The Second Week

The same room, the same shut doors, eight days later. Ten men in it who have seen him alive and one who has not, and they have lived together like that for a week. Somebody ate every meal of it beside Thomas.

What he asks for is what the others were handed without asking. On the first evening Jesus stood in the midst and shewed unto them his hands and his side, and nobody in that room had believed it on a report either. Thomas puts his terms in a form that has followed him ever since: Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. Eight days on, the first words spoken to him are his own conditions read back: Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side. He gets the evidence he specified, in his own wording.

Then the line that reaches past everybody standing there. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. John writes it for people who will never get what Thomas got, and says so two verses later: these are written, that ye might believe. Peter says it from the far side, to congregations who saw nothing: Whom having not seen, ye love. Paul makes it the ordinary condition of the whole enterprise: For we walk by faith, not by sight.

Hear the beatitude in the direction it was aimed, down the years at readers. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. That is spoken by the risen Christ over somebody in a room with nobody else in it, on a morning when nothing has happened and they are going on anyway. Blessed, in the same voice that said peace be unto you to men who had run from him, and said it again to the one who came late and named his price.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 295 is Grace and Glory Given (Psalm 84:11).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two