Thomas, the Apostle of Touch

Light of Truth

Thomas the Apostle has been branded as the doubter, perhaps a master of suspicion. But is it true? Only the author of the fourth Gospel, John, makes Thomas an important character of his Gospel. All the three others ignore him. Thomas in John is ready to take risks and die with Him; he is not weak in faith. John’s Gospel is the most literary of the four, meaning more poetic than the rest. Douglas Templeton who explored the fictional at length in The New Testament as True Fiction, holds that the opposite of fiction is not truth but rather fact.1 He writes, ‘Fiction, while it does not state, nevertheless embodies truth… Fiction, the term “fiction,” is wider than fact, because it can include fact. The gospels are to be read as literary texts rather than as historical chronicles, and indeed such an understanding is an elevation of the scriptures, rather than a diminution of their status.’ He further observes that ‘Fiction differs from history as the possible differs from the actual.’2 Furthermore, literature differs from history as fiction differs from fact. History and literature are equally modes of dealing with, of finding language for, reality.

The Word-made-flesh

In the Fourth Gospel, “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14) is a poetic statement of revelation, which forms the bedrock of John’s entire Gospel. There is in it a fixation on language and the body. We have chosen to explore the scandal of sacramentality, which primarily is Christ according to a two-pronged thematic – that of the word and the flesh, of language and the body. We pit these two terms body and language against one another. Indeed, the overcoming of th

e dualisms and opposing binaries of logocentrism is central to postmodern thought. Returning to John 1, the Christ event encapsulates the collision of word and flesh, the creative logos of God becoming incarnate within the created order spoken into being by that selfsame Word. The Word-made-flesh, Christ the “primordial sacrament,”3 makes present the coincidence or confusion of word and flesh: of language taking on a body; of the immaterial entering into and taking on materiality; of the sacred coming to inhabit the profane. So it is not dualism, but a coincidence of opposites of Nicolas of Cusa. God dies on the cross. There is scandal of sacramentality on the one hand, and a linguistic scandal on the other. Sacrament is “the language of God’s giving.”4 We possess knowledge about ‘everything’ that we call by a name. This also means that everything is there ‘always-already’ in the language, everything always-already speaks. What we hear is “language speaking,” or as Heidegger puts it, everything is “in the service of language,”5 which therefore is in the service of culture. If everything speaks, then everything contributes to the rise of the identity of human being as subject in the world, because culture is construction of reality in the form of language. “The symbolic order is the mediation through which subjects build themselves ‘the real’ into a ‘world,’ their familiar ‘world’ where they can live.”6 To make an event an ‘eventing’ again through language. An event is always in the mode of ‘eventing,’ still is happening. Hence, language as event means the present continues “eventing” of “what is said, what it means, what realities it engages, and how it refers to the ultimate truth of God.” Perceiving language as something always on-going and happening provide us with a new awareness of the uniqueness of temporality. All events are unique. They are unrepeatable. Now, at anytime the memories, tradition, stories are to be made remembered in present time; what happens is not the repetition of the events, because they are not repeatable.

“Don’t Touch Me’’

God died on the cross, the Logos is dead and buried. In John’s Gospel it is not three women w

ho are going in search of His body but only Mary Magdalene. “Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing Him to be the gardener, she said to Him, “Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have laid Him, and I will take Him away.”…Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to

them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (20:15-18). The Vulgate translation is “Don’t touch Me” (Noli me tangere). “It is time, in effect, to specify: Noli me tangere doesn’t simply say “don’t touch me,” but more literally “don’t wish to touch me.” The verb nolo is the negative of volo: it means “not to want.”7 In Nancy’s words Christ enjoins; the substance of His imperative is a recalibration of touch: “‘Touch me with a real touch, withdrawn, non-appropriative and non-identifying.’ Don’t touch me; caress me.” A real touch, here, would be a touch that does not seek to seize its object; a touch that remains at the surface of what it touches. But this would also amo

unt to an endlessly desiring touch; a touch sustained in the suspense of any conclusively appropriative act. If presence scares you–and there are good reasons why it might–then call it instead a presentness: an imperfect presence, an excessive one, an attentive and evocative one. It is a place where the world, sort of, comes as a surprise. Wait: like a mouth, like a hand, it opens.

She cried of the absence of the body, she searched for His presence in body. All the Gospels end with the absence of His body. It is bereaving absence of death. Word, which took flesh and dwelt, was

no more present. God is dead and absent. They cry for His presence to touch. Eckhart’s famous statement: ‘Man’s last and highest parting occurs when, for God’s sake, he takes leave of God.’8 For God’s sake, we take our leave of “God.” God has not only taken leave of us, but has in fact died, and has died for our sake, to liberate us from God. And while the death of God, in this sense, is understood as God’s own action. God’s self-negation – still we must say an emphatic ‘No’ to God because God has ceased to make Godself present to us, and thus God’s presence can only be known or experienced as God’s absence. Specifically, the death of God is inextricably bound to Christ’s death on the cross, making his a gospel of profoundly Christian, and deeply Christological. It is a woman who is looking for the body, it is woman who gave Him body – “the mother of Jesus” has no proper name in John, it is simply “woman.” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord;” and she told them that he had said these things to her”( 20:18). She carried Him away – “I will take Him away.” Her body speaks for Him. Language as the interplay of absence and presence provides us with the notion that “this is not purely and simply, because humans cannot fully grasp what is said, but because the thing that is said is also in the saying unsaid.”9 Language presents and communicates to us an event. Language can trigger a new ethical awareness and commitment. What was visible in our Saviour has passed over into His mysteries.

He Wants to Touch Him

“When 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.” After He said this, He showed them His hands and His side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (20:19-22.). Sprit is also ghost or spectre of Jesus.

The last pericope of John’s gospel speaks of the insistence of Thomas on touching His body. He is the second person who searches His body. Touch is similar to vision in allowing us to experience objects and properties even when those properties are not in direct or apparent contact with our bodies. Jesus appears and His wish is fulfilled and Gospel ends with the last words of Jesus: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (20:29). His followers “take Him away,” His spirit is embodied in them. His word is incarnated in them. All the four Gospels are written which is a way of giving Him body. The text of the body and the body of the text are the same. They are enactments, only in its telling or saying. The text creates His body. Christianity is indeed a religion of the touch, whatever one might like to do about that Jesus lets Himself be touched and this is not without meaning. To reach the Divine you have to touch the body. “Who touched me?” (Mk 5:31) – A genuine test of hospitality: to receive the other arriving, a touching experience. Thomas is the Apostle of touch. John places washing the feet narrative in the place of Eucharistic words. A clear symbol of authority as service of touching and washing the feet.

They as Sacraments only exist to touch, in the celebrating. Their bodies show Him and take His place. Speech is world and world is speech at once. If two gazes look into each other’s eyes, that they are touching. Speech calls its hearer out of a world which is silent and apart and into a world which is embodied in the full actuality of voice. The silence of the world ends in parabolic speech. Christianity and Christianity alone know a Word or speech which is the absolute antithesis of silence. Here, Word speaks finally or eschatologically, and Word speaks finally because Word irreversibly becomes “flesh.” The concept of God; as an event of self-sacrifice or kenosis in the life of God; and, in His writing, His poetics, as the linguistic impossibility of im-mediate encounter with the divine. So, if our language fails to make God present to us, or is only capable of re-presenting God in the mediacy and void of language itself; and if linguistic meaning is no longer underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence, how do we “make sense” of anything at all? Can we trust language to provide the medium in which communication may take place? And if not communication, upon what basis could any communion possibly occur? If we cannot trust language, can it possibly contain truth?

This is my Body: This is my Word

There is no institution narrative in John but what was visible in our Saviour has passed over into His mysteries. “This is my body” a language act akin to “Let there be light and there was light.” The priest proclaims the man and woman, husband and wife and they become husband and wife. Bread and wine are transubstantiated but the physics and chemistry do not change but the truth does. In the place of institution John has washing of the feet of disciples. His bodily existence to be replaced by the Holy Spirit through the body of the believing assembly –the mystical body. Sacraments are symbolizing the departure of Jesus Christ from His bodily existence. The sacraments as language are expressions in human language through which the believers can touch the unsearchable richness coming from God that generates inspiration for transformation. Language “eventing” occurs right here: when the horizon of the past event is conversing or interacting with the actual horizon. At this moment, time stops evolving. What is left is the language which presents us with an ongoing event. Reading operates on an implication of “real presence” and is therefore “transubstantiation.”

One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist. Any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence. The experience of aesthetic meaning infers the necessary possibility of ‘real presence’ of God.10 The notion is grounded in the sacramental real presence. This real presence, as in the enacted metaphor of the sacramental bread and wine, is finally irreducible to any other formal articulation, to any analytic deconstruction or paraphrase. A woman and man look for His Body and they both find and lose it. They are struck by His absence and His spirit gets hold of them. They are touched and carry Him with them. They embody Him and they lent their bodies to Him to enter history.” Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And pointing to His disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Mt 12.48).

FOOTNOTES:

  1. D. Templeton, Douglas. The New Testament as True Fiction: Literature, Literary Criticism, Aesthetics, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999, p.29.
  2. Ibid., p. 107.
  3. E. Schillebeeckx, O.P., Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963, esp. §1.2 “Christ the Primordial Sacrament” (pp. 13-39)
  4. David Noel Power, Sacrament: The Language of God’s Giving. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1999.
  5. Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy? Trans. J Anderson and E.H. Freund. New York: Harper and Row, 1958, p.93.
  6. Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments: The Word of God at The Mercy of the Body. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1997. p.15.
  7. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Bronx: Fordham UP, 2008, p.55.
  8. Meister Eckhart, “Distinctions Are Lost in God,” in Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation, New York: Harper and Row, 1941, p. 204.
  9. David Noel Power, Sacrament: The Language of God’s Giving, p. 64.
  10. George Steiner, Real Presences, Chicago: University of Chicago, 199 1, p.227.

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