The story of Thomas, “Doubting Thomas” as he is often called, is very familiar (Jn 20:19-31). We hear it every year on this Sunday just after Easter. But after so many years I noticed something I had never seen before. Jesus appears to all the disciples, except Thomas, and breathes on them and they receive the Holy Spirit. The following week when Thomas is with them Jesus appears again and Thomas experiences the reality of the risen Lord. Jesus doesn’t berate Thomas for his uncertainty, or call him out for missing the previous meeting. But also there is no mention of Thomas receiving the Holy Spirit as the others had previously done.
So is Thomas left in some different state from the other Apostles? That seems highly unlikely. What is more likely is that this story illustrates how our experiences with the risen Lord don’t follow some preset formula. Each encounter is unique.
We have a natural desire to want to systematize things. Philosophers and theologians suffer from this predilection to an extreme degree – after all, that is their business. But one thing that Scripture makes clear to us is that God doesn’t take well to fitting into our systems and categories. We can’t know how Thomas’ experience of Jesus and the Spirit evolved. We do know that baptism and receiving the Spirit were connected in the early church, but the order in which they were experienced varied, and even the Apostles didn’t always understand what was going on.
As the church matured, this level of heterogeneity, not to say inconsistency, was reduced. In both medieval times and following the Reformation, the Church tended to emphasize consistency, often described as “orthodoxy”, as a primary, if not the overarching, goal. It’s worth reminding ourselves that this is a human need, not a divine one. The story of Thomas, along with so many others, shows that Jesus takes us as he finds us. He doesn’t insist on prerequisites, he doesn’t follow established principles, he breaks laws as he sees fit, and he castigates people who insist that the most important thing is to follow the rules (whatever they imagine those may be).
Doubting Thomas was no less an Apostle than all the others. We are no less Saints than all the others. Jesus takes us as he finds us. That is what he died and rose to show us. And we can thank Thomas for playing his part in the demonstration.