From Doubt to Knowledge: St. Thomas and the Path of Faith
In this sermon for the Sunday of St. Thomas, Sub Dn. Timothy Grace explores the spiritual journey from crippling doubt to unshakable faith — and ultimately to the knowledge of God. Drawing on the Church Fathers, including St. Gregory the Great, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Cyril of Alexandria, he shows how doubt, surrendered to Christ, becomes the foundation for transforming faith. A message for all who struggle with uncertainty on the journey toward God.
Transcript
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Christ is risen!
Today we see the trajectory the disciples follow — from our Gospel reading all the way through to the Epistle. From crippling doubt to unshakable faith; from cowering in the upper room to proclaiming Christ and working miracles in his name. In a short space of time, a great transformation has been wrought. Let us see what we can gather from both readings today.
We begin with St. Thomas, also called the Twin, or Didymus in the Greek. He is in a place of doubt. To be fair, all the disciples doubted when the women came and announced their testimony. And even after Jesus had spent forty days after his resurrection — as we read in Matthew's Gospel — when he was about to ascend, the text tells us that even then some were still doubting.
The Scriptures make clear that this kind of doubt can be very damaging. The Apostle James writes in his letter, chapter one, verses five through eight: "If anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives generously to all and without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting. For the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. That person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord. He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways."
Yet in our Church, we do not dwell long on the doubt of St. Thomas and the other apostles. The Patristic commentators choose to emphasise other things — for example, their extreme grief at Christ's death, and their inability to believe that their Master had actually risen. But the Fathers also draw out more beneficial things that arose precisely because of this response.
St. Gregory the Great, commenting on this text, says: "Do you really believe that it was by chance that this chosen disciple was absent? Then came and heard, heard and doubted, doubted and touched, touched and believed? It was not by chance. In God's providence, in a marvellous way, God's mercy arranged that the disbelieving disciple, in touching the wounds of his master's body, should heal our wounds of disbelief. The disbelief of Thomas has done more for our faith than the faith of the other disciples. As he touches Christ and is won over to believe, every doubt is cast aside and our faith is strengthened."
The disciple who doubted, and then felt Christ's wounds, becomes a witness to the reality of the resurrection. This encounter with Christ leads St. Thomas to give one of the clearest declarations of Christ's divinity in the entire New Testament: "My Lord and my God." St. Gregory relates that this was for our benefit — and also for the combating of later heresies like Docetism, which claimed that Jesus did not truly have a human body. The fact that St. Thomas physically handled the wounds of Christ's risen body gave the Church Fathers firm ground to stand on in defence of the Incarnation.
St. John Chrysostom moreover says that St. Thomas, later in his life, "toiled through the grace of God more bravely, more zealously and tirelessly than them all" — going and preaching over nearly all the known earth, not fearing to proclaim the word of God to other nations. According to our tradition, he founded churches in Ethiopia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Parthia, India, and Sri Lanka. His doubt became, as it were, a motivator and a generator for great faith.
This is a repeated theme in the New Testament. Jesus said of the woman who washed his feet that her many sins had been forgiven — and that is why she loved much. But the one who is forgiven little loves little. Saints like St. Symeon the New Theologian and St. Mary of Egypt used their sinful past as a means to excel greatly in virtue. It is almost as though, to the extent the devil had taken from them, to that very extent they were able to strive and excel in the virtuous life and in the life of the Holy Trinity.
You too may be stuck in a place of doubt, fear, despair, depression, or anxiety — or hopelessly entangled in one sin or another. You can use these things as ammunition. Give flesh to your prayer through them. Use them as grist for the mill of heartfelt brokenness at the foot of the cross. A skyscraper has foundations hundreds of metres deep — those foundations must be dug first before the building can rise. St. Thomas was sunk in doubt, but he rose to great heights, travelling further than the others. We too may have to hit rock bottom. But from that place, by God's grace, we can rise to great heights.
St. Thomas, however, first had to take action. He had to reach out and touch. This shows us that there are concrete things we can do to meet Christ in our places of doubt — not merely sitting back in scepticism and waiting to be convinced, but taking clear and practical steps. Christ, in fact, consistently ignored the demands of those who insisted he prove himself to them. Let us not forget that the one who asked Christ to prove his lordship by performing signs was the devil himself.
St. Cyril of Alexandria gives us one way we can touch Christ. Commenting on this text, he says: "To adopt the language of allegory, we indeed close the doors — and he speaks here of the doors of the church — but yet Christ visits us and appears to us all, both invisibly as God and also visibly in the body. He suffers us to touch his holy flesh and gives us thereof. For through the grace of God we are admitted to partake of the blessed Eucharist, receiving Christ into our hands, to the intent that we may firmly believe that he did in truth raise up the temple of his body. Participation in the divine mysteries, in addition to filling us with divine blessedness, is a true confession and memorial of Christ dying and rising again for us. Let us therefore, after touching Christ's body, shrink back from unbelief in him as utter ruin, and rather be found well-grounded in the full assurance of faith."
Just as St. Thomas was able to touch the actual risen body of Christ, so can we touch the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. We can say something similar about all the services of the Church — about prayer, about reading the Bible, and especially about the sacraments: they are all ways in which we can touch Christ and increase our faith.
We also see in the text that it is Christ's wounds that bring the assurance of faith. Suffering, then, becomes a place where we can encounter Christ in a hidden way — both in our own suffering, especially when we bear it in a Christ-like manner, with nobility and patient acceptance, and also in the suffering of others, when we reach out to them in love. St. John Chrysostom says: "If you cannot see Christ in the beggar at the door, neither will you find him in the chalice."
We see the disciples continuing to extend this touch to others. They are touching the sick in God's name, and the sick in turn are reaching out — we even read of St. Peter that people sought that his very shadow might fall upon them and bring healing.
The French novelist Dominique Lapierre, author of The City of Joy, once visited Mother Teresa in Kolkata. He approached her as she was feeding a man who was scarcely alive. Rather than stopping what she was doing, she simply passed him the bowl and asked him to continue feeding the man as she moved on to another. When she returned to grant him the interview, Lapierre acknowledged that at the moment she handed him that bowl, as he began to feed that suffering man and witnessed the selfless love of Mother Teresa, he could recognise both the suffering and the risen Christ all at once in that action.
So if you are in a place of doubt, do not sit and think about it rationally and abstractly. Take concrete action. Attend more services. Try giving of yourself selflessly to another, reaching out to them in Christ's name.
Ultimately, we want to come to a place where even faith gives way to something greater. The saints reached a place where they were not merely living by faith, not merely hoping — but had arrived at unshakable knowledge. We ourselves are slowly piecing together this knowledge of God. St. Paul makes clear what God desires for us in Ephesians 4:13: "That we may all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes."
The Russian priest Father Alexander Elchaninov speaks to this beautifully in his Diary of a Russian Priest: "There have been many partial contacts — in certain rare instances of love expressed in entire self-denial, sometimes in prayer, especially during the holy service — you feel that you come out of yourself, that something which is not you has entered into you. In many situations which cannot be explained except in terms of God's manifest help: this is faith no longer — it is knowledge; precise and comprehensible signals from the other world. All the rest is faith, assisted by the love of God."
God wants to bring us also from doubt, to faith, to knowledge. Perhaps we felt partial moments of this certainty during Great Lent, and since Bright Week has come in and we have relaxed somewhat, we have sensed those things beginning to fade. Let us hold on to what we gained in the fast and use it to carry us forward.
As Father Alexander says: "Faith is an act of love which chooses freely. To expect proof of God's existence is to refuse to accomplish the heroic feat of faith."
Let us demolish our doubt through specific acts of love to God — in the form of prayer and ascetic practice — and through concrete acts of love to others, in the form of service and sacrifice. Let us touch Christ in this way, and have the eyes of our hearts opened. Let us allow God to reverse the narrative of our lives, to propel us beyond what our sins and ailments would otherwise tell us about ourselves. And may God grant us himself, to elevate our faith to knowledge by the Holy Spirit — whose power we look forward to receiving on the coming feast of Pentecost.
Christ is risen! Truly he is risen!
