Easter 2 2026

John 29.19-end

Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe. 

The disciples have just excitedly informed Thomas that “We have seen the Lord”, and this is his response, which must have disappointed, perhaps even exasperated and aggravated the others. 

As some of you may have heard, on Easter Sunday last week, we considered what it might mean to “see the Lord”, as Mary Magdalen had, and these other disciples too. Whatever it mean for us must be at least partly different for them, who could indeed, as we cannot, see with their eyes the risen Christ, his risen Body, in the flesh. An analogous question arises here with St Thomas, even though at this point, he has not yet been presented with the opportunity to touch the Lord’s wounds. Still, that opportunity is entirely absent to us, on this side of the Ascension. 

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I don’t know if you are any good at remembering sermons; I’m certainly not—neither my own nor those of others, which I’m sure (or I hope!) says nothing about the quality of the preaching. But there is a Good Friday sermon I heard many years ago that sticks in my mind, almost entirely because it introduced me to a poem by George Herbert, the 17th village priest whose manual for country parsons has been an inspiration in my own work among you. 

(This is perhaps less true of his chapter on preaching, which ends by advising that sermons should be no longer than one hour… Strictly speaking, I have kept to this advice very well, but perhaps not in the way Herbert intended. In any case, the little book is probably worth a read before preparing your parish profile during the vacancy, though I should want you that some years ago, a priest wrote a book called “If you see George Herbert on the road, shoot him”; I will also add that the priest in question has left parish ministry…)

The Bag, published posthumously with Herbert’s other poems in the collection titled The Temple, comprises seven verses, each of six lines. I give you the final two here, which is in the voice of Christ, who says:

If ye have any thing to send or write,

I have no bag, but here is room:

Unto my Fathers hands and sight,

Beleeve me, it shall safely come.

That I shall minde, what you impart;

Look, you may put it very neare my heart.

Or if hereafter any of my friends

Will use me in this kinde, the doore

Shall still be open; what he sends

I will present, and somewhat more,

Not to his hurt.  Sighs will convey

Any thing to me.  Harke, Despair away.

In his characteristically visceral style, this time quite literally, Jesus is himself the eponymous bag, and his wounds their opening, into which we may insert our prayers and supplications, and through which Christ brings these needs of ours into himself, “near [his] heart”.

And these wounds also are an open door, an entrance not just for our prayers but for our whole selves, into a realm where all despairing comes to an end because hope has found its fulfilment after all.

For Herbert, then, touching the wounds of Jesus is much less an act of will on our part, which serves as a precondition to faith, as implied by this exchange between Thomas and the other disciples. Indeed, it is scarcely an act on our part at all, but almost entirely of our Lord’s initiative, as it were, taking us by the hand and pulling us to him, and even taking us into him, into his heart. If it is a prelude to faith at all, it is as an invitation, a welcoming into friendship with God. 

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There is another way of thinking about what it means to touch the wound of Christ, which emphasises our own agency a little bit more. Last Sunday, I submitted to you that to see Christ is to see the world in light of his life, death, and resurrection, which is to see it from the perspective of the unconditional love of the weak and vulnerable, poor and oppressed, sick and suffering, even and perhaps especially in the face of powers that would rather we marginalise or even persecute those who fail to conform to our description of deserving moral patients. 

If this is at least partly what it means to see Christ, then to touch him—to touch his wounds—is to reach out and touch the wounded, in whose wounds and woundedness Jesus himself participates. It is, after all, one thing to see the needs of the world, and to see the needy as real persons with the real dignity that is inherently theirs as children of God; and it is another thing again to touch them, that is to walk alongside them, to fight for them, to break bread with them, that is to behold them not abstractly or anonymously, but—in they image of Christ—incarnationally, in the flesh.

Unless I put my hand in his side, I will not believe, he says; and maybe also, to believe is to touch his wound, and no one who fails to do so fails truly to believe. A faith, certainly a Christian faith, that sees but does not touch might not be seeing rig