter of St. Peter offers an appeal to us, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.”[5] We are not asked to provide an airtight answer to the sufferings we have endured but to offer a witness to Jesus’s workings in our lives. The Incredulity of St Thomas reminds the powerful effects of turning to the Lord and allowing Him to heal our wounds in trust. Caravaggio depicts one such encounter through the person of St. Thomas. Through his meeting with the resurrected Jesus, Saint Thomas became a devoted follower and evangelist, spreading the Gospel to the far east. According to tradition, he was martyred in modern-day India while preaching the resurrected Christ, whom he had seen with his own eyes. Allow Jesus today to make those parts of yourself beautiful that you wish to hide from the world. If Thomas could find healing, what's stopping you or me?

[1] John 20:27 (NABRE).

[2] John 20:24.

[3] John 20.28.

[4] The Catechism of the Catholic Church (New York: Doublesday, 1995), 651.

[5] 1 Peter 3:15.