John 20:28, ‘My Lord and my God!’
Thomas’ confession that the crucified Jesus who is risen is His Lord and His God (echoing the OT titles of YHWH) is an event that takes place in a single moment in time…and yet, simultaneosuly, it is an encapsulation of every moment of the Christian’s life. As Paul says in Colossians 2:6, as we *have received* Christ Jesus as our Lord, so also we are to *be walking* in Him. This moment of falling before the the Crucified One who lives forevermore, of seeing in His wounds the proclamation of the Name of the One True God…this moment of seeing and so confessing with our whole selves that *this one* alone is *my* Lord and *my* God, that is to be a moment extended across the entirety of our lives….or, better, it is to be the ever-deepening spiral in which we exist and along which we draw ever higher and deeper into the life of God in Christ.
But we can say more then this….in a sense, all of creation, all of reality, the full span of spatio-temporal history itself is expressed with minute elegance as the doubting disciple—now representing all redeemed creation—falls before the anastasiform Son of Man and confesses with shuddering awe, ‘My LORD and my GOD!’
Yes…this is the telos of the cosmos pictured in miniature, the incalculable span of created existence summarized in the joy-filled confession of a single man (cf. Phil.2:6-11, Rev.5:6-14, etc.). In that moment, truly, we behold the consummation of everything that has or is or ever will be within this created sphere…When all is said and done, and the unimaginable myriad of world upon world, and soul upon soul, and story upon story that have comprised created existence—when all of these, at the last, find their orbit around the Crucified and Risen Lord, when the harmonizing note of perfect Judgment, struck on Calvary, has resonated through all of time and space such that—by fire and by water, by blood and by wine, by trampling foot and pierced hand—all things are reconciled to God in Christ (Col.1:20), THEN it will be seen that, from beginning to end, reality itself has been nothing other than an articulation of Thomas’s great confession….’My Lord, and my God.’
