19When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” 24But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”26A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” 30Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
John 20:19-31 (NRSVue)
They were all scarred: deeply, irreparably, painfully.
They all died that day, in ways beyond the shocking powers of resurrection, in ways so complete they far surpassed even the might and power of the God to whom they’d already dedicated their lives. They saw their entire world dismantled overnight, and the central core of their lives – for years of their lives – be snatched from existence over the space of an afternoon. They were in emotional shock and wrestled with impending breakdown. One of their own betrayed them, to their faces! Another had betrayed their leader, to his face, to the soldiers of the occupation!
In John 20:19, the disciples were crippled with abject terror, in hiding partly for lack of any other, better, option. They were traumatised, bereft of hope, having lost the most important person in their lives, one arguably more central than their spouses, children, or parents.
Before we engage in any armchair fantasising, and start judging poor Thomas for his “doubts,” let’s engage in that lately-benighted, but essentially Christian, practice of empathy for just a bit. If you need to be reminded of what Thomas was dealing with, turn the Gospel of John back a few chapters, and re-read the Passion narrative. Re-read my framing above. Then go ahead and place yourself back in Thomas’s position, and game out how you’d respond. What do you think: should Christianity finally give this guy a break, and allow him the same humanity that we’re likely showing ourselves in our current moment of mass unease and global disorder?
Lest we forget, the power of the moment Jesus arrived in their hideout from out of nowhere, seemingly, simply does not transfer through the dry words of the Gospel text. We can only imagine it empathetically, attempting to find analogues to the experience of first seeing God’s promises die in real time, and then have all of those hopes restored in the blink of an eye. That level of emotional whiplash can only be fully comprehended when it is experienced personally. That kind of personal experience tends to permanently mark a person.
Except, guess what: one guy (equally scarred, mind you) wasn’t in the room, and shockingly, this traumatised-shock-victim needs a bit more proof (John 20:24-26). How dare he!
What does Thomas need to settle his doubts? The exact same things that his friends were able to experience firsthand – and crucially, didn’t have to ask to see: his wounds. The first time, Jesus just whips them out and says, “see! It’s me!” (John 20:21). Then Jesus gives all of them the Holy Spirit as well as power over sin and forgiveness (John 20: 22-23) This guy had to sit amongst his friends, all of whom have been profoundly transformed, laden with the most precious of gifts, and he’s the odd man out, on all of it.
For a week!
Could we maybe tell Jesus to be a bit more caring here and allow Thomas a second to probe in the same holes everyone else did a week ago, before admonishing him to lay aside his well-earned scepticism? Jesus inadvertently gave Christians for the next two thousand years (those who didn’t just see their entire world crumble, of course), the space to declare exactly how much more faith they’d retain in the same circumstances (John 20:29). I mean, Thomas immediately sees the reality in front of him and declares Jesus to be God (John 20:28). What more can we ask of him?
Especially because we are all Thomas now: we all have scars, and we’ve not been visited by the resurrected spirit of our hopes.
To be alive in 2026 is to live in chaos, but one rooted in the turmoil created by injecting sweeping, rapid change into a tightly-woven and interdependent global information and logistical system defined by ever-increasing interconnection. The chaos of 2026 is individual whimsy tearing at the infinitely complex web of relationships that define our world out of an impossible fantasy of returning to a golden past that never actually existed, where some had power and others dealt with it.
Yet, the whiplash of social change over the last decade proves, conclusively, that relationality, and not hierarchy, is the framework of the 21st century world. The meteoric – and global – rise of the far right is in close, intimate relationship with the global rise of social (especially gender and racial) justice and decolonialism movements. The COVID virus engaged in an intimate dance with the virology of bot farms, which in turn whipped a whirlwind to scatter AI slop and viral fake videos to the masses, infecting at the level of global society. Seemingly tiny shifts in one relatively minor area now inevitably have massive – global – ripple effects.
In other words, our world is now a highway during rush hour, where any driver can impact everyone else, throwing the entire road into chaos. Let me explain.
I regularly drive along a significant stretch of the northern half of the Garden State Parkway, often during rush hour. The Garden State serves as the “local” north-south highway along the entire New Jersey side of the New York metropolitan area. That stretch of highway crosses through the most densely populated stretch of the country, and it’s miles long. The highway carves a deep scar across an intricately-knit urban fabric that stretches clear across the state.
Yet, even its sometimes 10-lane bulk has to adapt to the reality of its circumstances, and as the fabric is woven tighter, the highway shrinks to six lanes, and begins to wind, serpentine, drifting and curving, all terrifyingly confined in tall concrete coffin-walls, filled to the brim with New Jersey drivers.
So: pack an overwhelming volume of cars driven by the notoriously impatient through a narrow, shoulder-less coffin gauntlet.
In other words: a system highly dependent on efficiency and precision, where any minor interruption to the continuous traffic stream immediately ripples through the entire system. Some disruption is inherent in the system, and will inevitably bend the traffic flow: bend a highway, and you inherently force traffic to slow. The mass flowing steadily along a highway must slow to adapt to turns and curves built into the fabric of the road, and consequences ripple. It should be unsurprising, therefore, that the truly significant shocks of a global pandemic, mass social movements, and multiple genocides occurring simultaneously have all caused epic snarls on the highway of the world.
What should still be shocking is when individual chaos creators act unilaterally – and completely selfishly – in ways that cause that tangled mess to become the equivalent of those days-long, epic traffic jams that make both global headlines and history. I have seen my life flash before my eyes due to the accrued consequences of the actions of one hideously selfish person, including the times that I was that hideously selfish person.
Traffic is real-time proof of our inherent interconnectedness, I’d argue, particularly when it’s often so very simple to note those who fail to see the inherently communal nature of highway driving. You know who I’m talking about: those who care only for their own concerns, and who derive a shocking amount of pleasure from causing chaos.
It is impossible to avoid injury during times of chaos. I mean, try keeping yourself afloat when your ability to heat your home, feed your children, buy enough gas for daily life, and have access to the medicines that keep you alive are all subject to the terrifying whims of the (very few) people allowed to sit at the centre of the controls of the world, who have the exhausting tendency to treat people’s lives like characters in a video game.
No one, and I mean no one, has any clue about why the Pied Piper decided to push the massive, red, flashing button, the one that everyone – and I mean everyone – could see was flashing “DO NOT TOUCH” at a blinking-strobe pace.
Now, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and no one, anywhere, comes out unscarred from that.
No one in the current White House administration – even the President – can state, definitively, a single, coherent rationale or mission objective for “Operation Epic Fury” beyond the joy that the administration obviously takes in decimation and the Commander-in-Chief’s love ofhis daily updates on all the things that went boom. The most galling to me is the concrete faith of Pete Hegseth, the tv hairdo “warrior-in-chief,” that the Divine Lord of All Creation is proud that hundreds of children have been killed in the middle of the school day.
The world has been suffering from an epidemic of massive earthquakes (whether political, cultural, viral, or literal) for the last year, if not the last decade. At this point, we are all scarred inside, in places often too deeply internal to be seen by the naked (or doubting) eye. We’re battered, our door panels are dented and bruised, we’re frazzled, anxious, and seeing the framework of our worlds changing in real time, at a scale massive enough to feel untouchable but individual enough that we see the results in our daily lives, all around us.
Let’s face it: we’re facing the death of the world as we’ve known it, and the birth of a new world, simultaneously. We’re at a tipping point in history, and everything’s going to change. Our reality is already that of the disciples the day after Jesus’s death. We’re already in absolute shock, flailing to find solid footing, riddled with half-healed scars.
And then these chaos lovers decide to make it worse. How could anyone heal when someone keeps ripping open old scars while also slicing and carving new ones? In times like these, we need more than a guarded hope, because even that feels impossible and almost immoral.
Instead, we can benefit from Thomas’s doubt and scepticism. We do ourselves no favours by not acknowledging the reality of our circumstances; only a true hope that’s wrestled with things as they are has the clarity of vision to be able to truly see how things could be. We can only see the truth as it is through the lens of our scars, therefore. I use the language of scarring very intentionally here, as scars etch two interwoven stories: survival, yes (we only earn scars after surviving something that cuts us deeply enough), but also the finality of change (the scar is now a permanent mark of experiencing something traumatic enough to necessitate survival mode, and will never return to what it once was).
In fact, having scars is a permanent mark of a life lived, as we can only gain scars if we’ve lived long enough to have the world impact us in a permanent way. Scars are both a proof of life and a mark of survival: marks of healing, therefore. They might be ugly, painful, or even disfiguring, but again: only the wounds of living people heal into scars, as dead bodies (by the very nature of being dead) don’t heal.
The world is impossibly complex now, and will only continue to be so. We must learn to adapt to this complexity, to dance with it and to allow it to be what it is. The days of unilateral power wielded simply for its own sake, intentionally causing chaos in its wake, are a luxury our traffic-jam-world simply cannot afford anymore, as literally everyone (including the chaos actors) is discovering in painful and immediate ways.
If you’re struggling to have faith in the future, or are doubting that there’s a Divine Presence who is immersed within a creation they care deeply about, breathe easier: you’re not alone!
Just never forget that you’re a doubting Thomas, and that’s a perfectly rational response to the world as it is. Now, it’s time to get busy answering the most important question during times of chaos: how are you going to bring divine presence to those hiding in fear?
