Jesus Reigns

There is a man in the resurrection narratives who has carried an unfair nickname for two thousand years. We call him Doubting Thomas, as if doubt were the defining fact of his life — as if the worst thing he ever said is the truest thing about him. But John’s Gospel, read carefully from beginning to end, tells a different story. This is the same Thomas who, when Jesus announced He was heading back toward a city where people wanted Him dead, stood up and said to his fellow disciples: “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16, CSB). This is the man who, at the Last Supper, voiced what every disciple was too afraid to ask: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” — and received in return one of the most sweeping claims Jesus ever made: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:5–6, CSB). Thomas was not a shallow skeptic. He was a deeply devoted follower who loved Jesus enough to die with Him — and who, when the crucifixion came, was utterly crushed by the loss.

That grief is the key to understanding what Thomas said on the evening of the resurrection. The other disciples were huddled together behind locked doors when Jesus appeared to them in the room. Thomas, it seems, was somewhere else — perhaps the kind of person who, in the darkest moments, needs to be alone rather than surrounded by people who cannot fix what is broken. When he returned and heard the others describe what they had seen, he could not receive it. His words were absolute: unless I see the nail marks, unless I touch the wounds, I will never believe. Those words became his label. But they were not the last words spoken in the story. Eight days later, Jesus came back — and when He came back, He came back for Thomas.

The detail John preserves in verse 27 is worth sitting with slowly. Jesus did not arrive with a rebuke. He arrived with the exact evidence Thomas had demanded. He quoted Thomas’s conditions back to him almost word for word: put your finger here, look at my hands, reach out your hand and put it into my side. He had heard every word Thomas said in that moment of raw, grief-soaked disbelief. He had held every condition. And He returned carrying the answer. This is the tenderness of a King who listens to His people even when they are speaking from the worst place in their grief — not a cool-headed academic challenge, but the desperate outburst of a man who had loved deeply and watched the One he followed die brutally. The woman at the well came with a water jar full of need and an argument about worship geography, and Jesus met her at exactly the well she had built. Peter came with a sinking faith and a scream, and Jesus reached out His hand before he went under. Jesus has always done this: He meets the actual need — not the polished version, not the need a person thinks they should have, but the precise, specific, messy need that is actually there.

What happened when Thomas saw the risen Lord is one of the most theologically dense moments in all of Scripture, compressed into five words. He did not ask a follow-up question. He did not slowly reason his way to a tentative conclusion. The words broke out of him as recognition, not something he was reciting: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28, CSB). John opens his Gospel with the declaration that the Word was with God and the Word was God (John 1:1, CSB). For twenty chapters, he has been building toward the moment when someone speaking directly to Jesus face-to-face would say the same thing. And the person he chose to say it was not the most faithful disciple in the room. It was the most skeptical one. The man who had refused to believe without evidence became the man who gave the clearest testimony to the identity of Jesus in the entire Gospel. Pope Gregory the Great observed this reversal in the sixth century when he wrote that Thomas’s lack of faith did more for our faith than did the faith of the disciples who believed, because Thomas insisted on seeing, and so we have the account of a man who touched the wounds and declared: He is alive, and He is God.

The confession Thomas made contains two distinct claims, and both of them matter. My Lord — an acknowledgment of sovereign authority, a declaration that Jesus has the right to rule every corner of his life. My God — an acknowledgment of divine identity, a declaration that the Person standing before him is not merely a resurrected rabbi but the living God. And the word “My” makes both claims personal. Not the Lord in some abstract sense. Not a God among others. My Lord and my God. This is the kind of knowing the Apostle Paul described as his consuming ambition in Philippians 3 — not knowing about Jesus, but knowing Him personally, experientially, as the Greek verb ginoskein describes: the kind of knowing that comes only from genuine encounter. Thomas did not leave that room with a refined theological position. He left having met Someone. That is what the resurrection was always designed to produce.

But Jesus did not stop with Thomas. What He said next was addressed to every person who would come after him — including every person reading these words. He looked past Thomas, toward a horizon stretching two thousand years into the future, and He said: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29, CSB). Our faith is not a second-class version of Thomas’s faith, a poor substitute for the real thing because we were not in the upper room. Jesus honored it in advance. He called it blessed — and the word he used does not simply mean happy or fortunate. It means accepted by God, the recipient of divine favor. In Luke 24, the risen Jesus opened the minds of His disciples to understand the Scriptures, showing them that everything written about Him in Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms had to be fulfilled. We do not believe despite the evidence. We are believing on the basis of trustworthy eyewitness testimony — carefully preserved, cross-examined by history, staked with the lives of those who wrote it. The tomb was opened and empty. The Scriptures were opened and fulfilled. Their minds were opened, and they believed. Jesus called every person who would follow them in that belief: blessed.

Thomas’s story does not end in the upper room, and neither does ours. Historical tradition, preserved across centuries of church memory, tells us that Thomas eventually carried the gospel all the way to India — farther than perhaps any other apostle. The faith communities of India’s Malabar Coast trace their roots to this man: the one who was not in the room for the first resurrection appearance, who demanded proof, who confessed Jesus as Lord and God when he finally saw, and who then gave the rest of his life to making sure others could hear what he had seen. He was eventually martyred there, killed by a spear for the testimony he would not stop sharing. This is the pattern that runs through the entire Easter series. The woman at the well left her water jar and ran toward the very neighborhood she had spent years hiding from. Peter, restored beside a charcoal fire, stood at Pentecost and preached to thousands. Paul traded a list of impressive religious credentials for a list of shipwrecks and imprisonments — and counted every bit of it as gain. Jesus does not rescue people and set them on a shelf. He opens their minds, and He sends them.

What sent Thomas to India is what has always sent the people Jesus finds: not a cleaned-up record, not a theology degree, not a stage and a platform. A story. Thomas’s story was simply this — I was not in the room, I refused to believe, I demanded proof, and He came back for me. He came back carrying exactly what I needed. And I will never be the same. That is the testimony no one can argue with, because it does not rest on a position but on a Person. The same Jesus who walked through a locked door to reach Thomas is still reaching. He is still coming back for the ones who are not ready yet. He is still speaking into the locked rooms of grief and doubt and honest disbelief. He still arrives carrying the evidence the specific soul most needs. And the question He has always been asking — the question He asked Peter on the shore, the question He asked the woman at the well, the question He asked Thomas in the upper room — is not whether you have believed perfectly. It is whether you are willing to believe at all.

This week at Union Avenue Baptist Church, we are walking through the final message in our Easter series — Jesus Reigns — as we trace the story of Doubting Thomas through John 20 and into the Great Commission in Luke 24. Whether you are in the room this Sunday with steady faith, or you are more like Thomas right now — full of questions, carrying grief, not quite ready — there is a place for you here. Jesus did not abandon the one who wasn’t ready yet. He came back. He always does. You do not need a polished story or a perfect record to walk through our doors. You need only be willing to show up — and let the One who comes back for the doubting ones meet you exactly where you are.

“Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

— John 20:29, CSB

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