What a strange week that must have been between the two Sundays--that
of the Resurrection and the next! Surely it would have been kinder if
the Christ had not left the disciples, with their new-found, tremulous,
raw conviction. It would have been less kind if He had been with them,
for there is nothing that is worse for the solidity of a man's
spiritual development than that it should be precipitated, and new
thoughts must have time to take the shape of the mind into which they
come, and to mould the shape of the mind into which they come. So they
were left to quiet reflection, to meditation, to adjust their thoughts,
to get to understand the bearings of the transcendent fact. And as a
mother will go a little way off from her little child, in order to
encourage it to try to walk, they were left alone to make experiments
of that self-reliance which was also reliance on Him, and which was to
be their future and their permanent condition. So the week passed, and
they became steadier and quieter, and began to be familiar with the
thought, and to see some glimpses of what was involved in the mighty
fact, of a risen Saviour. Then He comes back again, and when He comes
He singles out the unbeliever, leaving the others alone for the moment,
and He gives him back, granted, his arrogant conditions. How much
ashamed of them Thomas must have been when he heard them quoted by the
Lord's own lips! How different they would sound from what they had
sounded when, in the self-sufficiency of his obstinate determination,
he had blurted them out in answer to his brethren's testimony! There is
no surer way of making a good man ashamed of his wild words than just
to say them over again to him when he is calm and cool. Christ's
granting the request was Christ's sharpest rebuke of the request. But
there was not only the gracious and yet chastising granting of the
foolish desire, but there was a penetrating warning: 'Be not faithless,
but believing.' What did that mean? Well, it meant this: 'It is not a
question of evidence, Thomas; it is a question of disposition. Your
incredulity is not due to your not having enough to warrant your
belief, but to your tendency and attitude of mind and heart.' There is
light enough in the sun; it is our eyes that are wrong, and deep below
most questions, even of intellectual credence, lies the disposition of
the man. The ultimate truths of religion cannot be matters of
demonstration any more than the fundamental truths of any science can
be proved; any more than Euclid's axioms can be demonstrated; any more
than the sense of beauty or the ear for music depend on the
understanding. 'Be not faithless, but believing.' The eye that is sound
will see the light.
And there is another lesson here. The words of our Lord, literally
rendered, are, 'become not faithless, but believing.' There are two
tendencies at work with us, and the one or the other will progressively
lay hold upon us, and we shall increasingly yield to it. You can
cultivate the habit of incredulity until you descend into the class of
the faithless; or you can cultivate the opposite habit and disposition
until you rise to the high level of a settled and sovereign belief.
It is clear that Thomas did not reach forth his hand and touch. The
rush of instantaneous conviction swept him along and bore him far away
from the state of mind which had asked for such evidence. Our Lord's
words must have pierced his heart, as he thought: 'Then He was here all
the while; He heard my wild words; He loves me still.' As Nathanael,
when he knew that Jesus had seen him under the fig-tree, broke out with
the exclamation, 'Rabbi! Thou art the Son of God,' so Thomas, smitten
as by a lightning flash with the sense of Jesus' all-embracing
knowledge and all-forgiving love, forgets his incredulity and breaks
into the rapturous confession, the highest ever spoken while He was on
earth: 'My Lord and my God!' So swiftly did his whole attitude change.
It was as when the eddying volumes of smoke in some great conflagration
break into sudden flame, the ruddier and hotter, the blacker they were.
Sight may have made Thomas believe that Jesus was risen, but it was
something other and more inward than sight that opened his lips to cry,
'My Lord and my God!' Finally, we note--