An Homily for Thomas Sunday, the Second Sunday of Pascha, 7534/2026, from St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.
Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!
In Orthodoxy, we call the Apostle Thomas Believing Thomas and not Doubting Thomas as in Catholicism, because his experience strengthened his faith, and was a Gospel example to strengthen us.
Let us hear our founding First Hierarch, Metropolitan Khrapovitsky, comment on this day.
He noted (https://orthochristian.com/53064.html):
“One can say that everyone rejoices when they hear the troparion of the Resurrection. But they sometimes grow bored when it is sung often. This hymn, however, should be endlessly joyful to people: its continual repetition about the victory over death and the devil should be an infinite source of consolation. Therefore, if this joy soon passes, it passes because one’s faith is not so living and strong. People find it difficult to believe because their souls do not especially love this victory.
“They say: Thomas, who had been previously ready to die for Christ, also did not believe. No, Thomas asked for assurances not because he did not believe, but because he desired an untroubled faith, for he longed for the resurrection and understood its significance. Before their entry into Jerusalem, having learned that there would not be any external success but, to the contrary, that the Savior awaited suffering, the disciples thought that the same death awaited them as a reward for following Him. They were overcome by horror and fear, and then Thomas said: Let us go that we might die with Him [Jn 11:16]. Thomas had a loyal heart. How many of them were troubled when they learned that there was not, and would not be, any external success!
“When [the Lord] was to them a great miracle worker, healing them and giving them bread, they believed; but when they learned that He was ready to accept and bear the great deed [podvig] of patience and suffering for the sake of their spiritual benefit – then they all ran away, their faith weakened and, if their conscience rebuked them, they easily found an excuse in themselves: we trusted that it had been He [Lk 24:21].
“People say: if we had seen Him we would not have denied Him. This is not true: the majority of those who denied Him had seen Him, and they denied Him because they did not love spiritual values, and the victory over the devil spoke but little to their hearts; they desired external success.
“Cases of full denial are not many. Normally a remnant of faith remains, and this half-acknowledgment and half-faith is perhaps even worse, and such half-believers are in the majority. If they were to be excluded from so-called believing society we would see that there are but few true worshippers. Church and cross, unity in Christ, unity in the name of the feat [podvig] of love – there is the outline of our relationship towards the Lord. But half-believers do not strive to understand either one or the other–unity or Christ’s love–in the way that Christians understand it.
“Half-faith has many degrees, but one thing inevitably follows from all half-belief. Those who deny know both what they have denied and to what to return. But the half-believer does not have any such clarity and grows accustomed to a life guided by sophistries, half-truth, and hints at some sort of supposed truth.”
So Metropolitan Antony of blessed memory tells us for Thomas Sunday.
Friends, in the warm embrace of our Lord and His Body the Church in this Pascha season, let us not live in the shadowlands of half-belief. For that is where so many of our countrymen live. They of course have more excuse than I do as an unworthy Orthodox priest. They come from heterodox backgrounds. But the decline of the so-called seven sisters of Protestantism, for example, the mainline denominations of America, marks the slipping away further into heterodox half-belief, non-denominational and no-denominational, watering down or leaving even further Scriptural tradition and practice. This is true also of too many Orthodox Christians. For we live in a land dominated by what William James called the goddess success, and like the great Whore of Babylon of Revelation, from that idol the mark of the beast lies heavy on those who worship career, success, and comfort, and who place idolatries of self before love of unity in Christ and Christ’s love for us as the real source of our being.
Such a shadow life of worldly careerism of various types is what Dostoevsky’s novels warn against, a luke-warmedness of belief, by which, as the Book of Revelation warns, God will spit the luke-warmed out of his mouth. For to live a lie is to succumb to the devil. The great Orthodox writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn said we must learn to live without lies about ourselves and about others. For if we lie about ourselves and others, as Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima, based on St. Ambrose of Optina, says, we cannot truly love. For the devil is the liar and the father of lies. In modern speech, the lies our Lord warns about as satanic are the virtual realities with which we become entangled today under demonic influence.
Do we believe more in our electronic devices than in the Lord Jesus Christ? Let us set aside all idols and lies in this Pascha time, and redouble our devotion to the Risen Lord, following the example of the faithful Thomas, who touched him, to dispel all heresies of Gnosticism and the spirit of Anti-Christ, which would make Christianity into only a phantom, a bodiless half belief, rather than the embodied experience of life our Lord gives us at Pascha and every Day of Resurrection year-round.
Today is also called the Antipascha. It means in place of Pascha. It is a good reprise of Pascha. St John Chrysostom tells us in his famous Pascha Matins homily that those who arrive at the 11th hour are as welcome as those who arrived at the first. Even those of us who missed Pascha or may not have fully opened to Pascha during Bright Week now have this second Sunday of Pascha, the Antipascha. It has none of the negatives of the similarly formed word Antichrist, for in being in place of Pascha, it reinforces Pascha, it offers no deception. And the Gospel reading today presents this.
For Thomas, born a fisherman, touched the Lord and proclaimed “My Lord and my God” unto the ages and to many lands. As St. John Chrysostom put it, “Thomas, being once weaker in faith than the other apostles, toiled through the grace of God more bravely, more zealously and tirelessly than them all, so that he went preaching over nearly all the earth, not fearing to proclaim the Word of God to save nations.” According to tradition, after founding Orthodox churches in Palestine, Mesopotomia, Parthia, Ethiopia, and baptizing the Magi or Wise Men of the Nativity, he ended his evangelism career a martyr in India.
In Greek, the inscription on his icons reads, “The Touching of Thomas,” and in Slavonic, “The Belief of Thomas.” For in Orthodoxy, the uncreated grace of God reached him from his touch and transformed him, unlike the Western heterodox view that underestimates God’s grace and falsely made him into doubting Thomas. Earlier, before the raising of Lazarus, Holy Apostle Thomas expressed a desire to die with the Lord, when other disciples feared the Pharisees would try to kill Jesus if they re-entered Judea. But his touching of Jesus, which we remember today, for all time showed the lie of Gnosticism and the falsity of denying that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh and been resurrected bodily. For this is the lie that Scripture identifies with the spirit of anti-Christ and it is the lie of all half-believers of our age, including those Orthodox half-asleep and drifting into ecumenism of the anti-Christ. All of us are in danger of doing so in our culture today.
Agape Vespers last Sunday also put forth the account of Believing Thomas, on the joyful afternoon of the first Pascha Sunday. It is no coincidence that that is a time of acknowledging the resurrection of Jesus Christ bodily, a believing touch that is so Orthodox, while we also engage in the Agape of unity of love with him and one another, emptying ourselves in Him and in Him losing our sinful self-assertion in loving each other more than ourself, following His New Commandment. This is part of proclaiming the Risen Christ. While our Lord told Mary Magdalene not to touch Him because He would be Ascending, He allowed Thomas to do so for a special teaching purpose for us.
Adapting the words of an old hymn, we Orthodox Christians in American can pray that unworthily the Lord may help us to follow the Believing Thomas: “Amazing uncreated grace, how sweet the energy, that touches a wretch like me.” For Jesus Christ, the light of the world, sets alight the Paschal candles we all carry into the world. For as he commanded us, “ye are the light of the world, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
Like believing Thomas let us today touch the Risen Lord in His Body the Church and in His Eucharist, His Body and Blood, and fall back full of that uncreated light, saying “My Lord and my God,” going forth in the joy of the Resurrection in body and soul this Pascha season, to help our families and neighbors and America find salvation in our Lord’s Orthodox Church!
Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!
***
The Reading from the
Holy Gospel according to John,
§ 65 [20:19-31]
The same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in their midst and said unto them, ‘Peace be unto you.’ And when He had so said, He showed unto them His hands and His side. Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord. Then said Jesus to them again, ‘Peace be unto you. As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.’ And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said unto them, ‘Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosoever sins ye retain, they are retained.’ But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples therefore said unto him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said unto them, ‘Unless I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe.’ And after eight days the disciples were again within, and Thomas was with them. Then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in their midst and said, ‘Peace be unto you.’ Then said He to Thomas, ‘Reach hither thy finger and behold My hands, and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into My side: and be not faithless, but believing.’ And Thomas answered and said unto Him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said unto him, ‘Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.’ And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, ye might have life through His name.