ADVENT · 21 DECEMBER
Saint Thomas the Apostle
The Twin · The Doubter Who Believed · Apostle of India · Martyr at Mylapore
Thomas — TOM-as · Didymus — DID-ih-mus · Mylapore — MY-lah-por · Gondophares — gon-DOF-ah-reez · Kerala — KEH-rah-lah · Malabar — MAL-ah-bar · Mar Thoma — mar TOH-mah
O Almighty and everliving God, who for the greater confirmation of the faith didst suffer thy holy Apostle Thomas to be doubtful in thy Son’s resurrection; Grant us so perfectly, and without all doubt, to believe in thy Son Jesus Christ, that our faith in thy sight may never be reproved; hear us, O Lord, through the same Jesus Christ, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, now and for evermore.
His name means the twin — Didymus (DID-ih-mus) in Greek — and the Gospel of John uses it three times, as though wanting to fix in the reader’s mind this man who is double in everything: doubter and believer, absent and present, the one who was not there and the one who makes the highest confession. He was not there when the risen Lord appeared to the disciples on the evening of the first day of the week, and when they told him We have seen the Lord he said Except 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. Eight days later, the Lord stood among them again and said to Thomas: Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said: My Lord and my God. The confession of Thomas is the highest Christological statement in the entire Gospel of John, the climax of the whole narrative. Thomas is the Apostle of confirmed faith: the man whose doubt is not a failure but a necessity, because his confirmation is the confirmation the whole Gospel needed.
The tradition sends Thomas to India, and the Thomas Christians of Kerala (KEH-rah-lah) on the Malabar (MAL-ah-bar) coast are one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world, tracing their origin to the Apostle’s mission in the first century. The Acts of Thomas describes his mission to the court of a king named Gondophares (gon-DOF-ah-reez), whom numismatic evidence confirms as a historical ruler of northwest India in the first century. The South Indian tradition holds that Thomas was martyred at Mylapore (MY-lah-por) near modern Chennai around 72 AD. The Mar Thoma (mar TOH-mah) church of Kerala — one of the ancient churches of India, in communion with the Anglican Church — traces its foundation to Thomas’s mission on the Malabar coast, and the Thomas Christians have been there, in unbroken continuity, for the full span of the Christian era.
The placement of Thomas’s feast on 21 December — in Advent, in the final days of preparation before Christmas — is one of the most theologically charged in the entire Calendar. Advent is the season of longing and expectation, of the desire that precedes the meeting, of the faith that must wait for its confirmation. Thomas in Advent is the patron of all who wait for the confirmation they have not yet received, all who say unless I see I will not believe — not as a failure but as an honest statement of where they are. The Lord’s answer to Thomas is the Lord’s answer to every soul in that condition: he does not rebuke the absence, he provides the evidence. And the confession it drew from Thomas — My Lord and my God — is the prayer the Church will make at Christmas in four days’ time, standing before the child in the manger and recognising in that ordinary flesh the one who is Lord and God.
Thomas is also the Apostle of Advent because his whole story is the story of the God who meets the doubter where the doubter is, who does not demand faith without evidence but provides the evidence that faith requires. The Incarnation itself is the divine answer to human doubt: God does not ask us to believe in an abstraction but presents himself in the form we can touch and see and hear — the Word made flesh, the hands that still bear the print of the nails. Thomas stands in the cloud of witnesses as the Apostle who took the Gospel to the furthest reaches of the known world, to India, whose Christian communities are among the oldest on earth, and who went there not in spite of his doubt but through and beyond it, carrying the confirmation he had received to peoples who had not yet heard the name of the one at whose hands he had put his fingers.
O Almighty God, who by the doubt of thy servant Thomas didst give the Church the highest of all confessions, and by his mission didst plant the Gospel on the shores of India; Grant that we may make his confession our own prayer, and carry it, as he carried it, to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.