Feast of St Thomas, the apostle

Today Fr Paul reads from the Gospel of John (20:24-29) about Thomas’ encounter with the risen Jesus.

Apart from this passage and a couple of other places in scripture, Fr Paul says we do not know very much about St Thomas.

Most of us know Thomas is famous for doubting the resurrection of Jesus. He not only doubted the resurrection but he also doubted the other apostles who told him about it.

The flip side of this is that once Thomas had seen and touched the risen Jesus, he makes an immediate statement of faith when he says ‘My Lord and my God!’ What is interesting, says Fr Paul, and what distinguishes Thomas from the other disciples is that Thomas becomes the first apostle to call Jesus ‘God’ when he exclaims those words.

When the dispersal of the disciples came and they started to go out to evangelise various parts of the world, tradition has it that St Thomas, ultimately, went to India.

Fr Paul gives a shout out to our Indian Community ‘who we are blessed to have here in Port Macquarie’. Many in the community come from Kerala in India. Keralan Christians, for many years, called themselves ‘St Thomas’ Christians’, honouring the fact that Thomas made his way to India to spread the news about Jesus Christ.

As part of our reflection today, Fr Paul says we might reflect on the doubts that we may have at various times and that we follow the example of Thomas with his beautiful statement of faith, ‘My Lord and my God!’.

Today we ask for St Thomas to pray for us!