Your Yearly Reminder About Thomas
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, May 3, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to John, the 20th chapter, verses 19 to 29.
19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the [religious authorities],1 Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “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.”
26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Movement One: Where Was Thomas?
It’s evening on the first day of the week. The disciples are behind locked doors. John tells us they are afraid, afraid of the same authorities who had just crucified Jesus. And into that fear, into that sealed room, Jesus comes. He preaches to them. He commissions them. He reiterates the promise of sending the Spirit to be with them. It’s a deeply personal, intimate moment for the disciples.
But Thomas isn’t there.
For centuries that single absence has defined him. Doubting Thomas. The disciple who wasn’t where he was expected to be, who demanded proof before he would believe, who needed to see before he could trust. The church has repeated this story so often that his very name has become a synonym for skepticism, for hesitation, for the failure of faith.
But before we follow that road again, let’s sit with what the text doesn’t say. It doesn’t say Thomas ran away. It doesn’t say Thomas gave up. It doesn’t say Thomas was hiding in self-pity or wallowing in disbelief. In fact, if we take Scripture at its face value, at what it says and doesn’t say, it seems that Jesus is totally unconcerned that Thomas isn’t present.
Thomas had already shown us who he was. In John 11:16, when Jesus decides to return to Judea after the death of Lazarus, the same Judea where the religious authorities had just tried to stone him, it’s Thomas who speaks up. Not with a question. Not with a protest, but with a bold declaration: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” That’s not the voice of a coward. That’s not someone whose faith runs shallow. Thomas is willing to walk toward death alongside his teacher.
So where was he when Jesus appeared? We don’t know. Perhaps Thomas grieved differently than the others, not in a group behind a locked door but out in the city, in motion, in the kind of restless sorrow that cannot sit still. Perhaps he was the one who didn’t have the luxury of hiding, because someone needed tending to: a grieving family member, a follower of Jesus who had no community to lock themselves inside with, someone on the margins who had come to depend on this movement and now had nowhere to turn.
We know that Jesus’ execution left more people shattered than just the twelve men who take up most of the space in the Gospels. There were women who had followed him from Galilee, funding his ministry, caring for the community. There were people he had healed whose lives had been transformed. There were the poor to whom he had announced good news. When the movement’s leader was killed, who was looking after them? Maybe that responsibility fell to Thomas. Maybe he was the one who stepped up.
The text gives us enough to know that Thomas was not a man who abandoned people in crisis. So, when we find him absent from that locked room, maybe the most honest thing we can say is not that he failed to show up, but that he showed up somewhere else.
Movement Two: The Wound-Keeper
When Thomas finally rejoins the group, the others tell him what happened. “We have seen the Lord.” And Thomas says the thing that has followed him ever since: “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.”
Notice for what Thomas asks. He doesn’t ask for a vision. He doesn’t ask for a feeling. He doesn’t ask Jesus to appear in a dream or whisper to his spirit. He asks to touch the wounds.
This is a profound and specific request, and I think we have been wrong to call it doubt. Thomas has just watched his teacher, the one he was willing to die with, be arrested, beaten, and executed. He’s sat with that trauma. He’s processed what it means that Rome can take a person you love and destroy them publicly and completely. And now his friends are telling him that the same person is alive again, that death did not hold him, that something happened on the other side of that violence.
Thomas isn’t asking for proof because he has a deficiency of faith. Thomas is asking for proof because he’s a human being who has been through something devastating. And he knows, the way anyone who has suffered knows, that you can’t simply skip over the wound to get to the healing. You have to go through it.
And we also need to remember, honestly, that while the other disciples may not have demanded evidence, they had already experienced the evidence. Jesus had appeared to them, and they had the opportunity to do exactly what Thomas is now asking.
There’s a theological tradition, rooted in the Hebrew prophets and carried through the psalms of lament, which insists our grief and our doubt are not obstacles to encountering God; they’re the very path toward it. The psalms are full of people who throw their anguish directly at God. The first line of the 22nd Psalm reads, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That isn’t faithlessness; in fact, both Mark and Matthew record Jesus saying those words moments before his death. This is honest faith, the kind that doesn’t perform certainty it doesn’t feel. Thomas is praying a psalm with his whole body. He’s saying: I can’t pretend the crucifixion didn’t happen. I can’t leap to resurrection without first standing in the grief.
Perhaps there is a kind of pastoral wisdom in Thomas’ demand, in the honesty and sincerity of his questions, that we have too often dismissed. If the resurrection is real, it should be able to bear the weight of our questions. A faith that cannot withstand honest inquiry is not a faith worth having. Thomas is not tearing down the house. He’s testing the foundation. He wants to know if this thing which we have come to call the church can hold.
Movement Three: Eight Days in the In-Between
In addition to Thomas’ story, there’s another dynamic most of us miss in this passage. John tells us that between Thomas learning of Jesus’ resurrection and Jesus’ appearing to Thomas and the rest of the disciples, eight days pass.
Eight days.
Jesus doesn’t appear to Thomas that night. He doesn’t show up the next morning to correct him or reassure him. There’s no immediate resolution. Thomas lives in the gray area, the liminal space between believing enough to serve the community, but still not believing that Jesus really has returned for eight full days while the rest of the disciples are apparently transformed by their encounter with the risen Christ.
Think about the emotional and psychological cost. You’re living in community with people who have had a miraculous experience you haven’t had. You hear them speaking with certainty about something you can’t yet fully affirm. Yet you keep showing up without having received what you need.
Those eight days are a portrait of faith. Thomas stays. He doesn’t leave in anger or shame. He doesn’t pretend to believe what he does not believe. He simply remains present in the community, carrying his questions, with honest suspicion and expectant hope.
The ancient church observed this passage as an image of the time between Easter and the second coming, the long in-between in which the church lives now, having heard the testimony of the resurrection but not yet seeing what we have been promised. We are, in other words, all living Thomas’ eight days. We have the witness of those who came before us. We have the testimony of scripture and tradition and the community of faith. We have our personal revelations, those moments when we have encountered the risen Lord ourselves. But we haven’t yet seen with our own eyes. We haven’t touched the wounds ourselves.
The Rabbinic tradition of Judaism speaks of teshuvah, the act of turning back to God, similar to what Christians call confession or repentance. But what Thomas demonstrates in these eight days is slightly different: not a return from wandering, but a faithful remaining in the wilderness. He doesn’t wander. He waits. And that waiting is holy.
Movement Four: The Touch and the Declaration
At the end of those eight days, Jesus visits the disciples again and Thomas is with them. Jesus goes directly to him.
He doesn’t scold Thomas. He doesn’t lecture him about the nature of faith or remind him that the others believed without needing direct proof. He offers Thomas the evidence. “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”
We don’t know if Thomas actually touches the wounds. John doesn’t tell us. What we know is that Thomas’ response comes immediately and completely: “My Lord and my God.”
This is the highest Christological declaration in the Gospel according to John. Not Peter’s confession, not Martha’s, though those are significant too. Thomas, the one who has been labeled the doubter, becomes the first person in this Gospel to name Jesus as God without qualification. He doesn’t say “My teacher” or “My Lord” alone. He says, “My Lord and my God.” That declaration would have been recognized immediately by Jewish ears as an echo of Psalm 35 and Psalm 38, where David cries out to God in anguish and then is met by God. Thomas’ confession is born not in easy certainty but in the crucible of grief and honest waiting. That’s where the deepest knowledge of God so often lives.
Then Jesus speaks what has often been read as a gentle rebuke: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” I want to push back on the rebuke interpretation. Jesus doesn’t say Thomas was wrong to ask for evidence, to ask for proof. Jesus says there is a blessing for those who believe without seeing, a statement about the future community of faith, about us, about everyone who would follow and never have the option of touching the wounds themselves. Jesus isn’t scolding Thomas but rather telling him that Thomas has seen the risen Lord. Not physically until that moment, but in the people to whom Thomas has been visiting, consoling, and ministering to in the community.
And Jesus didn’t withhold himself from Thomas while Thomas was in those eight days. Jesus came. Jesus offered the touch. Jesus met Thomas in the specific and embodied place of Thomas’ need. The blessing on those who believe without seeing does not mean that those who need to see are less beloved. It means that the gift Thomas received is extended to everyone who comes after. The testimony of scripture and the Christian community and the movement of the Spirit continues to extend that gift to each of us.
Movement Five: Showing Up for the Thomas in the Room
Every congregation has people living in Thomas’ eight days right now.
People who have suffered losses that have not been resolved, that may never be resolved. People who were certain about their faith once and are no longer certain about anything. People who were hurt by the church, by another Christian, or by a theology that promised them one thing and delivered another. People who are watching the world, watching innocent people displaced, watching systems designed to crush the vulnerable grind on, watching the gap between what the church proclaims on Sunday and what it does the rest of the week and finding it very hard to feel the resurrection.
These people aren’t failing. They’re being faithful in the only way they can right now. They’re staying. They’re showing up. They’re carrying their questions into community rather than carrying them out the door.
The question for the rest of us, for those who, in this season, are more like the ten disciples in the locked room than like Thomas in his wilderness, is what kind of community we are going to be during those eight days. Are we going to treat those people with impatience, with judgment, with the subtle message that their inability to believe as quickly or as fully as we do is a spiritual deficiency? Or are we going to do what Thomas did: stay present, keep showing up, remain in the community with our questions held openly until the encounter comes?
Because here’s what the story of Thomas teaches us about accompanying one another through trauma, grief, and honest doubt: presence is the ministry. Thomas didn’t leave. He stayed with people who had something he didn’t have, and in staying, he was there when Jesus came back through the door.
The call to honor those on their own timeline and show up for them even when their process looks different from ours, isn’t a minor footnote to Christian community. Jesus modeled it. He came back. He came specifically for Thomas. He made space for the eight days. God doesn’t require us to arrive at faith on a schedule of someone else’s design. And because God doesn’t require that of us, we have no business requiring it of each other.
The resurrection is not an argument to be won. It’s a wound to be touched. And the church at its best is a community of people willing to hold still long enough for someone else to reach out their hand.
Amen.
I’m very uncomfortable any times the Bible uses “the Jews” when the text is referring to the Jewish leaders of a specific era, particularly the time of Jesus and the Early Church. Therefore, it’s my practice to render the the text as “the religious authorities.” While still imperfect, I hope this phrasing helps to distinguish between leaders of a religion at a certain time and place and the adherents of that religion then and across time.