Here is something a wrote some time ago, reflecting on the meeting of the Risen Lord and Thomas and the “hand” and “side” incident.
Here is something that I wrote a while back. Since today in the Vetus Ordo calendar is the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, I figured that it might be good to share for those who haven’t seen it.
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Christ showed [the Apostles in the locked room] His hands and feet and side, to demonstrate that He had a real body and that it was also is His Body. He didn’t pick up some unwounded, perfect Body that He was now inhabiting. We are our bodies, as we are our rites. The fact that the wounds remained in His Body’s hands, feet and side provided continuity with His Body before and during His Passion. He isn’t a mere shade of the Lord. Nor has he exchanged Himself for an unwounded version. In this way Christ began to show them the traits of the risen Body, traits which we, too, will share in the Resurrection: clarity (reflecting God’s glory), impassibility (incapable of suffering), agility (ease and speed of movement), subtlety (unhindered by barriers).
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We don’t know why Thomas wasn’t with the other ten Apostles in the room for that first appearance of the Lord. I like to imagine that it was his turn to get the “take out” for the rest of them.
Thomas, who had doubted, put his trust in the Lord at this point. In fact, he literally handed his trust to Him where the point of the lance had left its mark on the Lord’s glorious Risen Body, a wound from a Roman lance large enough to insert his hand. The Lord told Thomas to “thrust” (Greek bále) his hand “eis ten pleurán… into (His) side”. If we want to be picky, we might note that the Greek word “cheír”, insofar as our anatomy is concerned, can mean “hand”, but it can also mean “finger” or “hand and arm”, the later so much so that in some contexts additional words are added to denote “hand” as distinct from the arm (cf. Liddell-Scott-Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon aka LSJ – “χείρ , ἡ”).
This is significant for depictions in art, as in the famous painting by Caravaggio, wherein Thomas puts his finger into Christ’s side and peers into it, which smacks of the spirituality of St. Bonaventure who wrote about how Thomas the Apostle looked through the Lord’s visible wounds and saw His invisible wound of love. It also affects depictions of the crucifixion of the Lord and of His risen Body, with the holes of the nails in the hands. Some maintain that Christ would have been crucified with nails through the wrists so that the ulna and radius bones would sustain His Body’s weight rather than tearing through the flesh of His hands.
Christ tells Thomas to explore with his finger (dáktylos) the spike holes of His “hands/wrists”, which would be more or less the size of a large finger. However, he tells Thomas to use his hand for the wound in His side. The Greek suggests to me that the Lord instructed Thomas to push, thrust His hand into the wound channel left by the Roman lance, which had gone so far as to lacerate the Lord’s Sacred Heart.
We don’t have in the Gospel account of this stunning moment, to which John was eyewitness, a precise statement by John that Thomas physically did it. All it says is that Thomas responded, “My Lord and my God!” Christ responded with a “beatitude” (v. 29): “Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
Was Thomas so overwhelmed that He could not touch the Lord in that way? All He could utter was that amazing witness to belief in the divinity of Christ? The clearest and most exultant of any in the Gospels?
Christ refers to Thomas seeing Him, but He did not say, “because you have touched me”. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if the Risen Christ tells you to do something, you do it. Furthermore, John immediately concludes this chapter with something so definitive that it feels like the end of the whole work (vv. 30-31):
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.
There follows chapter 21 and the account of the reconciliation of Peter at the Sea of Galilee. We moderns count that as chapter 21. Remember, the Gospels were not written with chapters and verses and not even word breaks. Those were imposed centuries later. Yet, one has the sense that what happened between Christ and Thomas was so amazing that John penned something like a conclusion to his Gospel after Thomas’s cry of faith, arguably the climax of John’s account.
Given the various meanings of “hand” in Greek, and that word “thrust”, and the fact that the wound from the lance remained, therefore remained all the way to His Heart, perhaps Our Lord required Thomas not merely to touch His side but even to feel the breath, the ruach, in His torn lung. Did Thomas, while feeling the ruach on his wrist, touch with his hand the physical, risen, subtle, impassible, agile, blazing bright Heart of Jesus?
By the way, in art, statues and painting, the Apostles are usually depicted with the instruments of their martyrdom. St. Thomas is often depicted with a lance.
On this Sunday we emphasize the mercy of God and the institution of the Sacrament of Penance, perhaps the greatest encounter we have with incarnate Mercy, Holy Communion notwithstanding.
Christ told Thomas to do what He did before witnesses so that they too would understand about the traits of His risen Body and that it was truly His own. Knowing full well that we would one day read this, He inspired the disciple He most loved to write his Gospel account, an account that connects Thomas to the inspiration of the Spirit and the mercy of Christ’s Heart in a way that other Apostles didn’t experience on that first Easter evening appearance.
When we go to confession, we enter into Mercy in order to be breathed upon by the Spirit and to feel the beating, living, healing, Heart of Love.
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Beautiful and breath-taking
Relevant Extracts from Butler, concerning St. Thomas’ martyrdom:
“Origen informs us, that in the distribution made by the twelve, Parthia was particularly assigned to him for his apostolic province, when this nation held the place of the Persian empire, and disputed the sovereignty with the Romans. After preaching with good success in the particular province of Parthia, he did the same in other nations subject to that empire, and over all the East. Sophronius mentions, that by his apostolic labors he established the faith among the Medes, Persians, Carmanians, Hyrcanians, Bactrians, and other nations in those parts. Modern Greeks mention also the Indians and Ethiopians; but these appellations were sometimes given by the ancients to all eastern nations. The modern Indians and Portuguese tell us, that St. Thomas preached to the Brahmins, and to the Indians beyond the great island Taprobana, which some take to be Ceylon, others Sumatra. They add, that he suffered martyrdom at Meliapor, or St. Thomas’s, in the peninsula on this side the Ganges, on the coast of Coromandel, where his body was discovered, with certain marks that he was slain with lances; and that such was the manner of his death is the tradition of all the eastern countries.”
There are a set of spurius Acts, which probably describe real though embellished events.
“Many distant churches in the East ascribe their first foundation to St. Thomas, especially that of Meliapor; but many of them probably received the faith only from his disciples. The use of the Chaldean language in the churches, and the dependence on the patriarch of Mosul, which the church of Meliapor, and all the Christians of St. Thomas in the East profess, seem to show that their first teachers came from the churches of Assyria; in which the patriarchs of Mosul (a city built upon the ruins of Seleucia, erroneously called Babylon) exercise a jurisdiction, and have been for many ages the propagators of the Nestorian heresy, with which they are tinctured. The Portuguese, when they came into the East-Indies, found there the St. Thomas-Christians, it is said, to the number of fifteen thousand families, on the coast of Malabar. For a detail of the Nestorian phrases, and other errors, abuses, and superstitions which prevail among them, see the synod held at Diamper, in the kingdom of Cochin, in 1599, by Alexius de Menezes, archbishop of Goa; in the preface it is shown, that these Christians were drawn into Nestorianism only in the ninth century, by means of certain Nestorian priests who came thither from Armenia and Persia. On two festivals which they keep in honor of St. Thomas, they resort in great crowds to the place of his burial; on Low-Sunday, in honor of his confession of Christ, which gospel is then read, and chiefly on the 1st of July, his principal feast in the churches of the Indies. John III., king of Portugal, ordered the body of St. Thomas to be sought for in an old ruinous chapel which stood over his tomb without the walls of Meliapor. By digging there in 1523, a very deep vault in form of a chapel was discovered in which were found the bones of the saint, with a part of the lance with which he was slain, and a vial tinged with his blood. The body of the apostle was put in a chest of porcelain, varnished and adorned with silver. The bones of the prince whom he had baptized, and some others of his disciples, which were discovered in the same vault, were laid in another less precious chest. The Portuguese built a new town about this church, which is called St. Thomas’s, inhabited by Christians of several denominations, and situate hard by Meliapor, which is inhabited by the Indians. “
Two things in Caravaggio’s painting – beyond the gruesome probing – always stick with me. First, Christ holds St. Thomas’ wrist as if forcing his hand forward, as if the conversation may have included “No really, TOUCH it” –> St. Thomas said he couldn’t believe until he had touched it, so Christ is doing whatever it takes to enable him to believe.
Second, Christ also seems to have a hint of a smirk, or a twinkle in the eye. I imagine the conversation also included a bit of sarcasm along the lines of ” ‘Did it HURT?’? What do you think?”, in the rough-and-tumble way that men can be with their good friends. Even in His glorified form, He is truly alive, and still is Thomas’ very close and fully human/fully divine friend. The same one who grills fish on the shore for breakfast.