Enough that wondrous eye
From a sermon preached on the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle by Horatio Potter, Bishop of New York, 1872.
The Right Rev’d Dr Horatio Potter (1802-1807) was an American bishop, scholar and patriot with a keen sense of service to the poor. He founded Bard College and the cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, and instituted the religious Community of St Mary, one of the first Anglican religious orders since the Reformation. Influenced by the Oxford Movement, he took great succour when he travelled there and met the likes of Pusey, Keble and Isaac Williams, whose writings have featured in this Advent series. He was also a firm defender of the apostolic succession, resisting attempts to allow non-episcopally ordained Protestant clergy to exercise ministry in Episcopal churches. Here he exhorts the parishioners of a new congregation dedicated to St Thomas, on that great Apostle’s feast day, to have faith like his: he did not need to touch, but it was enough for him to see the wondrous Eye of Christ, and so be seen. We have, in fact, seen far more than St Thomas, for both good and ill, but we would be foolish to let the ill outweigh the good that two thousand years of Christ’s presence have wrought in His visible Body, the Church. -T.P.
Then came Jesus, the door being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then said He to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold My hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into My side: and be not faithless, but believing.--And Thomas answered and said unto Him, My Lord and my God! Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
ST. JOHN, XX. 26-9.
Thomas, in the absence of the visible presence of the Lord, had nothing for faith in the Resurrection to rest upon but the testimony which his brethren bore to one apparition of the Crucified, risen from the tomb. The fact of the Resurrection was too marvellous, too unexampled, too inconceivable to be accepted without irresistible evidence: without the evidence of more senses than one. The great Teacher had yielded to death! How could He rise again? What are a few words of promise, far in the past, and effaced by the dreadful events of the last preceding days what are they against the overwhelming confutation of the Cross and the Tomb? Words of promise are things of air, and may be things of fancy, or of pride and pretension; but a death of extremest ignominy and suffering, witnessed by all the world death holding its prisoner fast, even on to the third day that is an appalling, withering fact. "The Master risen! The Master seen by fond and excited brethren and by none else impossible!" says the doubting Thomas. Not by merely seeing a resembling form not "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, will I believe."
Ten thousand things that support our faith were wanting to St. Thomas; repeated communings of the disciples afterward, with the risen Lord; the witness of five hundred brethren who together see Him; His glorious Ascension; the descent of the Holy Ghost, according to His promise, and the miracles wrought in the power of His name; the triumphs of His Church in the early ages, when opposed by all the world; the wondrous changes wrought among the nations through eighteen hundred years by the regenerating and transforming influence of His religion; all these subsequent demonstrations of the reality of the Resurrection were wanting to St. Thomas. He feels in himself that the thing is impossible, that his unbelief is invincible; and yet no sooner does the risen Lord appear in his presence, calling upon him by name to reach out his finger, and put away his doubts in the awful Touch, than his whole soul recognizes the reality, and bursts forth in an answering cry of faith: "My Lord and my God!" The irreverent touch- O! of that there is no need! Enough the never-to-be-forgotten Form and Features! Enough that wondrous Eye, that thrilling Voice, that reading of the heart! All doubt vanishes in a moment. The sacred narrative furnishes no warrant for those many pictures which represent St. Thomas as touching the sacred form. The sight was all-sufficient;- the Saviour says: Because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed."
And the faith of St. Thomas embraces the whole mighty truth: the resurrection of the Incarnate Lord: the Humanity, and within its veil the Divinity God manifest in the Flesh; the Divine Mediator, who had power (exousia), authority to lay down His Life and authority to take it again, as a part of His mediatorial office and work. Yes; the Divinity, which dwelt in the man Christ Jesus departed not in death from the human Soul, nor from the human Body. It went with the Soul into the place of departed spirits; it dwelt with the Sacred Body in the silence and gloom of the tomb of. Joseph. And on the third day, that Divinity reunited the human Soul to the human Body, and came forth in the living God-Man Christ Jesus, triumphant over Death and Hell; so that when St. Thomas, gazing upon the Risen One, exclaimed, "My Lord and my God!" he confessed the whole wondrous and blessed truth, which is the substance of our Faith, the foundation of all our Hope.
The faith of St. Thomas sprang up suddenly, as a new creation, in the presence of the Truth; ("I am the Way and the Truth and the Life") and the reality and power of that faith of St. Thomas was in after days abundantly vindicated by his labours in planting the Church in the East, and by his glorious martyrdom. St. Thomas believed because he saw with the eye of sense. Other means of awakening faith were as yet wanting. But, my dear brethren, how wonderful and how full of comfort the words of our blessed Lord: Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed; blessed are they which have not seen, and yet have believed." There is hope, then, after all, that we, if we earnestly embrace the good things set before us, are not so very inferior in privilege, in possible blessedness, to those favoured few, who with the eye of sense, looked upon the risen Lord, spake with Him, ate with Him, and witnessed His glorious ascension into Heaven: Blessed are they," it seems as if they were especially "blessed," "who have not seen, and yet have believed." ...
O yes! It is the Faith which springs up and embraces the unseen Lord; the Faith that triumphs over the evil suggestions of a proud and perverse Reason; it is the Faith which amid storms and darkness in times when all things seem to be against us, in losses, and poverty, and sickness, and loneliness - not only endures, as seeing Him who is invisible" - but continues meek, and gentle, and loving, and grateful humble, yet uplifted in full assurance of hope adoring the wisdom and goodness of the Lord thankful in the lowest estate for unnumbered mercies, and against every peril replying, not in cold and boastful stoicism, but from a heart knowing in Whom it has believed; "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him!" O, that is the Faith--faith in the unseen, faith in spite of the taunts of a cold, darkened reason - faith that can rise above evil and transmute evil into good that is the faith which our dear Lord pronounces "blessed." But how (in absence of the visible presence of our Lord) is such a faith to be created and maintained? Why, my dear brethren, in place of His visible presence we have His visible Church His mystical Body, filled with His Spirit! We have His ministers, bearing His commission, and in His name dispensing the Word of God and His Holy Sacraments: "As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you: Lo! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." We have the blessed Gospels, in which we see our adorable Lord, as if He were here present with us.
We have before our eyes the wonderful works of God in and through His Church for eighteen hundred years- enlightening, humanizing, purifying changing the face of whole nations calling into existence for the relief of man's estate for the alleviation of his sufferings and sorrows for his deliverance from sin and death, a marvellous train of institutions, instinct with the very spirit of our Lord, and all unknown on this earth until He came to bring us new life and grace. At this very moment we ourselves are bearing our part in a multitude of agencies which are busy in doing the work of our Saviour Christ in the world. And, above all, to quicken and animate all these agencies, to give efficacy to the preached Word, spiritual life to the Sacraments, sanctity to our Holy Places to give a divine virtue to all our poor ministries, to all our humble endeavours, whether in the Priesthood or out of it, we have the abounding grace of our Lord Jesus Christ we have the mighty power of the Holy Ghost, sent down from Heaven that in all our works of piety and charity we may have, in spite of our human infirmity, a sufficiency, and that of God.
O! with all these quickening powers of grace with the visible Body of Christ abiding on the earth, and doing its works of mercy before our eyes with our Holy Places vocal with prayer and praise with the Gospels in our hands with Christ-like labourers all around us, busy in every place of sin and woe healing the lepers with all these helps Faith in the unseen is not difficult! Every where we may see the wonder-working of our unseen Lord, and exclaim reverently, gratefully, with St. Thomas, "My Lord and my God!"