In the evening of the day when Mary Magdalene began to spread the word that she had met the crucified Jesus, risen from the dead, Jesus appeared to some of His Disciples in the upper room.

Although the doors were locked, He came among them and showed them the wounds in His hands and side. However, one of the 12, Thomas, was not there. When the others told him what had happened, he was not convinced. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in His hands,” he told them, “and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in His side, I will not believe.”

And so the stage was set for one of the most dramatic scenes in the Gospels, when the risen Jesus met doubting Thomas.

Eight days later, we are told, Jesus came again. This time Thomas was there. And Jesus invited him to do what he had insisted he would have to do, if he were to believe, to put his finger in the wounded hands and his hand into the gash in Jesus’s side. Artists, seeking to capture the moment, have often shown Thomas doing so, but the text indicates that it was not necessary. Thomas simply declares: “My Lord and my God.”

But then Jesus challenges him: “Have you believed because you have seen me?” How often we say, “Seeing’s believing”. But is it? If Thomas believes only because he sees, we may wonder whether he really believes at all. As he sees, he has no need to believe. And indeed Jesus adds words that have comforted many: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (John xx, 24-9).

Isn’t that the essence of faith, belief without sight? Faith and doubt, on the other hand, we normally regard as mutually exclusive. But are they? Maybe not. Perhaps doubting Thomas has a lesson to teach us.

It is important to remember that Jesus’s presence in that room was unlike the presence of anyone else there. His Resurrection was not resuscitation. The Gospels tell us what happened, but not as simple verbal photographs. They teach us about events by showing us their significance. Jesus was really there, indicated by the way previously He had shown the Disciples His wounds and now by inviting Thomas to touch Him: He was not a figment of their imagination. Yet He came among them in spite of the doors being locked. Risen to new life, His was a presence of a different kind. He was not seen by those who did not believe. As Thomas saw, he cannot have stopped believing. How then are we to understand his doubting? Faith and doubt may not be as incompatible as we had supposed.

Perhaps Thomas was not there when Jesus first appeared to the others because he had gone off alone, brokenhearted with grief, struggling with guilt at the death of his friend. For according to John, when Jesus decided to disregard the dangers of going up to Jerusalem, Thomas had been the one to declare, “Let us also go, that we may die with Him” (John xi, 16). But he had not died. He had deserted him like the rest. Hence his grief and guilt. Maybe what we call his doubt, his reluctance to believe news that must have seemed too good to be true, was a fruit of love. Faith is matured when we realise that what we believe may not be true. There is a passage in Graham Greene’s novel Monsignor Quixote when the old priest dreams that angels had saved Jesus from the Cross. Instead of agony, death and the empty tomb, Jesus had stepped down in triumph, honoured by Jews and Romans alike, while His mother smiled through her tears: “There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt and no room for faith at all.” The old man then wakes, feeling the chill of despair and praying to be delivered from the “Saharan desert” of faith without doubt. Doubt need not be the enemy of faith, but its ally. Thomas knew faith, wounded by doubt. Faith is deepened when we wrestle with ambiguity. Then indeed they are blessed who without seeing have come to believe.

Monsignor Roderick Strange is the Rector of the Pontifical Beda College, Rome