Readings: Job 40:15-41:34, 1 Corinthians 13:12, and John 20:24-31.

“We have seen the Lord!” The disciples said to Thomas, who had been absent when Jesus first appeared to them and to the women who had found the tomb empty.

Now, faith comes by hearing the word, yet Thomas says, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails and place my finger into the mark of the nails and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” And this in a world of empiricism and hard materialism — a world where we measure to cook, to investigate, to build, and hold matter in our hands — the world of bodies held within a universe in motion. Thomas the Apostle highlights for us a problem that still must be overcome, and perhaps more so now, two thousand years later. For Thomas and for us all, by the grace of God, Jesus comes again.

By this grace Thomas gains a foretaste of the perfect vision — the beatific vision of the risen Lord — who appears to him and to many over the course of Eastertide before His ascension.

Our faith, here and now in this world, is imperfect sight, an obscure knowledge, or knowing in part, until the blessed day when the light will open fully to us and the beatific vision of Christ in His glory becomes our perfect seeing.

The vision of the resurrected Christ for Thomas is like a fire that lights in his eyes. The witness imprints the image of God in his mind and heart. Like the ringing of a bell, he is woken up and the imperfect is re-ordered and made certain: “My Lord and my God!” he said.

Echoing the words of St Paul: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)

And we declare this today by our being here: “He suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day.” Alleluia! This line from the Nicene Creed, written in the year 325, is a point around which every Christian gathers together in praise.

This mysterious event of Jesus’ appearing — the doors locked, and yet out of the invisible Jesus is made visible, out of mystery Jesus is again known.

Which is for me another echo, from the past: the king Melchizedek appears from nowhere in the book of Genesis carrying bread and wine to bless Abram. This has pointed us forward to Jesus’ victory, when He became the sacrifice, and death and sin were defeated.

Both were hidden and became visible, carrying the fruits of the earth made ready. Jesus, by the work of His hands, became the bread of life for us. He is the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

Yet His appearing out of stillness into our world in motion shows that Jesus not only has power over visible nature — He walked on water, calmed the storm, and healed the sick and dying. The nature of things seen, like the Behemoth — yes, maybe an individual creature like a hippo that is actually very dangerous, containable by humans yet not tameable (I think we can all agree they would not make good pets) — is an archetype of this untameable nature.

Nature as that which is within us and yet beyond our reach — what we did not create or shape by our own hand, yet which exists without our consent. Nature is terrible and beautiful, a gift and, at times, costly. It exists independently of mind, yet is also part of mind.

Nature cannot be reduced to a part or an isolated object; rather, nature is the relation between all created things — just as a hand does not function by itself, nor does any living thing sustain itself for itself alone.

But the encounter in John 20 goes beyond this, demonstrating that Jesus also has power over all that is unseen. He walked on water, but He reigns over all that is beneath the waves, unseen in the depths. The hiddenness of all mystery belongs to Him.

Jesus says to Philip, “You have seen Me, you have seen the Father.” Now the imago Dei, the image of God in man, is revealed fully in Christ as God made man.

In the book of Job, the response of God who speaks out of the storm reveals one of my favourite lines in Scripture: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.” This is the beginning of a different account of creation — poetic, mysterious — yet reminding us of this vast, unfathomable power of the Creator.

As we see in John Chapter 1: 1-3, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.”

Jesus, appearing out of the ocean, out of the mystery of our faith, the invisible made visible, is now also the sovereign ruler over the Leviathan, the great and terrible beast of the deeps — the created order that lay beyond our seeing. For what is unintelligible to us, the chaotic, is known by God. From infinite smallness to the large, God knows it all and yet reaches beyond. 

Jesus appears out of the stillness of omniscience. God’s stillness is His intellect and vision — He sees all and knows all, beyond all motion through time and space. We move, we change — we participate with His perfect goodness and love.

Christ is the light, and we share in this love, without prejudice. He calls everyone, and we have responded to this call. Yet He asks for humility, a radical acceptance of unknowing so that we may accept one another as brothers and sisters (an undoing of original sin) as one family.

A little lower than the angels for a while, Jesus — God made man — experienced this radical humility and unknowing, to learn over time as He grew, to meet us face to face, so that we may be adopted into His family.

Love, therefore, understood as all things working together by relation, with and for all that exists and is other, is the heart of nature — its purpose and meaning.

This “love” as the heart of nature is not anthropomorphic sentimentality. It is relational through and through. The Leviathan, then, as the hidden nature of things under God’s control, is the opposite of the beast in Revelation 13, the unnatural creature that seeks to imitate the power of God. The water in ancient minds held the mystery of generative power — where life emerged from — yet the false gods break down the Trinitarian relationship, not just the divine Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but also the relation of us with God, self and other.

Nature proceeding from God manifests as mechanism and co-operation at lower levels, but as agape in the divine life and our redeemed humanity, or as eros in desire. Yet in every sphere and at every order of magnitude, love is the principle of “all things working together” with and for each other.

This reveals love as the same principle already at work in the bonding of protons, in the photosynthesis that feeds the world, and where attraction fails this is not the absence of love but a different expression of it.

Love protects the freedom of the other; therefore, there is no natural right to everything. To cross this boundary is to trespass against another’s will, which, if a person has broken the duty to care for and protect the other, they will lose any natural right to not have a consequence imposed upon them. Hubris oversteps limits, leading to disharmony and self-destruction.

Yet the disarming beauty of God, who is Jesus Christ, transforms us. In Him, the invisible and visible are united. Like the land and the sea belong to one earth, so too do we have One God. A tree is a representation of this, where earth and water are drawn together and transformed into fruit.

God is the tree of life, and Jesus the exact copy, His branch.

To transcend nature is not to erase or destroy it. Neither does love make what is wrong stronger, filling in the gaps of what is. No — God meets us where we are and leads us. He who has all power, as St Augustine says, “God created us without us: but he did not will to save us without us.”

We are creatures who look up in wonder. To be human is to be a seeker, a pilgrim on a journey through time. As St Anselm wrote: “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.”

With our hearts oriented toward God, before all that we think, do or say, this helps us order our lives in harmony with His will and live with the grace of this faith that one day we will see what we believe.

Amen.