Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Second Sunday of Easter 2025

A week ago, on Easter Sunday morning, the Dean reminded us how difficult it is to visualise Easter – to know where to look. On Good Friday, it’s relatively easy; we are called to look at the cross, no matter how uncomfortable or difficult it might be. The crucial moment of the resurrection, however, occurs when nobody is there to see it. Artists across the centuries have attempted to put some visual flesh on the bones of the narrative, But, in fact, we do not know, we cannot know what the resurrection looked like: the empty tomb is an absence, we don’t know where to look, so we must look at ourselves. To quote the Dean: ‘humanity scarred yet risen, betrayed yet loving, beaten but made glorious, dead yet alive.  It is ourselves we must see dragged from the grave and made new.’

Today, on this Second Sunday of Easter, we see another possible portrait of ourselves in the figure of Thomas. Poor doubting Thomas: gone down in history as the one who couldn’t imagine, couldn’t believe the enormity of what the disciples had told him: ‘We have seen the Lord!’ Thomas, who became so known for doubting, that a part of his legend grew to incorporate the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who, on her way to heaven, appeared to Thomas and dropped to him her girdle – presumably because she knew he wouldn’t believe unless he had seen her. When Jesus first appears to the disciples in the Upper Room, where they are locked in out of fear, Thomas is not there, and refuses to believe unless he can see and touch the risen Lord. So, when Jesus appears again to the disciples, and Thomas is there, Jesus invites him to touch the wounds that are on his resurrected body, and doubt no longer, but believe.

We have been wondering where to look in this Easter season, but in this Abbey, this scene of the resurrection appearance of Jesus and St Thomas is one we can gaze upon ourselves. In the North Transept, on my left hand, there are two paintings from the late thirteenth century.  The one on the left with the red background shows Jesus and St Thomas, the one on the right with the green background is St Christopher. In keeping with what we have said about the impossibility of seeing the Resurrection, this scene shows something that isn’t actually spoken about in the Bible. We are never told that Thomas actually touches Jesus; just his extraordinary words in response to him: ‘My Lord and my God.’ But in this image, Thomas is on his knees in front of his risen Lord, and Jesus is grabbing his arm to place it in his side – a wound clearly visible on the back of Jesus’ hand. There may be a prosaic reason for this. In the archives of the Abbey, it seems that at one point the Abbey had a relic of St Thomas: an arm. It’s possible that what you can see in this image is a sort of thirteenth-century poster, showing visitors, the majority of whom wouldn’t be able to read, exactly what relics the Abbey had. Jesus holding Thomas’ hand makes the point about the sanctity of those relics. When I look at this painting, however, what strikes me is the sense of visceral, physical urgency. Thomas doesn’t look very happy at all – he looks rather uncomfortable. Jesus has pulled Thomas’ arm up so that he can place it in the wound in his side; there is a sense of the need to communicate in the clearest possible terms that Jesus is physically here, that he is raised in his wounded body. What we see in this painting is Christ’s wish that Thomas believe.

Christ didn’t need to appear again so that Thomas could have his doubt assuaged. Indeed, Christ didn’t need to appear to any of the disciples: the resurrection would have happened even if nobody knew about it. But Christ appeared to the disciples for their own sake, for our sakes, that we might know him and believe. The desire of God is that we have that faith, and he came to Thomas to ensure that he did.

This might be a little bit difficult to hear: How many of us have wished that when we have doubted, like Thomas, Christ would appear to us and ask us to put our hands upon him, to have that empirical, incontrovertible proof of the resurrected Christ: to have something we can look at, that we can point to. If God does so urgently desire us to know him, why doesn’t he do this for us?

To answer that question, we need to look once again at ourselves and what the resurrection appearances mean for us. We are risen to new life in Christ. As I quoted earlier, ‘it is ourselves we see dragged from the grave and made new,’ and each of the resurrection appearances reveals the ways in which the disciples had got things wrong, and places the truth before them in its place. Next week we will hear about how Jesus enabled the disciples to catch a miraculous load of fish, and then ate fish and bread with them: a call-back to when Jesus fed the five thousand, which led to an enormous misunderstanding of who Jesus is (the crowd wish to acclaim Jesus as king) and when Jesus corrects them, many fall away. At the end of the Gospel, Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him: a call-back to Peter’s denial of Jesus during his Passion. Each appearance takes some failure, presents the truth in his resurrection, and, crucially, redeems that failure. Thomas is no different; we are no different. It has been suggested that Thomas’s utterances in John 11: ‘let us also go, that we may die with him’ and John 14: ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ point to the fact that Thomas particularly does not understand that there can be anything beyond the death of Christ: it is not just that he doubts, but that his whole mindset cannot see beyond the cross. He has a picture of who Jesus is, just as Peter did, just as the crowd did, just as Mary Magdalen did last week when she tried to hold onto Jesus, just as we do, and the truth of Jesus does not fit that picture. He is the crucified and risen Lord, the triumphant suffering servant, and the truth of Christ’s resurrection appearance to Thomas, the urgency of wanting Thomas to believe, Thomas’s response recognising who Jesus truly is, redeems Thomas’s doubt and preconceptions.

We, too, have those pre-conceptions: we have an image of who Jesus is, but the truth of the resurrected Lord can never fit into our picture or pre-conception. When we try to see Jesus, to visualise him, our picture is clouded by the enormity of the empty tomb. Like Thomas, we doubt because our vision does not match the vision of the resurrected Christ. But the good news is the urgency with which God wants us to know him, to see him in his resurrected, wounded glory. Like Mary Magdalen, we are called by name. Like Peter, we are asked to proclaim our love of the Lord despite the times we have denied him. Like Thomas, we are shown Christ’s wounds. Our challenge is that those appearances are always unexpected, like they were for the disciples, who didn’t recognise Jesus, and when he appeared in a locked room, were afraid and needed to be told “peace be with you.” Christ calls us and comes to us in many, many different ways: through loved ones, through solidarity with the suffering, through the breaking of bread. He wants us to know him, to see him, and with Thomas to proclaim: My Lord and my God.