Sunday of Thomas, 2026

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THE SUNDAY OF THOMAS

John 20:19–31

Oops!

She fed the dying. She held the hands of the forgotten. She gave her life for the poorest of the poor in the streets of Calcutta. If you were to name a saint of the twentieth century, most of us would say: Mother Teresa.

But here is something most of us do not know. For the last fifty years of her life — fifty years — Mother Teresa lived in almost total spiritual darkness. After her death, her private letters were published, and the world was stunned. She wrote: 

“Where is my faith? Even deep down … there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. … If there be God — please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul.”

The woman the whole world called a living saint — was living in doubt.

Ugh!

And of course, we know another doubter. His name is Thomas. The disciples come to him breathless, barely able to get the words out: “We have seen the Lord!” And Thomas — who loved Jesus, who had followed Him, who had said he was willing to die with Him — Thomas says: 

“Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”

Doubt. Right there, in the Gospel. In one of the Twelve.

And perhaps some of us know this place. Doubt can creep in when suffering doesn’t end. When prayers seem to go unanswered. When we watch someone we love suffer and no rescue comes. When we encounter hypocrisy in the Church — perhaps even in ourselves. When grief hollows us out, or burnout strips away every feeling of God’s presence, or the intellectual questions pile up faster than the answers do.

And then comes the deepest wound of all: the shame. We think — if I were a real Christian, I wouldn’t doubt. If I were a true Orthodox believer — an ortho-dox, a “right-believer” — I would have certainty. My faith would be solid. I wouldn’t feel this emptiness.

And so the doubt doubles back on itself. Not only do we doubt God — we begin to doubt our right to stand here, to receive the Eucharist, to call ourselves part of this community. We feel like frauds. Failures.

Aha!

But I want to offer you a distinction this morning. A crucial one. There is a difference between doubt and unbelief.

Unbelief is a settled decision. It is the closed door, the turned back, the resolved conclusion: I’m done. I’m out. Unbelief is Thomas walking away from the other disciples and never returning.

But that is not what Thomas did. Thomas stayed. He was still in the room. He was still with the community, still wrestling, still arguing, still present. His doubt was not an exit — it was a cry. It was the honest uncertainty of a man who wanted to believe but didn’t know how.

And that distinction changes everything. Because doubt, as I am using the word, is not the opposite of faith. Doubt is faith still engaged. Doubt is the open hand, not the closed fist.

And an open hand can receive something.

Whee!

A week later, Jesus comes again. And He goes straight to Thomas. He doesn’t rebuke him. He doesn’t say, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” He says: 

“Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”

The risen Christ met Thomas precisely in his doubt. The wound in Christ’s side became the door through which Thomas entered into the deepest confession of faith in all the Gospels: “My Lord and my God!”

And here is the wonder: Thomas goes on to become the founder of the Church in India — the very subcontinent where Mother Teresa would one day serve. The doubter becomes the apostle. The man who needed to touch the wounds becomes the one who carries the Resurrection to the ends of the earth.

Doubt was not the end of Thomas’s story. It was the beginning.

And so it was with Mother Teresa. Her darkness never fully lifted. But she served anyway. She showed up anyway. She stayed in the room. And the Church has now opened her cause for canonization — not despite her dark night of the soul, but, in some mysterious way, as a witness through it.

True faith, brothers and sisters, is not certainty. Certainty is a feeling, and feelings rise and fall like weather. True faith is assurance — and assurance is different. Assurance is not rooted in our inner climate. It is rooted in the character of God, who is, as we sing, the ground and foundation of all that exists. God does not change because we are having a dark week. The Resurrection is not undone because we feel empty on a Tuesday.

In fact, doubt can deepen us. It drives us to ask harder questions, to read more carefully, to pray more honestly, to seek out the Fathers and the saints, to sit with the mystery rather than settling for easy answers. In a paradoxical way, doubt can make us better Orthodox Christians — more rooted, more humble, more real.

Yeah!

So here is what I want to leave with you this morning.

What doubts are you harboring right now? Not the polished, approved thoughts you bring to church — the real ones. The ones that wake you at 3 a.m. The prayers that feel like they’re bouncing off the ceiling. The parts of the Creed you say with your mouth while your heart hangs a question mark over them.

Don’t bury them. Don’t perform certainty you don’t have. Instead — stay in the room. Stay with the community. Stay at the Table. Bring your doubts to the icons, to the Scriptures, to your confessor, to a trusted friend in the Faith.

Because the Risen Christ is not afraid of your questions. He showed Thomas His wounds. He will show you something too — not necessarily what you expected, not necessarily on your timeline, but He will meet you in the place of your honest seeking.

Doubt, held with integrity and kept in community, is not a wall between you and Christ. It is a wound — and wounds, we have just seen, are exactly where the Risen Lord asks us to place our hands.

Christ is Risen!