I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

—

Dear Soul,

I need to confess that I have avoided thinking of you lately. Or perhaps I have just avoided praying.

I know that you know who I truly am, a man who struggles to know what or why a man is, a disciple who wavers at the thought of a straight line, a believer whose fears betray his beliefs, a pastor with the impulses of a wolf. I know you must be strained, existing as you do as a string dividing incalculable polarities while simultaneously uniting some tension that gives rise to the woefully negligent word “I”. I’m sorry about that—about not attending to the truth behind that word, the truth that wearies of confronting the rapid and volatile oscillation between reflection and shadow which daily announces the most self-evident truth available to the experience of faith, the only truth that makes the prospect of faith possible: “but by the grace of God…”

“I am what I am,” but I am discovering that even when “grace to me is not in vain” it does not remove in me all that is “least deserving” (1 Cor. 15:9-10). In the world of faith I still drag around my shadow. And as in the world of bodies, as I expose myself more directly to the Light the dark only seems to burn more intensely dark. I have only shades of pretense. Naked and laid bare before my conscience I have proven to be essentially both reflection and eclipse—essentially and both!—never either star or coffin, but always and only a moon. I am therefore always wanting to hide from a side of myself, from you, all that is dark because it has to be dark, a side that is always sad because it can neither make itself warm nor forget that it is sad, a side, nevertheless, that serves to remind me just how suicidal is my desire to enthrone myself as Light and how lonely it would be to move into the outer darkness bask in my own lightless glory. But I can’t hide my shadow from you because you can always feel its cold. I can however hide it from others. I can lie and pretend that I am one-dimensional.

But the truth is: I am what I am: a dark, cold, lonely rock that has nevertheless been strong-armed into the gravity of something Real. It is my somehow my Center without being mine, my Light without lying about my darkness. It makes me glow without making me something that glows, because nothing made can be made to glow by itself.

—

For a short time I enjoyed the ideas put forth about the so-called New Perspective on Paul, because it was easy to ignore you, to think in grand terms where all souls get cast into the “Kingdom of God” and all the optimism about its inhabitants. How Augustinian it would be for me to speak to my soul about the concerns of the soul; how un-nuanced of me to imagine the psalter actually inquiring as to his soul’s downcast estate. So perhaps I should earn the preemptive judgment of the New Perspective prophets, but I can’t help but wonder if the reason Luther read his tormented conscience into Paul is because Luther, like Paul, had a properly functioning conscience. Krister Stendahl might have been right about the “introspective conscience of the West,” but Krister Stendahl was a closet Mormon—Mormons do not have properly functioning consciences.

I think Barth was right about the strange new world of the Bible that one enters only when one enters it as a wilderness. We must be stripped of all our defenses and instruments that might fool us into trying to conquer or manipulate words that only become God’s Word when they are heard—the voice crying out in the Wilderness, saying, “Prepare the way!”

Indeed, the voice comes to prepare the way of the one who, upon His arrival, is announced: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” The voice can only introduce this God-Lamb to the tormented conscience. There is no complement or counterpart befitting among men. We want to prepare the way with palm branches and processions, but the voice points alone to a Lamb and we must prepare ourselves for the slaughter. And hence what has always been there, so damningly plain and as unmetaphorical as physics for those who dare believe in a reality that is higher than the flesh of a man and even the potential of a Kingdom: “but by the grace of God” means precisely “Yet not I, but Christ…”

“I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

Perhaps that is why I have neglected you. It always seems so morbid in there.

But there are but two men in this world (Rom. 5). I must either crucify one and die with the other or obey one and despise the other. But all too often I have traded the truth of God for a lie in the name of a truth and in the name of a god, sending out a gospel shrouded heavily with chains and a muzzle—because I am shrouded heavily with chains and speak as though I am not, even though when I speak as though I am the chains disappear. When I am crucified, then I am free. Anything less is less than freedom.

—

The obvious struggle of a Christian leader is confusing the living with the dead: “Yet not Christ, but I…”—the confusion of pride in all its seductions to become the object of worship. It is a temptation to which we are all vulnerable lifelong. But I think this temptation, strong as it may be, can rather easily be recognized the moment we begin panting after human praise, or perhaps the moment our exemption from hell no longer comes as a surprise.

The more subtle seduction, however, one that we so desperately need some higher Light to pierce with a more incisive vision, is with the angel of light herself. It is a deception that does not come as a greedy confusion between “I” and “Christ.” Instead, it makes a fusion its noble goal. This is the primal resistance to the invasion of God, because our instinctive resistance to truth of God is first a resistance to the truth of ourselves. We were already covered in fig leaves before we hid in the woods (Gen. 3). So we inadvertently or not resist the God who, coming now as he must as our opposition, insists on invading only what is entirely empty, who insists on living in only what is thoroughly dead, but who finds himself among the tombs with bodies restless for resurrection. God comes to us and we prematurely want to come to him so we can come again to ourselves. Grace, we suppose, should raise us in a flash so we can get on with living, failing to see that something must remain dead in order for something to made alive. We sanctify this apostasy by calling it conformity or sanctification or obedience or faithfulness or, worst of all, “optimistic grace” (Collins). Its inner creed sounds so venerable: “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, because Christ lives in me.” But Christ cannot live in me or for me if I try to live in me or for me as well. Yes, we were “buried with him into his death” but we have not been raised up from the cemetery. “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6). Paul does not say that we too were raised just as we too were buried. We were buried, and yet we walk. Nevertheless we live, yet not we but Christ.

But who can truly say that—who can say what must be said? “Yet not I!” Who can truly resist saying, “You can change because Christ can change you” rather than “You cannot change so God changed for you…”? What change can the immutable God subject himself to without subjecting himself to something less than God? What change in God can mean anything other than the death of God?

—

I am convinced that this apparent modesty, to walk on resurrection planes of victory, is perhaps the chief enemy of Christian freedom. “It was for freedom Christ has set us free! Stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1). It was for freedom’s sake because it could not be for the sake of anything else. It could neither be for merit nor for the hope of merit. If for merit, it is already confused: “Yet not Christ, but I!” If for the hope of merit, it will inevitably despair of its futility, if it is honest: “Yet not I, therefore neither Christ…” Indeed, “The conscience is the perfect interpreter of life” (Barth). I am left reduced then to either a liar or a great depression.

The noble goal of a fusion in the relentlessly honest realm of the conscience can only send us running with our forefathers to the trees. And there we resolutely look in the wrong direction. “It was the woman whom you gave me.” “The serpent deceived me.” We comb the land and the Netherland in search for something more overtly hollow than ourselves, something that might serve as a decoy from our extinguished innocence. So we begin, and with sound logic I might add, to “see the small and the larger but not the Large…the preliminary but not the Final, the derived but not the Original, the complex but not the Simple…[we see] what is human but not what is Divine” (Barth). We are the ocean’s title waves that sneer at the pond’s ripples, but God hovers over the abyss watching each self-exalting wave crash infinitely short of the moon it is trying to reach. He sees flatly thus: we’re all at bottom, with the devil. We are hopelessly bound to the serpent’s shores unless the moon plunges itself into the deep.

—

But we are not bound!

And not because of inherent loveliness nor for some essential spark that needed but a fan to swell into its burning potential. It is freedom for freedom’s sake, because freedom for freedom’s sake can never deny the Egypt on the other side of the sea nor tire out from the futility of trying to swim. It does “not submit again to the yoke of slavery” either by denying the truth of slavery or insisting that we return to fight our own battle. We can only stand firm in our weakness. And if ever we meet an inquirer in the wilderness impressed with the testimony of our escape, we have nothing other to say than “Before us came he who is mightier than we. He must increase; we must decrease.”

We stand firm, that is, by becoming humbly honest about who we are, so that we can be boldly truthful about who God is. We stand firm by resisting the temptation of, say, the father who persists in keeping his beloved son alive on life support, the father whose inconsolable sadness of loss is compounded with a paralyzing delusion of hope. We stand firm by resisting the temptation of refusing to admit that it is okay for the Son to die—that He must die. We must refuse the temptation to make the crucifixion of Jesus Christ any less necessary than it truly was for the salvation of the world—for me!

How audacious it is to say it, though, to say “Yet not I!” and really believe it is okay to say it—that we must say it? Who can say “I am crucified with Christ” when we know we are, in effect saying “I am the crucifier of Christ.” I am the killer of God. I am the thorn of his crown. I am the spear in his heart. Who can say that and believe God would have it no other way—that God had it no other way. “But I do not abolish the grace of God, for if righteousness comes by the law, Christ died in vain” (Gal. 2:21).

Oh, Mary,
Gentle Mother,
Open the door and let me in.
A bee has stung your belly with faith.
Let me float in it like a fish.
Let me in! Let me in!
I have been born many times, a false Messiah,
But let me be born again
Into something true.

~Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Toward God

—

Christ demands one act from us: truthfulness. Truth is the only thing that can starve our great appetite for life. It truth that drinks the water from his side without pretending it is not red. It is truth that keeps us standing there firm, naked and hideous with innumerable scars and some fresh scabs. It is truth that resists the temptation to begin stripping the fig tree with every offense. It is truth that remains stripped. It is truth that eats from the forbidden tree and goes boldly to God to who begins with our feet and then washes our soiled, leather garment.

In our depravity, the truth is that we are condemned to death in our sin. In Christ, the truth is that we are not condemned in our sin and death, because we are incorporated into his righteousness and life (Rom. 5-8). Being truthful doesn’t mean being good. It means being truthful about not being good. Truth sometimes sins but never lies about sometimes sinning. Truth demands our utter willing against pretense, because a Christian cannot lie about himself without lying about his Christ. If we exalt ourselves, we humble Christ. If we humble ourselves, we exalt Christ. That is why the preacher’s calling is unmovably singular.

“I determined to know nothing among, save Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).

—

If we begin here and seek to end here, Soul, the space between then and now will remain a chainless space, because in the world where Christ became for us what we could not become for ourselves, there is nothing left to chain. Christ has conquered and is seated at the right hand of the Father. His chains were broken without even concerning himself with ours. It is too late for us. We simply remain—resting in peace. This is now and then will be then, but until then there is no other Truth. So die with me in this Truth, because God lives in Truth.

And with God, all things are possible.

It dawned on me upon reading this that my greatest complaint to God is that He is real.

I’m learning to be thankful for seasons of absence.

Lord, help me through the desert, even if help only feels like heartache, even if your presence feels only like a vacuum filled with infinite longing, even if seeking you leads to an endless search–forsaking all the treasures of Egypt like a fool chasing an Infinite horizon. Even so, let it be.

Only keep me from settling for anything less than all of you.

“But the gods, taking pity on human beings–a race born to labor–gave them regularly recurring divine festivals, as a means of refreshment from their fatigue; they gave them Muses, and Apollo and Dionysus as the leaders of the Muses, to the end that, after refreshing themselves in the company of the gods, they might return to an upright posture.”

~Plato

Just listened to NPR radio show that began by announcing the statistic that one in six Americans are nonreligious and then followed with the (somehow related?) question: Is religion becoming obsolete?

“Forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be born” (Lawrence Krauss, Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing).

There are two types of nothing, two types of darkness, and two types of god.

Everything begins on a canvas that is black to our eyes. The darkness was over the face of the deep before God began speaking his mind, saying things like “light” and “darkness” and “Lawrence Krauss.”

But black to our eyes is only black like a pupil to God’s eyes. To him, “even the darkness is not dark…[and] the night is bright as the day” (Ps. 139: 12); indeed, “God is light, and in him there is no darkness” (1 Jn. 1:5), and “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow” (Ja. 1:17). So we should expect the canvas of creation to be a formless void of an outer darkness. How else could Infinite Light create something other but by first creating a no-thing?

He, of course, is not removed from the outer darkness of the no-thing. He withholds his blinding radiance for the express purpose of giving it, indeed, so that the no-thing could become something. That is why “Let there be light…and God separated the light from the darkness” (Gen. 1:3-4) mean the same thing, in the way that will and act can mean the same thing, and why Genesis begins there and only later announces the creation of the creation of the stars.

So God hangs a veil around a space and begins with pinpricks to dot the veil with glimpses into the fullness of the other side. Before long, he has created an entire universe wildly spangled with his glory. And this he does for no reason other than for a creation yet unborn to behold it: the human eyeball.

So God begins with a black canvas for the reason Caravaggio begins with a black canvas—to be dramatic with his colors. He wants to make the universe pop, like a firefly in the night or a supernova in outer space. And he delights in both the same because to him they are the same size. This divine wisdom is simply conventional wisdom. The theater always dims before the spotlight is beamed. So even in the darkest of night, we should expect to see the stars dancing all the more promiscuously in their splendor. We might even write an imprecatory psalm and request that God begin judging the meteorites—since in every judgment of God a veil must be torn—but only so we might get to watch him tear through the night with a wound that bleeds with the pixies of his glory.

So the veil does not lessen the beauty of pure Light. It is makes it visible. It makes it possible for God, in whom there is no turning of shadow, yet pour forth his glory like buckets of rainbows on the space he creates for reflection. The whole universe is set up like stage props, and then like a beam—but only like a beam—out came the sight of human perception.

Humans are free to see what they want to see. Humans can look at a rainbow and see nothing more than a number scale in HTML, if they so choose. They can dissect the universe into evidence and confine its energy within a three-letter-equation², and even be entirely accurate, and fail to see the bigger picture with the self-evident observation that even upon arriving at the very bottom of space or the very end of time (which simply cannot happen), we still have not reckoned with the fact that what there is can give no account for its being there at all, and that if the infinite God is at all, he is all in all, and cannot thus be located apart from anything else. He is the ground of all that there is and the above-ground that makes all things possible—like Christmas. He is here but more than here. We are here and less than here.

And God designed the human eyeball to see as a given that beauty and sight are neither coequal nor coeternal, but rather complementary. That is why the pupil pays its compliments to the iris, but then gives glory to the sun it reflects. But the story of human freedom tells of the rebellion against all that is given and seen as a given. Human beings would learn to love their eyelids and dream that the iris is just a reflection of the pupil, indeed that we only need to cross the veil to see who we truly are. That is what certain physicists imagine they are doing when they speak of a model of the universe, which suggests either that the physical universe is potentially very small or the human ego can perhaps expand to infinite proportions.

So there is another black beginning of an oppositely ordered canvas. There is the no-thing and then there is the no-god; there is night given to Beauty and then there is night given to itself. It is the difference between creation ex nihilo and creation in nihilo, which is the difference between creation and annihilation. And thus the earth would begin filling up with shadows of self-destruction, the heavens overcast with eyelids. God would continue to poke rainbows through the clouds and shoot signs through the night, but humans loved the darkness because they could not simply let there be Light.

I wish Lawrence Krauss could see the Christ that refuses to exist in even his wildest dreams. I used to dream of gods like his, so I am no less blind than he. But my sight came through eyelids heavy with an infinite weight, and that only after dreams of glory led not just to an outer darkness but even to dreams of the outer darkness: night upon night, black upon black, pure and faithful nihilism. It was only then, wrapped up in the folds of the veil, that I was startled to discover my Death at the intersection of a Caravaggio red, painted like a cross from the other side.

Disclaimer: The following is a revised version of a fairy tale entitled, “Werewolf,” which was published by the University of Pittsburgh as a story from the Brothers Grimm collection (although in my collection, Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales, it is absent). This revision changes the meaning of the story entirely. If I were more creative, I would make up my own fairy tales. But since I am not, I enjoy revising ones that already exist. Besides, every fairy tale has evolved to become what it presently is. It only stops evolving when print replaces voice and publisher replaces grandfather. We would do well to rediscover that lost tradition of telling old stories in new ways.

For readers unaccustomed to reading fairy tales, I would recommend reading an article or two that might help you to get oriented, or perhaps just read G.K. Chesterton’s masterful eisegesis of many well-known fairy tales whose hidden (potential) meanings have since been painted over with cinematic flare. Also, don’t read it unless you have time for reflection.

—

The Sleeping Prince

A soldier related the following story, which is said to have happened to his grandfather. The latter, his grandfather, had gone into the forest to cut wood with a kinsman and a third man, both much younger. People suspected that there was something not quite right about this third man, although no one could say exactly what it was.

The three finished their work and were tired, whereupon the third man suggested that they sleep a little. And that is what they did. They all laid down on the ground, but the grandfather only pretended to sleep, keeping his eyes open a crack. The third man looked around to see if the others were asleep, and when he believed this to be so, he took off his belt and turned into a wolf.

Then he ran to a nearby meadow where there was a wild horse, who during the day was a beautiful young princess, resting after running for hours. She saw the wolf and thought to run away but instead invited him to run with her toward the moon. But the wolf attacked her and ate her, from her mane to her bones. Afterward he returned, put his belt back on, and laid down, as before, in human form.

A little later they all got up together and made their way toward home. Just as they reached the village gate, the third man complained that he had a stomachache. The grandfather secretly whispered in his ear: “Perhaps you should consider a different diet…horses are not made for eating, you know.”

The third man replied: “If you had said that to me in the forest, you would not be saying it to me now.”

The grandfather replied, “Perhaps. But perhaps if I had said that to you in the forest, you now would be a prince…”

After the sun set the old man lay in his bed and wept through the night, for he was unable to sleep.

After about three months of focused reading of a number of ancient spiritual mystics and modern psychologists who would be called spiritual mystics if they were ancient, a clear message has emerged: if you haven’t discovered God, then you haven’t looked and listened deeply enough within your own soul. Discover your true self and there you will discover the God who accepts you just as you are. You need only now to accept yourself just as you are. You may even need to forgive yourself, but mainly just for not accepting yourself.

As much as I have gleaned from what I have read–there is a lot of laudable stuff on the woes of technology and the unexamined life–I cannot help but confess that in my own experience of the infinite inward dive I have never found anything other than an infinite inward abyss. Now it may just be that I am especially void of any inborn divinity or particularly undiscerning of the God who is always within. It could be that my spirituality isn’t mystical enough or my psyche isn’t spiritual enough. I could just be an anomaly of godlessness in a world of demigods.

Whatever the case may be, if there are others out there like me who have looked soberly within to discover God and discovered nothing but the self standing in empty space, perhaps you will benefit from my path toward discovering God. But the following only applies to such as these.

Once you get to the bottom and discover there is in fact no ground beneath; once you see that there is no one else there accepting just as you are; after you’ve carefully listened for that eternal voice saying of you “This is my beloved in whom I am well please” and hear only hissing echoes of your own disguised persuasions; once your exhaustive inward search has led you only to despair–you may then be convinced to give up. If so, you are on the right path. But don’t give up. Instead, stop looking inside yourself for the God who accepts you just as you are, because perhaps God does not accept you just as you are. Stop listening for the voice that calls you beloved and is well-pleased with your life, because perhaps your life is not well-pleasing to God. And if you can entertain the notion that perhaps God does not accept you just as you are, that he is not well-pleased with your life, that you have not lived as his beloved, you really only have one last resort:

Turn around and look at the cross of Jesus Christ.

Once you begin looking, keep looking. I mean really look, like the way you look at yourself. Fix your eyes on him and there begin to listen–not to what the voice says about you but to what the voice says about him. Don’t confuse yourself with him, lest you mistake the well-pleasing waters of acceptance for the displeasing flow of forgiveness. Let the cross be the measure of your life and your love. And when you hold your gaze long enough, as though there were nowhere else to look for God, as though your life and love and hope depended on it, you will inevitably be confronted by just how displeasing you are just as you are, because your life and your love are nothing like the well-pleasing love of God revealed in the displeasing death of his beloved Son.

And if you discover your God there, it is there you will discover your true self–guilty. And when there you discover your true God and your true self, you will discover too that it is not divine acceptance that you need. It is divine forgiveness. But for that, you need not look anywhere else. Neither will you want to.

“Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord…For there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus!” (Rom. 7:24-8:1).

Guilty, yes. Condemned, no.

“Worship the LORD in the beauty of his holiness; tremble before him all the earth” (Ps. 96:9).

Thomas did not doubt the resurrection of Jesus. He doubted the death of Jesus.

The Gospel of John is set in a darkened world of disbelief. There is a two-fold problem of blindness and ignorance that this Gospel intends to address with a Light and a Word, with grace and with truth. The prologue (Jn. 1:1-18) orients readers by taking them backstage to witness the Gospel’s main character suiting up (Jn. 1:14) for his role in the ensuing drama to make visible what had become invisible, to make known what had become unknowable. So the one who exists from eternity with God, through whom God sang the cosmos into being, enters from behind the curtain into time and space onto the world’s stage as the Son of God become Son of Man, and thus invites us into the eternal communion of the heavenly table where God the Father becomes “Our Father…” (Mt. 6:9).

“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; It is God the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, who has made him known” (Jn. 1:18).

And thus the unveiling of God the Father required a veiling of God the Son—the Word became flesh. The Son would have to disguise his own glory in order to reveal his Father’s grace, not simply because the grace of God depends on this incarnate veiling but because the veil as such will become instrumental in making grace visible and knowable to the objects of grace (Heb. 10:20). So this Gospel sets out the specific task of bringing the objects of grace and the Subject of grace into proximity, calling the characters in the story and the readers of the story again and again to believe in a picture of God that becomes harder and harder to believe, as the divine Word and Light of life makes his descent from God to the flesh and from the flesh and to the cross (cf. Phil. 2:5-11). The Gospel of John is thus concerned with the quality of Christian faith, that is, concerned to take us from believing in an out-of-focus picture of God and zooming in on the Son until a decisive moment at which point he will address the reader directly (Jn. 20:29-31), so that through this Gospel we might see what is otherwise invisible and know what is otherwise unknowable and thereby believe what is otherwise unbelievable: that of all people it is none other than “Jesus,” the Crucified One, who “is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing [we] may have life in his name” (Jn. 20:31).[1]

[Enter the (peculiar) character of (doubting?) Thomas.]

It is to this end that Thomas’s character is made intelligible. Historically, Thomas has been cast down almost to the bottom of the disciples, second in antagonism only to Judas. Only by the skin of his teeth does he rise above the status of Judas in a last-second moment of belief, which is often looked down upon as a sort of second class faith-by-sight (Jn. 20:29). And if this Gospel portrayed believing in static, black and white terms, this view of Thomas would be justified. But this Gospel does not portray believing in that way. The believing in John’s Gospel is commensurate with the unveiling in John’s Gospel, which sheds its light not like the flick of a switch but the turn of a dimmer. And it is precisely at the most absurd moment, when Doubting Thomas’s finger is buried inside the gaping bosom of the Risen Christ, that the dimmer switch is maxed out, Thomas believes, Jesus becomes “my Lord and my God” (Jn. 20:28), and the readers are called to see what Thomas sees and believe what Thomas believes. It appropriate, therefore, to consider that perhaps Thomas’s character is not there to give us a generic summons to faith in the divine Christ via negativa, that is, an example of the kind of faith not to have. Rather, Thomas’s character is there to give us a particular summons to faith in the divine Christ of the Via Dolorosa (“the way of suffering”, referring to the path from the Stone Pavement to Golgotha). In other words, the purpose of Thomas’s character is less about the general substance of our faith and far more about the particular Object of our faith: the Wounded yet Risen Christ.  

---

We are introduced to Thomas, the one who is called Didymus by John and Doubter by posterity, in John 11, where he immediately betrays one of these given names. Thomas, Jesus, and the rest of the disciples had been driven out of Jerusalem on pain of death because Jesus had claimed, “I and the Father are one.” Certain of the Jews picked up stones and decried him as a blasphemer, “because you, being man, make yourself God” (Jn. 10:30-31). The cat was out of the bag, Jesus claimed to be divine, and at least one of his disciples, it seems, believed him.  

News had come about Lazarus. He was sick. After hearing of his sickness, Jesus surprisingly stayed put for two days and then ordered, “Let us go to Judea again” (Jn. 11:7). The disciples protested. They had left for fear of death, so “Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus has died, and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go.” It is precisely at this point the text introduces Thomas: “Thomas, called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him” (Jn. 11:16).

Thomas’s opening line certainly betrays his popular name. Indeed, he seems to be ahead of his time, willing to die before even seeing Jesus’ power over death, which he will see when he gets to Lazarus’ tomb. The Thomas of John 11 seems to believe something about Jesus that none of the other disciples yet believe, perhaps in his power over death, perhaps even that his alleged claim was actually true: “You, being man, make yourself God” (Jn. 10:31). At any rate, he at least at this juncture acts more consistently with the name given him by John, the twin, not tradition, the doubter. “Let us go, that we may die with him.” He just wants to be like his Brother (#twinning).

After Jesus was crucified, the disciples locked themselves behind closed doors “for fear of the Jews” (Jn. 20:19),  the same reason they had protested going back to Jerusalem in John 11. Well, all but Thomas–in both cases. The Thomas who was ready to die with Jesus in John 11 was the same Thomas ready to die for Jesus in John 20. Apparently, at least, he was still not living in fear of death. He was out there roaming the streets, looking for who knows what.

Three days later, Jesus walked through a locked door, declared, “Peace be with you”, and “showed them his hands and his side.” The Lord revealed to them something specific, something particular he wanted to show them, his hands and his side. They saw him, though perhaps yet not with the clarity and particularity that he had wanted. “They were glad when they saw the Lord” (Jn. 20:19-20).

The others went to Thomas the Twin and told him about seeing the Lord, but Thomas did not care to see something so general as “the Lord.” He wanted to see something specific, something particular. “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe” (Jn. 20:25). Thomas wanted to see precisely what Jesus wanted to show.

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At this point the reader should ask this question: What do wounds actually prove? 

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After hearing this, Thomas joined the other disciples. Eight days later, Jesus again walked through locked doors, declared “Peace…”, approached Thomas, and immediately the text turns to Jesus, who becomes the sole agent of the scene. Thomas is silenced and passive. It is no longer about what Thomas wants to see but what Jesus wants to show, the very thing he wanted to show the other disciples but who failed to focus in on it with the hi-res particularity he displayed: “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” (Jn. 20:27). And, using the finger of Thomas, the Twin, Jesus points deep inside himself in an unprecedented revelation of the heart of God revealed inside his own bosom (cf. Jn. 1:18). Thomas’s response, I believe, should be regarded as nothing less than the precise narrative climax of John’s Gospel. And he will forever remain the only person in the Bible to ever address Jesus with such an explicit, indeed scandalous, combination of divine nouns and possessive pronouns: “My Lord and my God!” (Jn. 20:27).

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The narrative has been moving steadily along since it set out to give readers something to believe in (John 1:12), using the verb for believe 98 times, 60 more than Acts (in a distant second of all New Testament books), and taking the disciples on journey of coming to believe again and again in Jesus as he reveals more and more of who he is (cf. chs. 2; 11; 14; 15; 20), and therefore in retrospect who God is. Indeed, John is not just concerned that the reader believes in the Son of God so much as he is concerned who the Son of God actually is and precisely what it is we believe about him, what it means to believe in him, in a way fitting of Thomas’s finger.

And so at this very moment, the narrative freezes in time.

John, taking his cue from Jesus, halts the story with Thomas the Twin caught red-handed, frozen in this frame forevermore. All that is left to happen in this scene is for a summons to be directed beyond this scene, to enter into this scene, to follow the path pointing into the heart of God. So Jesus addresses Thomas and then the reader, after which John follows suit:

“‘Do you believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ Now Jesus did many things in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (Jn. 20:29-31).

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What does John’s depiction of Thomas tell us about his doubt? And what does John’s Thomas, the Twin, tell us about Jesus? First of all, unique to Thomas is a consistent fearlessness concerning death, both in chapter 11 and in chapter 20. The best explanation for that fearlessness in chapter 11, I believe, is that Thomas believed in the divinity of Jesus, which those who were seeking to kill him accused him of claiming. And if that is the case, chapter 11 should be understood as John’s way of providing a unique vantage point from which to see the Risen Christ in chapter 20. Just as John developed the character of Mary Magdalene, Peter, and the Beloved Disciple throughout his Gospel, so that he could bring them all together in chapter 20 to provide a unique perspective for seeing the Risen Christ, so too Thomas’s character in chapter 11 must be the lens that helps situate us in Thomas’s shoes in chapter 20. In that case, one must consider what the crisis of faith/belief would be for a person (Thomas) who believed that (a) another Human (Jesus) was divine, (b) that this divine human had been killed, and (c) that this dead divine human had been raised from the dead. Following that logic, such a person would in a sense doubt the resurrection of the dead divine human, but likely only because he doubts the death of the divine human.

Indeed, the stumbling block for Thomas was not the resurrected life of Jesus. It was the shameful death of God. If Jesus was already in some sense categorically equal with God in Thomas’s mind, then the idea of his crucifixion and death would by far be more difficult to believe than his resurrection and life. The life of God, the power of God is a given; it is the death of God, the wounds of God, over which the world stumbles. 

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What is the purpose, then, of Thomas’s character? It could be and has been argued that John’s Jesus was a correction to the docetic “phantom” Jesus. And that may or may not be true. But the sustained value of this reading comes to the readers of any and every generation with much greater immediacy than the solution to a religio-historical riddle, because at the existential center of the Christian faith there are two very difficult things to believe that this reading seeks to address. The second most difficult thing to believe is indeed that a man could be raised from the dead. All four Gospels bear witness to the historic fact of the resurrection, thus serving to validate the Messianic, and indeed divine, claims of Jesus’s lordship expressed through the divine power in his triumph over death. Paul makes this connection in the introduction of his letter to the Romans:

“[Christ Jesus] was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 1:3-4). 

But perhaps John’s Gospel, which weaves together the themes of our faith and God’s love far more than the Synoptics, is intended to help us to “read into” this fact of history more deeply and thus see the Object of our faith more clearly.

The appropriate question, then, is How should the reader interpret (1) Thomas’s confession at his apparent moment of belief, (2) Jesus’s response to Thomas’s confession, and (3) the purpose statement from John that immediately follows Jesus’s response?

Traditionally, these three statements have been read as a generic exhortation to believe in the risen Lord without having to see risen Lord. The focus is set on the fact that Thomas believed when he saw Jesus and not what Thomas believed, or what exactly he saw in Jesus, which prompted the breathless and verbless confession of a man just on the other side of speechlessness: “My Lord and my God!” (Jn. 20:28).

Given all the evidence, it seems hardly plausible to me that Thomas’s confession essentially communicates that the empirical proof of Christ’s crucifixion, his wounds, had for him finally effected faith in the resurrection, as though he were simply saying in effect, “Now that I have seen and felt your mortal wounds, I believe that you were healed from your mortal wounds and raised from the dead.” Would not the presence of his Person been enough? If not, would not the walking-through-the-wall miracle have been sufficient evidence for a glorified, risen Lord? Besides, the question bears repeating: What do wounds actually prove? And why was Jesus so intent on revealing them?

If indeed they are the wounds of God, then perhaps Thomas’s confession and the object of Thomas’s belief can best be understood as heard within the chorus of that great Charles Wesley hymn, “And Can It Be”:

‘Tis mystery all: th’Immortal dies.
Who can explore this strange design?
In vain the firstborn seraph tries
To sound the depths of love divine.

…

Amazing love! How can it be
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Amazing love! How can it be
That Thou, My Lord [and my God!], shouldst die for me?

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Indeed, the resurrection of Christ proves God’s power but the death of Christ proves God’s love. John’s Gospel gives readers not simply the nature of the divine Christ. He gives readers the character of the human God. Paul does the same. As he probes more deeply into the meaning of the Christ-event, the his finger begins to move like Thomas’s into the very heart of God: “For God has demonstrated his love for us, in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). 

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The Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio painted this scene with Thomas and Jesus with the title “The Incredulity of Thomas.” In it he uses an an obvious mirroring effect between the characters of Thomas and Jesus by placing a tear in Thomas’s robe that is level with the wound in Jesus’ side, also by Thomas’s grabbing his own side as he places his finger into Jesus’ side. As he stares wide-eyed at Jesus’ wound and his finger in it, Caravaggio depicts two other disciples peering over his shoulder to see what Thomas sees.

Caravaggio was not only right to immortalize this moment in salvation history, in perhaps the single most important snapshot God has given the world of both his infinite power and infinite love, but he is also right to capture Thomas leading the way for the other disciples and readers of all ages to quite dramatically get a glimpse into the heart of God, that is, to see what could have only been shown by the One who was close to the Father’s heart (cf. Jn. 1:18). So as he buries his hand into the Scarred but Risen Lord, Caravaggio captures Thomas grabbing his own side in pain, suggesting that in the wounds of Christ he discovers his own wounds, or rather than in his own wounds he discovers his truly loving Lord. Indeed, he discovers that “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).

Perhaps the reader should not be so confused by Thomas’s first words: “Let us go, that we may die with him” (Jn. 11:16). For those words had been spoken once before, yes, even before the foundation of the world. They had been spoken by the One who proved to become Thomas’s Twin, indeed, the Twin of us all, the One who left his throne in heaven, saying to the divine council, “Let us go, that we may die with them.” And so he did. And so we live. 

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We need to get Thomas’s name right. He is not The Doubter. He is The Twin. He is Didymus. Because if we fail to see that Thomas is the Twin, we may fail to see who his Brother is, and therefore just who our Brother, and therefore our Father, is as well.

“Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (Jn. 20:17; cf. Jn. 1:12).

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1. John’s unique concern with the quality of our trusting or believing in Christ is demonstrated by a simple word count of the verbal form of the faith (pisteuo) in the Fourth Gospel over against the rest of the books of the Bible. Of all the books in the Greek New Testament and the LXX, only five books use the word pisteuo 10 or more times: Matthew 10x, Mark 16x, Romans 20x, Acts 38x, and John 98x. Furthermore, John’s Gospel is bracketed within two “purpose statements” of Jesus’ mission in the Gospel (1:12) and John’s mission and writing it (20:31) that ultimately reduce to eliciting faith in the hearer/reader of the Gospel. So between 1:12 and 20:31 John, I believe, is concerned to bring into clear focus precisely what is the Object of Christian pisteuo.

[Seated for breakfast at my grandfather’s table in Trinity, NC.]

Barney: “Have you seen my shoes? I need to put them on before I go home.”
Me: “You are home, Granddaddy.”
Barney: “No I’m not. This is just where I’m staying until I go.”
Me: “But…I understand.”

My grandfather was a minister for 64 years. He began showing signs of dementia many years ago. Since my grandmother passed, his mind has been slipping more rapidly into the void. Watching his decline I have learned that the world of humanity consists in memories. I’ve also learned that memories are married to names. When one is lost, so the other, and whatever piece of the world went with them.

Of all the names that have fallen into that inglorious abyss, which includes mine, it was saddest to see my grandmother’s go. Never again will I get to hear the story about the first time he saw her, standing on a sidewalk in a white dress: “She looked like an angel.” Never again will I get to see her memory become wet in his grieving eyes only to be consoled back into laughter by yet another moment shared still in his mind. She was always visible as a glow in his face, even under the hanging weight of his grief. But now there is neither glow nor grief. That part of his world and that part of his face are gone. And I expect that if he could choose, he would welcome endless waves of that dark ocean of grief if only he could salvage that glowing memory of his of his beloved angel. But she is lost to him.

But she is not lost, and she is not lost to him forever. Because the one Name that still puts color in his face and fills his mouth like lead is the Name of the One whose hands joined them together. And His grieving hands are as stubborn as nails that refuse to let go of the dead. So my grandfather may not have my grandmother’s hand anymore to hold, but he still daily folds his hands in prayer—and he has never forgotten in whose Name his prayers are made. That world still belongs wholly to him, and he wholly to it.

So perhaps in this way, he has forgotten nothing. For those who remember where they are going, not even a single drop of the past will be lost.

~Dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, which has helped untold generations of wonderers remember just where they are going.