“These things did Thomas count as real:
The warmth of blood, the chill of steel,
The grain of wood, the heft of stone,
The last frail twitch of flesh and bone.

The vision of his skeptic mind
Was keen enough to make him blind
To any unexpected act
Too large for his small world of fact.

His reasoned certainties denied
That one could live when one had died,
Until his fingers read like Braille
The marking of the spear and nail.

May we, O God, by grace believe
And thus the risen Christ receive,
Whose raw, imprinted palms reached out
And beckoned Thomas from his doubt.”

J. Kirk Richards, “Thomas Who Doubted,” 2008. Oil on panel, 26 x 12.25 in.

This hymn appears in the Psalter Hymnal of the Christian Reformed Church (Oxford University Press, 1984), with music by Carol Doran. For more information visit www.hymnary.org.

For more on “Doubting Thomas,” see these two older posts: “Jesus Invites Us to Touch, See, and Know” and “What Makes Jesus Happy?, Part 1: Revealing Himself to Us.” I also recommend this recent blog post by Pastor J. D. Greear of The Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina: “Feeling Christ’s Wounds Changes Us Forever.”