st thomas

We All Need Doubt: Sermon Preached on 12th April 2026 (Second Sunday of Easter)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

1 Peter 1. 3-9; John 20. 19-31

“Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.’”

A dimly lit scene showing four men in close proximity, their faces and hands dramatically illuminated against a dark background. One man, bare-chested with his robe pulled aside to reveal a wound in his right side, guides the hand of a second man whose index finger is extended and appears to be probing the wound. The second man leans forward intently, his face close to the wound, brow furrowed in concentration. Two further men press in from behind, peering over the shoulders of the first two, their expressions conveying intense curiosity. The lighting falls sharply from the upper left, casting deep shadows and emphasising the physical, tactile nature of the moment. The figures fill the picture space almost entirely, with very little background visible.
Caravaggio, The Incredulity of St Thomas (1602). Hangs in the Sanssouci Picture Gallery, Potsdam.

Do you blame Thomas for doubting that his friends had really seen Jesus risen from the dead? I don’t know about you, but if any of my friends want me to believe something that seems pretty far-fetched, I expect them to have some actual evidence for me, ideally hard physical evidence. If they can’t supply that, I’d expect there to be some evidence that whatever far-fetched thing they wanted me to believe had had some impact on them.

Now, the idea of one of your mates not only rising from the dead, but walking through walls and appearing in a locked room, is about as far-fetched as it gets. So the fact that the apostles were still hiding in the upper room, full of fear, would have left me pretty unconvinced too. He gets dismissed as “Doubting Thomas” when he is only engaging in the sort of healthy scepticism we should all practice at times.

And, actually, when we think about it, is it always a bad thing to be a doubter? All groups of people need different temperaments and personalities. An organisation or institution without doubters is going to see all sorts of poor practices, dishonesty and abuse going on, unchallenged and perpetuated. The term for a church without doubters is a cult. I wouldn’t be without the doubters in the various churches I’ve worked and worshipped in over the years. Of course, an organisation with too many doubters is also an unhealthy place, and is probably in the process of losing faith in itself – indeed, something very much like that happened to the Church in the latter part of the 20th Century. There is, I think, a natural ecology to these things.

What Thomas wanted was some hard physical evidence that Jesus had risen from the dead – and he got it. Christianity is a very physical faith. We’ll see that in a few minutes’ time, when we baptise little Ivan: the water is essential for baptism. There is no valid baptism without it. We couldn’t baptise for periods during the worst of Covid because we weren’t allowed to be physically present together. It wouldn’t have been valid to pretend to baptise someone down a Zoom link. For the same reason, we also couldn’t carry out ordinations during Covid – the bishop actually needs to lay hands on the person they are ordaining, in a link of physical touch that goes all the way back to Thomas and the other apostles. As a result of that, my ordination as a deacon was delayed by three months, which seemed like a big deal at the time.

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A Vision for the Appointed Time: Sermon Preached at St John’s, Devizes, Sunday 3rd July 2022 (Feast of St Thomas)

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Readings – Habbakuk 2: 1–4; John 20: 24–29

“…there is a vision for the appointed time.”

It hasn’t been much of a summer, has it? Even by Wimbledon fortnight standards, we have had a depressingly heavy dose of rain. We are promised rather better for the next fortnight, and the wet start to the summer means we shall appreciate it all the more if we are indeed blessed with a fine spell in the next few weeks, when the days are still at their longest.

A carpet of flowers in the Namaqualand desert around a water-pumping mill.
The desert blooms briefly in South Africa’s Namaqualand region as winter ends. © Gerry Lynch 27 August 2011

On the other side of the world it isn’t high summer, but the depths of winter. In August, when winter starts to give way to springtime, something remarkable happens in the deserts that straddle the border between South Africa and Namibia. Normally almost completely barren, for a few weeks the desert blooms with carpets of flowers, sometimes stretching for miles in brilliant purples, oranges, and bright yellows, all giving off the most wonderful perfume. It is as if heaven has suddenly broken into the mundane world.

The same thing happens in a few other spots around the world as winter ends, where a desert approaches a western ocean coast and the rainfall patterns are favourable – in parts of Chile and California and Western Australia. The barren desert blooms with billions of wild flowers, and it comes and goes in a few weeks, and then the barrenness returns.

There is a vision for the appointed time… wait for it.

This is one of the more pessimistic times any of us have lived through. The desert has plenty of charms and compensations compared with the barren dryness of our culture and our political discourse.

It is not, despite all that, a time that quite matches the mood of hysterical doom-mongering that dominates our media reporting and especially our online discussions. I remember the 1980s, which were at least as politically divided as the current era, and also a time which in this country and generally in Western Europe was marked by much more politically-motivated violence than today, both in terms of terrorism and of street fighting. Most of it is now forgotten. The threat of war with Russia was quite a bit more intense then, with TV shows like Threads depicting the likely consequences of a nuclear war for ordinary people in grizzly detail. We also had a thousand miles of fortifications through the middle of Europe with easterners routinely shot dead by their own governments for trying to cross them. I am not going to join the panic-mongers just yet about our own situation, even if the United States seems to be in the grip of collective insanity.

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