Ancient Faith Radio presents Speaking the Truth in Love with Fr. Thomas Hopko.

Fr. Thomas is the dean emeritus of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary and the author of numerous books and articles.

From his study in Elwood City, Pennsylvania, here is Fr. Tom.

In the Orthodox Church, the Sunday after the Lord's Pascha, after the Sunday of the Resurrection of Christ, is called, technically, in the Church service books, Antipascha.

It's a kind of a strange name, Antipascha.

In different parts of Christianity, this Sunday had different names.

In the classical Western tradition, it was called the Sunday of the removal of the white robes of the Lord,

which meant that the catechumens who had been baptized and were wearing the white robes that symbolized the risen body that they had received when they were clothed with Christ, that these robes on the eighth day were removed.

And that was a general practice of Christianity throughout Christendom at that time—let's say third century, around there, second, third, fourth—where the baptized person would wear the white robe of baptism for eight days, this eight days symbolizing the one beyond the sabbath.

And then on the eighth day, the chrism would be wiped off—this was the Eastern Church practice—

and the white robe would be removed,

and the person's hair would be cut in a tonsure to show that they belong to God,

and then they would resume their normal life.

And when baptisms were done on Pascha, on the Paschal Vigil, then the newly baptized were in the church the entire bright week, the entire Paschal week, singing over and over again, the Paschal hymns:

"Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death upon those in the tombs, bestowing life"; "It is the day of resurrection. Be illumined, people"; "The Pascha, the Pascha of the Lord."

They would sing these hymns in the earlier Church. These words would probably not be the same; some of these hymns were written a bit later.

But there was this remaining within the community of the faith and having the Holy Communion every day and celebrating the Lord's resurrection for that eight-day period.

Today in the West, the Sunday after Easter is commonly called, especially in English-speaking worlds, "Low Sunday."

I tried to find out why, and most of the references say that the reason isn't clear why it was called Low Sunday.

Some people think that it was a kind of a corruption of the Latin word laus, which means praise, because the praises of God were sung on that particular Sunday.

In the West also, this Sunday was called the conclusion, the closing of Pascha, the kind of recapitulation and ending of Pascha.

And that's probably what anti-Pascha means in Greek.

And in the Orthodox Church tradition, it's "anti," not as opposed to Pascha, but kind of instead of Pascha, or the counterpart of Pascha, kind of the conclusion, the bringing to a certain ending of the celebration of the Lord's resurrection—

although the Paschal period is actually 50 days long and it ends with the 50th day, which is Pentecost.

"Pentecost" means 50, and so this entire season of the 50 days is called the Paschal season, or the 50 days, the Pentecostal season, depending which way you're looking at it.

And then, of course, on the 40th day, there's a special celebration of the ascension of Christ into heaven.

And then there's also a feast in the Eastern Orthodox Church of the middle day, mid-Pentecost, which is done on the 25th day, halfway exactly between Pascha and the 50th day of Pentecost,

where somehow the festival recounts and remembers the resurrection of Christ, and celebrates it, and brings in already the ascension, and the glorification, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

So this is this marvelous season that the Church has.

During this season, the Scripture readings at the Holy Eucharist are from the Book of Acts.

The Acts of the Apostles are read through this period, and it's finally completed on the Friday before Pentecost.

We read the whole Book of Acts through this season, and the readings are from the Gospel according to St. John.

And it's interesting to note that in the Sunday readings, and in the continuous reading of the gospels in the Orthodox Church, the Gospel of St. John is only read during this Pentecostal, Paschal-Pentecostal season.

The Gospel of St. John begins to be read on Paschal night itself, at the Holy Eucharist of the Holy Pascha.

And that's interesting to note, because at the Paschal liturgy, the Easter Divine Liturgy, you do not have a reading of an account of the Lord's Resurrection.

You actually have the reading of the prologue of the Gospel according to St. John.

And then the Gospel is read at all the daily services throughout the entire season, and it concludes just on the eve of Pentecost, on the 50th day of Pentecost.

And as a matter of fact, even the gospel readings for Pentecost itself, about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and the living water is also— the Gospel itself on Pentecost is also from St. John.

And some people think it's plausible, a very plausible theory, that the Gospel according to St. John is read during this period because this is the theological Gospel for believers.

It's kind of the insider's Gospel, the initiate's Gospel.

You preach on the street, you preach to the public: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the Gospel of Jesus as the Messiah, the Messiah as God's Son, the Messiah as Lord, crucified and resurrected.

And then, once you believe that, and are baptized into his death, and raised with him, and receive the gift of the Spirit, and then you enter into the communion of the Church, and then you hear the Gospel according to St. John.

In this particular theory, which is only a theory, but it's very interesting, very convincing, at least to me,

that the Gospel according to St. John is kind of the first post-Paschal, post-baptismal catechesis.

In other words, you have a certain type of catechesis until you enter, and then you have another catechesis that's given to you after you enter,

so that you can understand the deepest mysteries of God, or even sometimes called the dogmas of God.

In the early Church, this was quite common.

They had what they called the disciplina arcana, the mysteries, the secret things, the things that were only within the Church.

And St. Basil the Great, particularly in his treatise On the Holy Spirit, he comments on this.

He says, when Christians preach the Gospel to people outside, those who are coming to faith or are hearing the Gospel, that is called proclamation.

In Greek, it's called kerygma, or ta kerygmata, the preachings, the heraldings, the announcings.

But then, in a kind of antithesis to the kerygma, you have the mystery, ta mysteria, or dogmata.

And Basil says that you can't speak about the inner mysteries and the dogmas of faith to people outside.

They have to first hear the Gospel, believe it, be baptized, accept Jesus as their Lord and Master,

and then they enter in, receive the gift of the Holy Spirit,

and then they have the deeper mysteries, and those deeper mysteries are revealed in evangelical form in the Gospel according to St. John—

which, by the way, in the Gospel according to St. John, the word "gospel" is never used.

You don't find the word "gospel" in the Gospel according to St. John,

where you find the word, of course, very often in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and in St. Paul.

This leads me sometimes to think that perhaps what St. John's Gospel is, is a kind of theological, mystical contemplation of the Gospel.

It's kind of the believer's Gospel, the deeper glad tidings and good news of what this victory of God in Christ actually means for those who accept it.

And that's why St. John's Gospel is so different.

And perhaps, as I said, that may be why St. John's Gospel, except on certain feast days, is not read any other time on the Lord's Day and as the regular continuous reading in church,

except during these 50 days from Pascha to Pentecost—that's the season of St. John.

And St. John, from the beginning, of course, this Gospel is called the theological Gospel, or the Gospel in the literary genre of wisdom literature of the Old Covenant.

We mentioned, I think, on the radio before that there's a kind of theory that the four gospels are in the four genres of the Scripture.

Mark is the apocalyptic Gospel, the clash between good and evil, God and the demons.

Matthew is the new Torah.

Luke-Acts, the two-volume work, is the new narrative chronicle history.

And John is theology.

And St. John is called John the Theologos, John the Theologian, or sometimes John the Divine.

"Divine" is an old English word for theologian.

So we have this Gospel according to St. John through the Paschal season, Pentecostal season,

and then this first Sunday after Pentecost, as a kind of counterpart to the prologue of the Gospel of St. John, which is read on Pascha night at the Holy Eucharistic Divine Liturgy of Pascha,

you have the account of Thomas and the story of Thomas, which is familiar to most Christians. It should be anyway.

And the story is, of course, that the Lord Jesus Christ appears in St. John's Gospel to the disciples with the doors being shut.

He passes through the closed doors. He enters into the presence of the disciples.

He does this on the evening of the first day of the week, the very evening of Easter itself, Easter Sunday, Pascha Sunday itself.

He enters in; he gives them the word of peace; he shows them his hands and his feet; he breathes on them and gives them the Holy Spirit,

telling them that if they forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if they retain the sins of any, they are retained.

And then it says Thomas wasn't there. He was not with them at that time.

And this is considered by the liturgy and by the Church Fathers as a providential act.

It's part of the marvelous plan of God that one of the disciples, Thomas, would not be there, and therefore he would have his doubts.

And he became to be known as the Doubting Thomas, which in some sense is true, but in another sense is kind of unfair—

at least I feel that way, since he is my patron saint, Thomas.

But he says, "Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the mark of the nails

and place my hand in his side, I will not believe."

And it's interesting that that's the gospel that's read at vespers of Pascha, at the vespers of Paschal Sunday, the day of resurrection, the vesperal gospel reading ends with the words,

"I will not believe—unless I see, I will not believe."

So you have that carryover from Pascha day itself to the Sunday after Pascha, the eighth day, the fulfillment day.

And then the Gospel of St. John continues and says, "Eight days later—"

and that eight is significant, because the eight is the fullness day; the eight is the day of the kingdom.

And in the early church, the eight was the day when, as we heard, the baptismal robes were removed and the people re-entered into their normal life after being baptized and dying and rising with Christ at the Paschal Holy Liturgy.

So eight days later, they're gathered again, the doors are shut again,

and those shut doors are also symbolic. It means this belongs to the interior of the Church.

This is not to be preached outside on the street.

This belongs to the mystery of faith, to those who are within and who believe and who are given to see the risen Christ

and to receive the Holy Spirit from the risen Christ, which is within the Church with the doors being shut.

Actually, this is carried over in the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgies of St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil,

because after the proclamation of the Gospel and the epistle and the sermon at the Divine Liturgy,

then those who are not baptized or those who are in penance are asked to leave the church.

They're not supposed to be there to see the mystery of the Holy Eucharist.

St. Basil says the Eucharist is not preached.

In fact, St. Basil went so far as to say the gift of the Holy Spirit is not preached. The Spirit is not preached.

The Holy Trinity as a dogma is not preached.

Certainly anything having to do with the Theotokos and the Virgin Mary is not preached.

All those things belong to the inner life of the Church.

They're not part of the proclaimed Gospel to the people on the street.

That's what you learn after you believe the Gospel and enter into the life of the Church and participate in the Holy Eucharist.

Then your mind is illumined and you enter into the deeper mysteries which are not to be disclosed. They're not to be spoken about.

That's why even on Holy Thursday the hymn says, "I will not speak of your mystery to your enemies. I will not kiss you like Judas."

So we don't proclaim the mysteries of God on the street.

And that's very important for us today. Of course, you know, the toothpaste is out of the tube, so to speak!

And people do know about the Holy Trinity and about the Holy Spirit and about the Holy Eucharist.

And they argue about these things and fight about these things and about the Virgin Mary and everything else.

But if we were strictly following the pattern and the teaching of ancient Christianity, we would refuse to discuss these things with anyone who has not accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior and been baptized and entered into the life of the Church.

Why wouldn't we do it?

Well, it wouldn't only be because we're forbidden to cast the pearls before the swine, as the Lord Jesus said, and not to speak to mysteries outside.

As it says even in the synoptic gospels, the Lord says to his disciples,

"To you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to those outside I speak in parables."

So the point is that those within the Church know the mysteries and come to know the mysteries.

So we should be very, very careful.

And I think if some people would want to engage us into discussions about the Trinity, like how you can believe one God, three Gods, and all this stuff,

or about Mary and how Mary is the Theotokos,

or about the Holy Eucharist—is it really the Body and Blood of Christ and all this kind of thing,

I think that we should just very politely say to such people:

We do not want to discuss this with you, if you don't mind.

We're very ready to discuss Jesus, his teaching, his life, and especially we're ready to discuss his crucifixion and his death and his resurrection,

and we're very ready to discuss that according to the Scriptures, according to the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets, according to the history of Israel,

but we are not ready to discuss the inner mysteries of the Faith with you.

And not only because we don't want to defile them in any way, or pervert them or twist them,

but it's also a matter of charity, because until you believe in the risen Christ who was crucified, you can't understand these things.

Your mind is still darkened. You have not yet been illumined by baptism.

And baptism in the Church is called holy illumination.

It's a receiving of light. It's an opening of the eyes.

And we'll see through this whole period how the signs in St. John's Gospel are all about illumination, washing, seeing, coming to know, coming to understand.

As we go through this season, we'll pay attention to that.

But what we want to see for now, for today, is that the Gospel according to St. John is in this season, and it begins with the prologue on Pascha night,

and then on the Sunday after, the anti-Pascha, the kind of antithesis.

You might say Pascha is the thesis, and Thomas Sunday is the antithesis,

or Pascha Sunday is what is the first theological contemplation in the deepest way about who Christ is, and then at the end of the Gospel, as a recapitulation of the Gospel, in the story with Thomas, then you have all of this affirmed again, but now concerning the risen Christ.

And so the story of Thomas goes on that eight days later, the doors are shut again, the Lord comes again,

he says, "Peace be with you" again, which we say in church all the time,

and then he says to Thomas, "Put out your finger here and see my hands.

Put out your hand, place it in my side, and be not unbelieving, but believing.

Be not faithless, but be faithful."

And then you have this marvelous proclamation of Thomas.

It says: Thomas answered him and said, "My Lord and my God":

"The Lord of me and the God of me" is what it says literally in Greek,

"ho kyrios mou kai ho theos mou," with a definite article, "the Lord and the God of me."

And this is the only place in Scripture—in the gospels in any case—where Jesus is called the God.

In the prologue he's called God, and here he is called God, and that's the recapitulation.

So let's look at it a little bit more closely to see how this beginning of the gospel and the ending of the gospel are compared to each other,

and how the ending of a gospel is a recapitulation of the entire gospel, as it begins with the prologue in the very beginning.

And of course, we should just remember that all, practically all, biblical writing is done this way.

The beginning is always an affirmation of certain things, then you have a laying out of the story, then you have a center point—

which I believe in St. John's Gospel, the center point is the raising of Lazarus—

and then you have a contemplation of what all that means,

and then the ending, with the crucifixion and death and resurrection of Christ, recapitulates the beginning.

So for example, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you have the passion story and the death and resurrection of Christ recapitulating the narratives about Christ's conception, birth, infancy, and baptism in the Jordan.

So that begins the gospel, and then it ends with the passion, death, and resurrection.

In St. John, it begins with the prologue, and then it ends with Thomas.

Now one more point here before we take a look at comparing the prologue to the event of Thomas,

we should know that most likely the Gospel of St. John originally ended, literally ended, and literarily ended, with the narrative about Thomas,

this providential narrative of the apostle being absent and then being present and seeing the risen Lord and proclaiming him, "my Lord and my God," seeing his flesh with the nails and the marks of the spear and so on.

Probably it ended there originally, because if you read the last verse of that particular 20th chapter, it sounds just very much like an ending.

It says: Thomas proclaims to Christ, "My Lord and my God."

Jesus says to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen

and yet believed."

And then it says: Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book.

But these are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and, believing, you may have life in his name.

It sounds like an ending, but then the gospel starts up again and there's a 21st chapter,

and some Church Fathers and modern contemporary scholars and commentators, they kind of explain to us that it may be very much the case that this chapter was added or was a kind of afterword that was very early, obviously very early, not many centuries later, but right away,

because there probably was a controversy among the Christians about the place of Peter, because Peter had denied the Lord, and he denied him three times.

And so in this chapter, you have the risen Lord appearing to the apostles again, and it even names who was there:

Peter and Thomas and Nathanael and James and John (the sons of Zebedee), and two other disciples were there, so you had a good crowd of the twelve there,

and Peter goes fishing, and Christ appears, and they know it's the Lord, and they catch all these fish,

and then when they break the fast, Jesus breaks the fast with the apostles on the shore, with those fish, with the breaking of the bread, and with the fish, as a revelation to the disciples after he was raised from the dead,

then you have this narrative about Jesus asking Peter three times if he loves him.

He says, "Do you love me, Simon son of Jonah; Simon son of John, do you love me?"

And he says, "Tend my sheep."

Then he asks him again, "Do you love me?"

He says, "Feed my sheep."

And he asks him again, "Feed my lambs."

So he asks him three times,

and Peter, with his kind of volatile character, even the third time, he gets kind of angry.

He says, "Why do you keep asking me? I've told you already. You know that I love you."

And then the Lord says to him, "Truly, truly, I tell you, when you were young, you went where you wanted.

When you're old, you're going to be taken where you don't want to go."

And he showed this, it says in the gospel, by how he was going to die, being taken in chains to Rome and be crucified.

And then it ends where he says to Peter, "Follow me."

And it's like an original calling.

And so, many Church Fathers, like, for example, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great of Rome, they point out that this narrative most likely was a kind of demonstration of the reinstatement of Peter

as not only one of the apostles, but as the leader of the apostles, even though he had denied him three times.

And so it was kind of obliterating the denials.

It was a kind of reaffirmation of the love of Peter, of his repentance,

and he hears the words again, "Follow me."

And then he is called, once again, to be one among the twelve, the leader of the twelve.

And of course, there will be twelve after Pentecost, because Matthias will be elected by lot to replace Judas.

Because there has to be twelve, because there's twelve tribes of Israel, and twelve is a symbolic number.

Then the gospel actually ends in its present form, where Peter asks, "What about John?"

And the Lord says, "If I want him to remain until I come, what's that to you? You follow me."

And so a rumor spread that John was never going to die, but the Lord says, "I didn't say that. I just said, If I would that he would remain, you follow me."

And then it claims that it is this disciple who is writing these things. It's the Gospel according to St. John.

And then you have another ending, another last sentence, which says:

But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

And so this last sentence is very similar to the last sentence in the 20th chapter where it says:

These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, believing, you may have life in His name.

And then it says: If everything were written, the world itself could not contain the books.

So here we have the prologue and then this conclusion of the gospel,

kind of the thesis is in the prologue, the antithesis is in the Thomas story,

and then you have the synthesis in the Christian faith itself, the vision of the entire Gospel itself.

Now when we look at the prologue, what is read on Pascha night at the Divine Liturgy, and compare it to the narrative about Thomas at the end of the gospel, we see very many interesting and very significant things.

First of all, the Gospel according to St. John begins with the very words with which the Bible begins, the Book of Genesis: "In the beginning."

So in Genesis you have: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was void, and there was darkness, and then God says, 'Let there be light.'"

Now the prologue, which patterns that, says: In the beginning was the Logos, the Word, the Devar in Hebrew,

and this Devar of God, the Devar Yagve, was with God, pros ton Theon,

it was, it's a funny expression in Greek: was with him, toward him, around him, accompanying him.

God was never without this Devar, this Logos, this Word.

And then it actually says not only that the Word was with God, pros ton Theon, but that the Word was God, the Word was divine, the Word was Theos.

Sometimes people point out there's no definite article there,

not the Word was the God, because "the God," usually in the Bible, virtually always, means God the Father,

but that the Son is also Theos, that he is God.

And then it says: All things were made through him; without him was not anything made that was made.

Perhaps a better translation would be: All things came to be through him, and nothing came to be that is, except through him or by him.

Then it says: In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

The light was shining in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

So you have the Logos being called the light.

He was in the light. He was the life. The life and the light.

And here, you have not only a reminder, kind of, you can't help reading that without thinking of the first words of the Bible.

God says, "Let there be light," and the light is shining, and the darkness is separated from the light.

And the Holy Fathers point out that that light did not mean sunlight, because you don't have the sun until the third day of creation in the biblical story.

That's to show that the light comes from God, and that the light is God.

And the Scripture speaks again and again that God is light; in God is no darkness at all. God is dwelling in unapproachable light.

Light belongs to God, and that light, it breaks into the darkness and chaos of the non-being when God creates the world in the beginning.

Now, in St. John's Gospel, three times, Jesus is called the light of the world.

He says, "I am the light. I am the light of the world." And so, illumination is coming from him.

God is the Lord and has shown us light. He has revealed the light to us. He has shined upon us, as we say in Epiphany.

Now, here what you have at the end is Thomas in that room eight days later,

and Christ now, the risen Christ, the enfleshed Christ, showing himself to Thomas, revealing himself to him.

And in that room, in that narrative of Thomas, Thomas will now call him the risen Lord, touching his flesh, his hands, his side, God, "the Lord and God of me."

So the Logos is God in the prologue, and the risen Christ is God in the narrative of Thomas.

And you have that parallel there, a kind of recapitulation from the eternal divine Logos to the risen Man, Jesus, with his wounded hands and his wounded side.

He is then proclaimed as God and as life, because he is risen from the dead.

So you have this connection between the prologue and the Thomas story.

Jesus is life. Jesus is light. Jesus is God. Jesus is the Logos.

It's shining in the darkness, and Thomas is now illumined to see.

And then, in the prologue, it speaks about John the Baptist bearing witness to the light, that all might believe through him.

And in St. John's Gospel, this, "that all might believe," it runs through the entire gospel again and again, "that all may believe."

That's how it begins; that's how it ends.

Certainly in the Thomas story, it actually says it in so many words.

It says, "These things are written."

Why?

"So that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, believing, you may have life in his name."

Now this, "in his name," is very important, because in the prologue of the Gospel, which is read on Pascha night, it says: The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.

And by the way, that's probably the proper translation.

Sometimes it says: The true light that enlightens every man, or every human being, was coming into the world.

That's the proper, because sometimes people say: The true light that enlightens every man who came into the world.

Well, the "who came into the world" doesn't refer to the anthropos, to the man.

It refers to the light, that the light was coming into the world.

Then it says in the prologue, this light, this Logos of God, the word and wisdom of God, was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.

And this, I believe, doesn't refer to the Incarnation. It refers to the indwelling of God through his Word in creation,

that the cosmos is filled with the wisdom and the words of God.

You know, it's kind of like what St. Paul says in the letter to the Romans,

that the invisible things of God were known in creation, and if people offered him praise and glory and gratitude and eucharistia, thanksgiving, they would know God.

They would just know God in the things that are.

And people were created to know God because God was in the world.

Through his Word, through his Spirit, he's indwelling everything that exists.

So the prologue says he was in the world. The world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.

And according to St. Paul, it did not know him because it refused to offer glory and gratitude. It refused to praise and to thank.

Then it says he came to his own home, and his own people received him not.

And that, of course, is the coming of the Word to Israel, and then the coming of Christ to Israel, who brings the word of God.

But then it says, "but to all who received him, who believed," and then it says, "in his name."

Now in Thomas at the end it will say "that you may have life in his name,"

and that's a very particular Johannine, St. John expression about the name, believing in the name, being preserved in the name, being kept in the name.

So that name means the very presence; the name means the presence of the person.

And when you say, "in his name," it means in him, in everything he is, stands for, teaches.

So it says, who all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

So there's this new birth. And the newly baptized would know what that means because they were just illumined by dying with Christ, arising with him into newness of life, and being born again.

And actually the better translation of that is not born again. It's born from above. That's the St. John thing.

You have to be born from above. It's not enough just to be born biologically from your earthly mother.

You've got to be born from above, born through faith.

And so they were born not of blood, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.

Now in the prologue you have the centerpiece.

And if you interpret this chiastically, this is the high point of the prologue.

"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father."

Now that's recapitulated in the narrative of Thomas, because he sees!

In the prologue it says, we have beheld his glory. Now the glory of God fills all creation.

But now, as the Apostle Paul also says, the glory is shining from the face of the risen Christ.

St. Paul says it clearly in the Corinthian letters, in the Colossian letter, in the Ephesian letter, that the glory of God, the kabod yagve, which shows that the presence and the indwelling of God is there.

And by the way, this expression, the Word became flesh, it's an allusion to the kabod yagve in the Old Testament, the shekhina.

In fact, the verb is not "dwelt"; it's pitched his tent among us.

The Word pitched his tent. He made his indwelling, his shekhina.

He brought the glory of God in fleshly form to us, and we saw it. We beheld his glory.

And in Thomas, this glory is seen in the risen Christ.

The glory shines from the face of Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Logos incarnate,

and it shines through his flesh, again through those marks in his hands, through that spear mark in his side.

Now the Logos is enfleshed, and you behold the glory of God in the risen Christ.

And Jesus said that to the apostles before his crucifixion.

When Philip said to Jesus, "Show us the Father, and we'll be satisfied,"

Jesus says, "Have I been with you so long, and you still don't understand?

He who sees me sees the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?"

Now we see God, the Father, in the face of his Son, crucified, raised, and glorified.

And so the glory of God and the presence of God is now in the risen Christ, bearing in his flesh the marks of crucifixion.

That's what Thomas sees, and that's why Thomas proclaims to him, "My Lord and my God."

And then the prologue says it this way:

And from his fullness have we all received grace upon grace. For law, the law, was given through Moses.

But charis kai aletheia, the grace and the truth—and there's definite articles there in Greek, not just grace and truth, but the grace and the truth—came through Jesus Christ.

Then you have this marvelous sentence:

No one has ever seen God, the only begotten Son—

and some ancient texts actually say the only begotten God—

who is in the bosom or the loins or the inners of the Father,

he has made him known.

And that "made him known" literally in Greek is exegisato.

He has exegeted him. He has declared him. He has interpreted him.

So Jesus as the Word is the living interpretation of the Father. He's the living exegesis of the Father.

But again you have the verb "to see."

No one has ever seen God.

The only begotten Son, who dwells in the loins, the bosom, the inner parts of God, the deep things of God, he has declared him, shown him, made him known, exegeted him.

And you flip over to Thomas again.

And he says that he sees him. He sees him. And he sees the God who is invisible.

But he sees him now literally in the incarnate flesh of the crucified, raised, and glorified Christ.

And then as it's written in the prologue that all this is written that we may believe.

It says John says, "I bore witness that they may believe, those who believe in his name."

So here you have Thomas now, believing.

And then the Lord Jesus risen from the dead says to him,

"Have you believed because you have seen me?"

And he did see. He did see.

And he says, "Blessed are they who have not seen as you have, who have not touched, who have not beheld the incarnate word of God,

who became flesh and pitched his tent among us and was crucified and went into Sheol and died and is raised and glorified.

You see that Thomas, and you're blessed.

But blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."

And hopefully that's us.

We have not seen as Thomas saw, but we have seen in so many other ways and in the Holy Eucharist and in the doors being shut and receiving

and eating and drinking the flesh and blood of the crucified and risen Lord, we then share in that blessing.

And it's interesting that in the liturgy the doubt of Thomas is called blessed.

In fact, in the translations in English it's often called blessed or wonderful.

In Greek the word is kalos which means beautifully good:

how beautifully good was the doubt of [Thomas].

It says in the verses at vespers on Thomas Sunday, Lord I call.

And then in the aposticha, the verses at the end of vespers, it says Thomas's doubt gave birth to certain faith.

And it says Thomas's doubt changed to certain faith, and he cried fervently, so this doubt is providential.

The doubt of Thomas is so that he could have this experience and we could know about it, we could hear about it, we could relate to it,

and we could hear the wonderful words that if we believe, we are blessed with the same blessing that he has.

Now this doubt is blessed because Thomas did not say, "I don't care if that Christ comes through the doors being shut and stands here; I'll never believe."

He never said that.

He said, "If I see it, then I will believe," and that's why the doubt is blessed.

Thomas was not a skeptic.

He didn't say, "I'll never believe no matter what."

That's a sin. To have that attitude is simply sinful.

If a person would say, "You can show me something but I'm not going to believe it because I don't want to," that's the height of arrogance and pride.

But a humble person would say, "If you show me, I'll believe."

And a humble person with the temperament of Thomas might even say, "And unless I do really see, I'm not going to believe."

Now we can say that if we're ready to believe, if we're ready to follow, if we're ready to die with him, because Thomas says that in John's Gospel too—"Let us go with him that we may die with him"—

Well, he flees at the time of the crucifixion, but after the resurrection Thomas does die with him.

He is put to death for him, as were all the other apostles with the exception of John according to Tradition.

But Thomas is there not simply putting God to the test or being skeptical.

He's there saying, "You saw the risen Christ, you other apostles. I wasn't here. I want to see, too.

And unless I see what you're telling me, then I'm not going to be one of the twelve who are witnessing to the resurrection."

Now the apostles among the twelve had to witness to the resurrection. They had to see the risen Lord.

And in this part of the Gospel of St. John we hear about how Thomas came to see him.

And that that story is for us. That Gospel narrative, that word of God in St. John's Gospel, is for us.

And we must also believe and it's written that we might believe.

How many times we've heard that already:

But we have this testimony, this martyria, that Christ is risen from the dead.

And in St. John's Gospel we have this wonderful presentation where the theological statement at the beginning of the Gospel about the divine Logos is completed at the end of the Gospel

in reference to the risen Christ in his flesh bearing the marks of his passion.

So this is what we celebrate on Thomas Sunday

and it's interesting on this particular Sunday it's kind of a regular Sunday service.

All the other Sundays until Pentecost will be a kind of a repeat of Pascha.

At every vespers they'll sing the Paschal verses again. The Paschal Canon will be sung at matins.

On Thomas Sunday you have the Paschal Canon sung as the so-called katavasia, the second ode of the canon.

But on Thomas Sunday it's all about Thomas. It's all about the Resurrection. It's all about the witness of the risen Lord.

It's all about the fact that the risen Christ is Lord and God.

He is our God. He is our Lord. He is the one who is God together with the Father who begot him before all ages.

That's what we celebrate and the great Feast of Antipascha, the feast called Thomas Sunday.

on the Sunday after the Sunday of the Lord's Resurrection.

For Ancient Faith Radio this is Fr. Thomas Hopko.