For the first time I’m considering the connection between touching wounds and belief in my own story. A casual reading of this gospel narrative represents my earliest stages of faith and doubt. Thomas was a skeptic, an empirical thinker, a guy who needed proof. Hearsay and hopes wouldn’t cut it. His truth-tests were fair enough—firsthand observation of the facts. What happened is straightforward: Jesus was killed with nails and a spear. Thomas observes nail and spear holes in the risen Christ. A positive ID. Mind changes, intellectual assent is achieved, case closed. Next question?

Like Thomas I am a hard-wired skeptic. Though I have embraced the Christian story since childhood, it hasn’t come easy, and I have vivid memories of myself even as a small boy experimenting with simple prayers to see if they “worked.” Often as not, they didn’t. These days I get forwarded emails about miracles; usually I hit the delete key or occasionally, check them on snopes.com.

It’s a small matter to disregard flaky religious urban legends, but my story is marked by much deeper crises of faith. Higher education introduced me to rival worldviews and stiff challenges to my belief system. I learned the term theodicy, the age-old philosophical puzzle of suffering and evil. These intellectual jabs softened me up, and then came a devastating, affective right-hook: a loved one in pain. Long pain, followed by a year-long coma, a shattered family, and fervent unanswered prayers. The finality of death, followed by the anguished un-finality of grief.

All that, before I discovered justice and met the poor. In murky darkness under a bridge in an Asian city, I held a toddler dying from diarrhea. For lack of a little clean drinking water, or a doctor, or any ideas I could muster at the time, human life leaked out the back end of this little kid—and with it, what seemed left of my faith.

In earlier stages of my journey, evil and doubt were head-scratchers. With some more miles on me in hard places, unanswered questions themselves became a gut-wound—bleeding me of whatever faith and spirituality I had known. It became flat-out personal between me and God, a rage that simmered into testy mistrust. Finally, almost full circle, it became impersonal again—perhaps the silent God was absent or dead. The wound of doubt began to harden, to scab.

Then, this soul-rescuing invitation: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” It is only in hindsight I can recognize how this invitation, and my response, played out in my life. I continued to touch wounds. In slums, in orphanages, in my urban neighborhood, in my own spirit, I touched human suffering. I would come to recognize these sorrowful places as wounds of the painfully-present enfleshed Christ, not simply a distantly-absent deity. Nothing could be more intimate than this invitation to finger scars, to reach deep into his gashed body.

And, in not-so-distant hindsight I recognize the consolation of the prophet: “By his wounds we are healed.” It has pushed me to a deeper reading of the story of Thomas. Perhaps, Thomas had the sort of simple intellectual doubt that merely needed fixing with a little factual medical evidence. After reading the larger story, I doubt it. Here was a man who had urged his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16). Here was a man who, like the others in the end, “deserted him and fled” (Matthew 26:56). Here was a man shamed and disillusioned by God’s failure and his own, who likely carried his doubt not simply as a question but as a life-bleeding wound—even though it may have scabbed over with a cynical “show me.”

Such doubt can never be answered, only healed. How strange that it might be healed by touching wounds—the torn flesh of the world, the fresh scars of God.

I’ve got a little bronze trinket, rescued from the clearance bin, to remind me.

Scott Dewey
thanks to his bronze image, now knows one phrase in German
has family in Romania
hung out for 3 years in Bangkok slums, and loves going back
lives in a 110-year-old house in Denver
thinks about fishing most of the time