The One Who Needed to Touch the Scars

By the evening of the day Mary met Jesus in the garden, his friends had all heard her news. They locked themselves in a room anyway, because they were afraid of the leaders who had him killed.

Then Jesus was standing among them. "Peace be with you," he said, and he showed them his hands and his side. Most of his closest friends saw him that night. Thomas was not there.

(The Bible never says where Thomas had gone. Wherever it was, it was the wrong evening to be out.)

Thomas was one of the twelve, and he was no coward. Once, when Jesus set off back toward Jerusalem, where people had just tried to stone him, Thomas told the others, "Let's go too, so we can die with him." But that brave talk was before Friday. On Friday Jesus was nailed to a cross and died there, and a soldier pushed a spear into his side to make sure.

So when his friends came running, Thomas folded his arms.

"We have seen the Lord!" they said.

"Unless I see the nail marks in his hands," said Thomas, "and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it."

(Thomas had made a list, and he meant every item on it.)

"Thomas, he was here!"

"Then you saw him," said Thomas. "I didn't."

For a whole week the others kept telling him, and for a whole week Thomas kept shaking his head.

Then the friends were inside the same house again, and this time Thomas was with them. The doors were locked. No one knocked, and no one turned a key. Jesus was simply there, in the middle of the room.

"Peace be with you," he said.

He turned to Thomas, and he used Thomas's own words. "Put your finger here, and look at my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe."

Jesus had not been in the room when Thomas made his list. He knew every word on it anyway.

John never tells us whether Thomas reached out and touched the scars. He only tells us what came out of Thomas's mouth.

"My Lord and my God!"

The friend who held out longest was the first person in John's book to call Jesus "my God."

Jesus said to him, "You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are the people who have not seen me and still believe."

Thomas got his look at the hands. But in a few weeks Jesus would go back up to his Father, and after that no one could reach out a finger and check.

So John, who was in that room both times, wrote it down for people who would never see the nail marks, "so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and have life in his name."

People started believing almost at once, and they still do. Jesus had blessed every one of them that night in the locked room, long before most of them were born.

And the one they believe in kept the marks of the nails, even in a body that will never die again. One day his friends will see those hands and know him the way Thomas did: Jesus, alive, with the scars still there.