Doubting Thomas Is Us

“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable unto your sight, oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”  Amen.

— — —

I.

I have a scar on the inside of my right wrist.

It came from a kitten. I was in second grade, grasping for the easiest love I could find, holding him too tight. He scratched me and left a mark that never fully faded. It looked, from the beginning, like a semicolon.

I have written that it felt like a foreshadowing. And it was.

Years later, at twenty-two years old, that wrist held a different kind of wound. Depressed, isolated, told by the man I loved that I was not worthy of the love of God — that Hell was surely mine — I reached for something I should not have reached for. It should have been a very happy time in my life. I had a ring on my finger, someone who told me he had saved me, and a church I had grown up in but never truly claimed. What I did not have was solid ground.

I survived. And daring to survive would be used against me. Even after leaving there would be continued fights in and out of court. Every time trying to move forward — the shame of that lowest moment would become my leash, a way to try and put me in my place.

And so I learned, early and repeatedly, that my wounds were something to be managed. Tucked away. Kept quiet. Not just by him — but by the world around me that prefers its pain tidy and its women composed.

Which is why, years later, when a friend told me that I air my dirty laundry too much — that I should not be telling the world all of my hurt — I understood exactly what she meant.

As any good Southerner knows, that is about as low an insult as it gets.

She was also, at the same moment, telling me she was no longer my friend. That she no longer wished to be associated with me. I respect her honesty. But what she was really saying — what the world has said to me in one form or another for most of my life — is that visible wounds are a liability. That the story of your lowest moment should stay buried. Much like the Alleluias we bury at the start of Lent — tucked away, out of sight, not appropriate for public use — our pain is meant to be kept quiet until we are presentable again. Until we are Easter-morning ready. Grace, the world tells us, is for the cleaned-up version of you. Not the one standing in front of everyone with her wrist showing. Or perhaps — with the wounds of nails in her palms.

I have always been a storyteller. And the truth I keep reaching for is the truth of what I have actually lived through. Not because I want sympathy. But because I believe — with everything I have — that showing our wounds is one of the most holy things we can do.

The semicolon is a symbol used by suicide attempt survivors. It means: the story is not over. An author uses a semicolon when they could have ended the sentence — but chose not to. My scar was there before I knew what it meant. But I have come to believe it was always meant to become the thing I would one day offer up as evidence.

Evidence that the story was not over. Evidence that wounds do not disqualify you. Evidence that the risen Christ is not the only one who gets to walk back into the room carrying his scars.

And I think Jesus would agree with me.

— — —

II.

The Gospel passage for today is the story we call Doubting Thomas. And Thomas has been a consistent theme in my life. I first wrote about him in 2017, saying that I needed to place my fingers in the flesh of the risen Christ before I could sing my Alleluias again. I needed,to know- have certainty. I wrote a version of it again in 2019. Again in 2023. And if I am standing before you today with any honesty at all — I will tell you that some part of me is still writing it.

Because here is what I know about Thomas: he is not an outlier. He is us.

The disciples are hiding behind locked doors. Afraid. The man they followed — the man they left everything for — has been crucified, killed, buried. The story is over. The dream is dead. They are huddled together, waiting for someone to come arrest them too.

And then Jesus is there. In the middle of the room. Not knocking — through the locked door. Standing there saying, Peace be with you. And he shows them his hands. His side. The wounds.

He does not appear to them as something triumphant and untouchable. He appears to them scarred. The Resurrection does not erase the wounds. He brings them with him. He shows them on purpose.

And they believe. All of them, that is, except Thomas — who was not there. And when the others tell him, Thomas says the words that have gotten him branded across two thousand years of church history as the problem child:

“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

The church has not always been kind to Thomas. We call him Doubting Thomas like it is a diagnosis. But Thomas did not doubt that Jesus had existed or that he had turned the world upside down. He doubted the specific, impossible claim his friends were making — that a dead man had walked back into the room.

That is not spiritual failure. That is what honest grief looks like.

I know what that doubt feels like. I spent years sitting in pews — sometimes the exact pews I sat in as a child, wearing the right dress, saying the right words, knowing the liturgy by heart — and feeling the gap between what I was saying and what I actually believed down in my bones. Not because God was not real. But because I had been told, by someone who claimed to love me, that God was not for me.

He told me I was going to Hell. He told me I was not worthy of the love of God. And for years I believed him. And I sat in church performing a faith I had not yet been allowed to claim as my own.

I was saying Alleluia on cue. Performing the praise while the wounds stayed buried — because that is what you do. You bury the hard things. You bury the Alleluia in Lent and you bury the truth about your life on Sunday mornings and you smile and say the liturgy and nobody can see what is underneath.

And sometimes the most honest thing you can do is say: I was not there. I need to see it for myself. I need to put my fingers in the wound before I can believe that any of this is real.

— — —

III.

But here is what we skip over in the Thomas story. What happened before.

Before Thomas. Before the locked room. Before any of it.

The women went first.

On the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb. Not after sunrise. Not when it was safe. Not when there was a crowd. While it was still dark. She came anyway.

And when she found the stone rolled away, she did not understand it yet. She ran and got Peter and the beloved disciple, who came and looked and then went home. Scripture says plainly: they saw, and they went home.

Mary stayed.

Mary stayed and she wept. And through her tears she looked into the tomb and saw angels. And then she turned and saw a man she thought was the gardener — until he said her name. Mary. And she knew him.

She was the first. She was the one sent. Go and tell my brothers. That was the commission. Go. Tell.

Now. I need you to understand what that means.

In the first century, a woman’s testimony was not considered legally valid. In a court of law, her word did not count. She could not be a witness. She could not testify. The culture she lived in had decided, formally and systematically, that what a woman saw and what a woman said did not rise to the level of reliable evidence.

And God chose her anyway.

Not despite the culture’s rules. Not as an oversight. God chose her knowing full well that the world would not accept her testimony. Chose her knowing the disciples would call it an idle tale. Chose her knowing that for centuries the church would minimize this moment, skip past it, treat it as a warm-up act for the male disciples who would carry the real story forward.

Jesus did not appear first to Peter. Not to John. Not to any of the eleven. He appeared first to a woman who had been sitting outside his tomb weeping in the dark — and he said her name, and he sent her, and he trusted her with the most important message ever delivered in human history.

That is not incidental. That is not a footnote. That is a choice. A deliberate, countercultural, kingdom-of-God choice about who gets to be the first witness of the resurrection.

And scripture tells us that the disciples did not believe her. Luke puts it plainly: it was an idle tale to them.

An idle tale.

I have some thoughts about that.

Because I know what it is to have your testimony called an idle tale. To tell the truth about what you lived through and have people decide — formally, casually, with a look or a silence or a friendship ending — that your account of your own experience does not rise to the level of reliable evidence. That you are too emotional. Too wounded. Too much. That what you saw and what you suffered and what you know to be true should stay in the category of things we do not discuss in polite company.

Mary Magdalene knows that feeling.

And she told them anyway.

It was not an idle tale. It has never been an idle tale.

The women have always been the first to see. The first to go. The first to name what is true in the face of a world that would rather not hear it. Hagar in the wilderness — cast out, alone, certain she and her child were going to die — became the first person in all of scripture to give God a name. El Roi. The God who sees me. A slave woman. An outsider. Someone the powerful had discarded. She named God before any of the patriarchs did.

The women at the tomb went first. In the dark. Before it was safe. Before anyone else was ready to hear it. They have been disbelieved and dismissed and told to go back to their proper places — and they have spoken anyway.

That is the lineage we carry.

— — —

IV.

The women at the tomb were not the first outsiders Jesus found. They were the last in a very long line.

The bleeding woman had spent twelve years being told she was unclean and untouchable — and she reached out and grabbed him in a crowd, and felt power leave his body. He stopped. In a crowd pressing in on every side, he stopped for her.

The Samaritan woman at the well — a woman, a Samaritan, divorced multiple times, living with a man she was not married to. Jesus sat down and had the longest theological conversation recorded in the entire Gospel of John with this woman who had every reason to believe she was too far outside for God to bother with. She became an evangelist. She ran back to town and said “come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done.” Her village believed because of her.

The Gerasene man, living naked among the tombs — Jesus crossed the sea to reach him. Just him. Got back in the boat and went home after.

He crossed water for one man the whole community had written off.

This is the pattern. This is who he came for. And here is the part that should stop us cold: the outsiders are the ones who recognized him. The disciples argued about who was greatest. The crowds wanted a warrior king. But the bleeding woman knew the moment her fingers touched his robe. The Samaritan woman ran back to her village. The outsiders always knew first. Because the outsiders were paying a kind of attention that comfort does not require.

— — —

V.

So what does this mean for us today? In the middle of your actual week, with the actual headlines in front of you.

Children in detention centers, separated from parents, held behind fences. The debate is about border security and legal process — real conversations. But underneath them, there are children. The ones Jesus said “let them come to me.” Pharaoh was afraid of children too. So was Herod. Power has always feared the innocent. And God has always been found among them.

There are LGBTQ+ teenagers being turned out of their homes by the very families who took them to church. People watching state after state legislate their existence into something shameful. And there are people in our own pews — right now, this morning — struggling in ways they cannot name out loud because the church has sometimes been a place where you had to have it together. Where showing your wounds was considered airing your dirty laundry.

The ones behind the fences. The ones on the streets. The ones sitting quietly in the back of this room with their wounds hidden and their Alleluias buried so deep they have forgotten what it sounded like —

Those are the people Jesus crossed water for.

There are unhoused people on our streets — people we step around, whose camps get cleared with bulldozers, whose very existence in a public space has been criminalized. The debate is about property values and public safety. But underneath it, there are people. People Jesus would have stopped for. People Jesus would have touched.

There are sick people in this country — right now, today — rationing insulin because they cannot pay for it, choosing between medication and food. The debate is about markets and policy. But underneath it: people. People Jesus healed without asking for insurance.

And we are resurrection people. We are what he left behind when the tomb was empty and the commission was given — first to a woman, while it was still dark, before the disciples were ready.

But Jesus did not hide his wounds. He walked back into the room carrying them. He showed them to Thomas on purpose. He said: here. touch this. it’s real. I’m real.

So yes. I air my dirty laundry. I will keep doing it. Not as performance, not as self-pity — but because someone in this room is sitting alone in their wound right now, and they need to know they are not the only one.

— — —

VI.

Back to Thomas. Back to the locked room.

A week later, Jesus returns. Thomas is there. And Jesus does not scold him, does not remind him the others already believed. He simply says:

“Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.”

He offers the wounds.

Jesus does not arrive at the resurrection scrubbed clean. He is risen — and he is still marked. The wounds are not erased by the resurrection. They are transformed by it. They become the proof. They become the evidence that the story is not over.

The world told Thomas the same thing it told me. The same thing it tells all of us. That the wounds should stay hidden. That grace is for the cleaned-up version. That you come back when you’re better, when you’re whole, when you’re not still carrying the marks of what happened to you.

And Jesus stood in that room — risen, glorified, death defeated — and held out his palms.

I have a scar on the inside of my right wrist.

He had the wounds of nails in his.

Neither of us was asked to hide them.

And I want to say something here that the church does not always say. Something I encountered recently in the work of a theologian and communicator I follow — and that I could not stop thinking about once I had read it.

We talk about the crucifixion as suffering. As sacrifice. As death. All of those things are true. But there is a dimension of what happened to Jesus on that cross that we sanitize in our telling of it — and in sanitizing it, we cut off something important for a great many people sitting in pews just like these.

In the ancient world, crucifixion was not only a method of execution. It was a deliberate act of public humiliation, specifically designed to strip victims — literally — of all dignity. Jesus was stripped of his clothing. Matthew 27 and John 19 both record it. His garments were divided and lots were cast for them while he hung exposed above the crowd. For a Jewish man in the first century, forced public nakedness was not merely embarrassing. It carried profound connotations of sexual violation and shame. It was a power move. A domination act. Designed to communicate that the empire owned his body completely.

The mockery. The beatings. The forced exposure. Scholars of Roman history and biblical studies have noted that these were not incidental to crucifixion — they were the point. The process was brutally and intentionally dehumanizing in ways that reflected the sexualized violence common in ancient torture and execution practices.

What this means — and this is the part I need you to hear — is that Christ’s suffering was not abstract. It was not sanitized. It was not the cleaned-up, stained-glass version we are sometimes given. Jesus’ body was violated. His dignity was stripped. His most intimate humanity was used against him as a weapon of shame and control.

For the 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men who have experienced sexual violence or assault — Jesus is not distant from that pain. He has borne it. He knows it from the inside. The cross is not only a symbol of redemption. It is a radical testament to God’s solidarity with the most wounded among us. With those whose bodies have been violated. With those whose shame has been used as a leash. With those who have been told that what happened to them is something to stay quiet about.

He knows.

And he came back. Scarred. With his hands open.

For years, I was told that scar was my shame. It was used against me in courtrooms. It was weaponized in arguments. It was the thing that was meant to keep me small, keep me compliant, keep me from ever leaving or speaking up or claiming a life of my own.

And then slowly — through good therapy, through good priests, through a slow return to a church I had grown up in but never truly claimed — something shifted. It shifted the day I sat alone in a great church during a Bishop’s visit while my small children played in the nursery, and I heard a sermon preach the words I had stopped believing: that God loved me. Not despite my wounds. Not after I had cleaned myself up. Not once I had proved I was worthy.

Loved. As I was. Scarred.

And here is the thing about receiving that kind of love — the kind that does not require you to be clean first. It does something to the way you see everyone else.

Even him.

I have come, slowly and not without struggle, to have compassion for the person who told me I was meant for Hell. Not because what he did was acceptable. Not because the years of harm were not real. But because I have come to understand that he was fighting his own battles, in the only ways he knew how. His wounds were real too — even if the way he carried them caused so much damage to the people around him. Hurt people hurt people. That is not an excuse. But it is the truth.

Jesus came back into that room and the first words out of his mouth were not how could you. They were peace be with you. He said it to the ones who had abandoned him. To Peter, who had denied him three times. To the disciples who had scattered. Peace. First. Before anything else.

That is not a small thing. That is the whole gospel in four words.

I am not there perfectly. I do not think we are required to be. But I can say honestly that I no longer carry him as an enemy. I carry him as someone who was also, in his own broken way, grasping for love. Just like a second-grade girl holding a kitten too tight.

That was the weight lifting. That was the thing I had needed to hear for twenty years. That was my finger in the wound of the risen Christ.

And what Thomas said when he touched those wounds is worth sitting with:

“My Lord and my God.”

The fullest confession in the Gospel of John. Not from the disciples who believed without touching. Not from the women who ran from the empty tomb. From the one who doubted the longest. From the one who needed the evidence. From the one who was not there the first time and refused to pretend otherwise.

The Alleluia that costs something is not lesser praise. It is truer praise.

It took me forty years — mirroring the forty days, the forty years in the wilderness. And then, in the Cathedral of St. Philip, watching my oldest children be confirmed, I felt conviction for the first time. Not the absence of questions. Conviction underneath them. The straight line I could not see while I was still walking it.

Here I am, God. And my arms are open wide.

That is what comes on the other side of honest doubt and honest grief. Not certainty. Not the absence of questions. But contact. Presence. The willingness to reach out and touch the wound and say: this is real. You are real. I believe.

— — —

VII.

Here is where we land.

The most radical thing about the gospel is the pattern of who Jesus went to, over and over again. The stubborn insistence that the ones the world has written off are the ones God shows up for first.

Are we the ones who stop?

Or are we the ones who debate while the woman is still bleeding?

Are we the ones who cross the water?

Or are we the ones who grumble that Jesus is going to Zacchaeus’s house?

Are we the ones who run to tell while it’s still dark?

Or are we the ones who called it an idle tale and went home?

Show your wounds. Tell your story. Say the true thing even when it costs you.

I have a scar on the inside of my right wrist. For a long time it was my shame. Now it is my testimony.

He had the wounds of nails in his palms. For a long time the world tried to make that the end of the story. It was not.

The women knew first because they went first.

Thomas confessed deepest because he doubted longest.

And Alleluia means more when it has been missing.

We bury the Alleluia every Lent because we know that praise without the grief underneath it is just noise. The word means more because it was absent. It lands because we sat in the silence of Holy Saturday and felt what it cost.

The same is true for you. The same is true for your wounds. The story of your lowest moment was never meant to stay buried. It was meant to be the thing you bring back into the room — like the risen Christ, like the women running from the tomb, like Thomas reaching out his hand in the dark.

The semicolon means: the story is not over. Our alleluias are not permanently buried.

So let the Alleluia come now. Not performed. Not inherited. Not said on cue.

But claimed. Chosen. Yours.

He is risen. And we are sent.

Alleluia.

Amen.

— — —

Source Note

The theological reflection on crucifixion as public humiliation and sexualized violence draws on material shared by @mattiemaemotl on Instagram (Holy Saturday 2025), which is grounded in historical scholarship on Roman execution practices and the Passion narrative. The scriptural basis is Matthew 27:28,35 and John 19:23–24. This line of inquiry has been developed by biblical scholars including Jennifer Glancy (Corporal Knowledge: Intimate Life in the Flesh Economy of Ancient Christianity, Oxford University Press, 2010) and others working in body theology and trauma-informed readings of the Passion. The statistic on sexual violence prevalence (1 in 3 women, 1 in 6 men) is drawn from RAINN and CDC research.