Happy Easter From the Cornerstone Forum
"If Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, your faith also is vain."
(1 Cor 15:14)
But how do we know that Christ has been raised?
This extraordinary painting -- The Incredulity of Thomas -- was on the walls of a little church in the French town of Loches when experts discovered, in 1999, that it was an original Caravaggio. The timing of the discovery may have been as providential as the painting itself was prophetic. Caravaggio completed the painting roughly five years after the birth of René Descartes, the father of modernity, the philosopher of methodological doubt.
John's Gospel suggests that Thomas responded to Jesus' invitation to probe his wounds with an immediate act of faith: "My Lord and my God." Painters before Caravaggio, however, had shown Thomas timidly and diffidently touching Christ's wounded side. But Caravaggio's Thomas is almost attacking Christ's wound with an aggressive, clinical, and forensic determination. Indeed, one wonders: How much farther into Christ's side will Thomas have to probe in order to overcome his doubts? In contrast to the Thomas of John's Gospel, this quintessentially modern Thomas appears to be looking -- not for proof of the Resurrection -- but for confirmation of his doubts about it. The artist has brilliantly captured what was to become the spirit of the modern age -- a skepticism of the will masquerading as an honest search for truth.
When Jesus replied to Thomas' doubt with the words: "Blesséd are those who have not seen and have believed" (John 20:29), he was saying that there is a better way to come to Christian truth than by sifting through empirical evidence. Faith is most certainly knowledge, but knowledge of a higher and subtler order than that of worldly science.
The Resurrection was an event. Some people were there; they saw the risen Christ. Strangely, Jesus himself seems to say that those who witnessed the Resurrection were at a disadvantage with respect to those who would learn of it from others. It was the latter, not the former, whom he pronounced blesséd. We know the Lord has risen because we have been told so by a great cloud of witnesses. How else could we account for the river of sanctity and love which has flowed down to us from age to age, and by which Christians have ever and again been revived?
Have a blesséd Easter,
Gil Bailie & Randy Coleman-Riese
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