"My Lord and My God"
Thomas, Holy Week, and the sacred space between promise and proof
During this Holy Week, I’ve been reading and meditating on the story of Thomas from John 20:24–31.
Holy Week drops us into the deep end of the story—the suffering, the silence, the resurrection. It’s a week soaked in contradiction: betrayal and hope, grief and glory. And by Easter morning, we’re supposed to feel the shock of it all. Death has been undone. Something new has begun.
I’m the first to say the resurrection isn’t just a one-and-done miracle to be admired from a distance. It’s the first spark of something much bigger. Jesus walks out of the tomb, and with him comes New Creation. Not metaphor. Not good vibes. Actual, real-deal renewal of the world.
But we also know—we see and feel—that the world isn’t exactly running on full resurrection power just yet. Revelation 21 gives us the final picture: God declaring, “Behold, I am making all things new.” It’s coming, but it’s not all here. So here we are, smack dab in the middle of this divine renovation project. We’re people of the resurrection living in a world that still groans (Rom. 8).
And that’s why I’ve been thinking about Thomas.
You know the story. Jesus appears to the disciples after the resurrection, but Thomas isn’t there. Classic timing. And when the others tell him, “We’ve seen the Lord!” Thomas responds like a guy who’s had one too many letdowns: “Unless I see the marks… unless I touch them… I won’t believe it.”
Cue centuries of sermons calling him “Doubting Thomas.” But Thomas isn’t a cynic. He’s just honest. He doesn’t want to believe in a ghost story. Too much is at stake. He wants Jesus to be real—bodily, scarred but alive.
Had Thomas been with his friends that first night, he likely would have believed too (John 20:19–23). But he wasn’t. He missed the moment. And then he had to sit in it—for a week.
Have you ever thought about what that in-between week was like for Thomas?
The others were buzzing with resurrection energy. Joyful. Different. They’d seen Jesus. They were changed. But Thomas? He was still stuck in Saturday, in silence, in sorrow. Watching everyone else move into Sunday while he still carried Good Friday in his chest.
I imagine that week might have been lonely. Long. Confusing. The spectrum of emotions. Maybe Thomas couldn’t quite allow his imagination to go there. Maybe his friends tried to convince him again and again.
“No, really, we saw him, we heard him, he breathed on us. You gotta believe us!”
And maybe Thomas wanted to believe them. Maybe part of him whispered, “It’s true!”
But then another voice crept in: “Look around you. Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t be that childish. Don’t let yourself imagine something so ridiculous.”
Because imagination, when it comes to faith, isn’t child’s play—it’s risky. It’s faith!
It’s opening yourself up to a new reality that, if false, could shatter you all over again. But if it’s true—if Jesus really lives—then it means you’re being made new. Even the dead can pulse with new life. The whole world hums again with possibility. We live in a world where heaven has already started reviving earth.
I think Thomas’s in-between was sacred. Because when Jesus finally comes again, Thomas doesn’t just catch up. He goes further than any of the others (John 20:28).
“My Lord and my God.”
It’s the most direct and profound confession in the Gospel of John.
Thomas gives voice to a faith that didn’t exist until after the resurrection. He must now imagine and articulate something brand new—a faith no one had imagined before—resurrection life in the middle of history!
And this is where the Christian imagination enters the “locked room.”
Which has always been a challenge for me. I’ve never been all that imaginative. Even as a kid, I wasn’t the one dreaming up magical lands or pretending my backyard treehouse was a castle. And if I was, it must not have been that great because I don’t remember it. I didn’t invent make-believe words or draw or color creatures that didn’t exist. I was too concrete. Too literal. I liked things that made sense. I prided myself on being “realistic”—on seeing the world as it is, not getting swept away in fantasy.
In a way, I carried that into my Christian faith, too. I wanted things I could “prove.” Doctrine that lined up. Systems that clicked into place (I’m trained in “Systematic Theology”). Faith was about believing the right things and knowing where the lines were.
Now, I still care about those things. But resurrection doesn’t fit neatly into that kind of thinking, not right now, anyway. It stretches beyond what’s "reasonable." It asks me not just to believe that Jesus bodily rose but to imagine that his rising means everything else is rising, too. It asks me to trust that God is already remaking the world, even though I live between its beginning and completed renovation. It calls me to see what I can’t always verify.
Reading Christian scholars, fiction writers, and poets has helped me here. My Christian imagination is growing!
The resurrection isn’t just about what happened to Jesus—it’s about what happens to us and to the world. It calls for a whole new way of imagining reality. If the resurrection is real—bodily, historical, world-tilting—then the rules of the old world no longer apply. Death isn’t the final word. Power doesn’t belong to empires. Pain and loss and violence don’t get to write the ending.
That’s only the beginning of a new kind of imagination—a Christian way of seeing.
Our resurrection hope isn’t escapist. It’s not about waiting to float off into the sky someday. God’s future has already begun in Jesus and is now by the Spirit at work through us. The resurrection calls us into this world—into our bodies, communities, work, hobbies, and relationships—as the spaces where resurrection is meant to blossom. It takes imagination to live like that’s true. To look at a world still in between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday and say, “New creation is happening here.”
That’s the faith-turned-sight Thomas witnessed on Sunday. Now bold enough to say “My Lord and my God,” even in a world still full of Roman crosses and locked doors. And that’s the renewed imagination we’re invited into during Holy Week.
Thomas believed because he had seen Jesus (John 20:29). And notice—Jesus doesn’t undo the grace he just gave him. But he is thinking of the ones who believe without seeing. To the ones who believe by the story, the Spirit, and the sacraments. To the ones who lean on imagination just as much as intellect. The ones who whisper, “It’s true!” and live in faith like it is.
Jesus says: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
A Holy Week Prayer:
Risen Christ,
You walked out of the grave and into the middle of our confusion,
not with judgment but with scars.
You met Thomas in between—his hope and fear, doubt and belief—
and you gave him not just proof,
but a new imagination.Give us that same grace.
In the in-between spaces where we wait and wonder,
breathe resurrection into our tired hope.
Teach us to see the world not as it is,
but as it is becoming through you.
Help us to live as people of the New Creation,
even when the old creation still clings.And when we say, like Thomas,
“My Lord and my God,”
may it come from faith,
from a mind of renewed imagination, from the powerful belief of trusting that you are making all things new—
starting with us.Amen!