The Incredulity of St Thomas

Hello friends!
Presentation written, I would appreciate your comments!

I am a lover of art. Now, I can’t actually paint myself, and if I’m honest I’m not much of an art historian either, so don’t ask me for my views on 19^th century post impressionism please, because I’ll just panic and run away. I just like going to art galleries, and in the words of that noted academic Mr Bean, “I sit in the corner and I look at the pictures.”

While I have liked looking at pictures for a long time, it was only three or four years ago that I really started to think about the use of paintings in Christian worship.

I was attending my church, St David’s, for the first time. It must have been the equivalent to last Sunday’s service, because the then Curate was preaching on doubting Thomas. He wheeled out the OHP - an item I have never seen used in my church since - and projected this painting onto the wall.

It is Caravaggio’s masterpiece ‘the Incredulity of Saint Thomas.’ I had seen it in books a couple of times before, but the presence of the image in church challenged me to reflect on how it struck me spiritually. I can’t actually remember the Curate’s conclusions on the painting, but let me tell you briefly how I see it now.

When I look at this picture, my eye is drawn immediately to that wound in Jesus’ side, indeed the focal point to which all eyes in the picture, apart from Thomas’, are drawn. The flesh is depicted horrifically realistically. I almost flinch as Jesus guides Thomas’ extended finger into it, stretching back the skin. I wonder why the eyes of the stooping Thomas are not also drawn to Jesus’ side, but he stares at a point somewhere else. Perhaps in his touching Jesus’ flesh he has seen a truth beyond the picture frame.

In some ways it’s a simple painting - four figures, no real background, not particularly colourful or decorative. It’s the kind of painting we might pass by in a gallery. But look at it for a few minutes, and some universal themes emerge - doubt, exploration, realisation, the glimpsing of something beyond the flesh. Themes that are just as important to the church today as they were in the age of Caravaggio.

In some ways I’m inclined to think that paintings have lost the place they once had in the church. When worship was only in Latin, and the majority of people did not understand Latin, one of the only ways people could learn about God was through looking around them at the iconography of the church. Although the words of the sermon my Curate preached haven’t stayed with me the image has stuck in my mind for a long time and this has made me wonder if we ought to make more use of the visual both in teaching and in worship.

And I’d like to discuss this with you.

Firstly, I’d like to have a think about those static features of the buildings in which we do our public worship - paintings, statues, stained glass windows, the architectural features even. Do they inspire our worship, or do they pass us by Sunday by Sunday? And for those of you who are perhaps not in highly-decorated churches, does this matter? Does anyone have any immediate thoughts?

There is a phrase that Christians are “people of the word.” Whichever strand of the church we belong to, we cannot get away from the fact that the Bible is absolutely central to our self-understanding as Christians - and the Bible is passed down in words. Given this, are any truths we can gleen from this painting missing the point? Let’s face it, the Biblical account does not actually say that Thomas put his fingers into Jesus’ side, it only says he invited him, this is Caravaggio’s interpretation. Is it not better to preach from the Bible alone?