 In this Easter season, we celebrate God's raising of Jesus from the dead as we see it explained and expounded in the New Testament Scriptures. A week later, the disciples were again in the house and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut. Jesus came and stood in the middle of them. Peace be with you, he said. Then he addressed Thomas. Bring your finger here, he said, and inspect my hands. Bring your hand here and put it into my side. Don't be faithless, just believe. My Lord replied Thomas and my God. Is it because you've seen me that you believe? replied Jesus. God's blessing on people who don't see and yet believe. This extraordinary story of Thomas and his sudden leap into Christian faith into recognizing Jesus as Lord and God comes to round off the story of Easter in John chapter 20. It's a story of new creation. John 20 begins with light, the dawning of the day and with the first breathings of life and Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb and running back to tell Peter and John and they run to the tomb and so on. And then Jesus meets them that evening in the upper room and then when the disciples tell Thomas about it, he wasn't there he refuses to believe and he says, unless I put my finger into the mark of the nails and put my hand into the mark made by the spear in Jesus' side I'm not going to believe. And what we see here is the extraordinary grace of Jesus that though John does have Jesus say, God's blessing on those who don't see and yet believe it's as though Jesus is saying, Thomas, to see the evidence you want to know for yourself you've asked these questions right. I will meet you halfway and more than halfway. Be my guest. Bring your finger here and put it into my hand. Bring your hand here, put it into my side. Don't be faithless but believe. Believe in other words that Jesus has been raised from the dead that it is the same Jesus known now by the mark of the nails and the spear. It's the same body. It's not that he left one body behind in the tomb and that he grew another one. People have said all sorts of silly things like this but this is absolutely crystal clear. This is God doing new creation matching the original creation but now a creation out of death and out the other side because Jesus when he was raised from the dead he didn't come back into ordinary life. People sometimes get confused about this. The raising of Lazarus was about Lazarus coming back into ordinary life so that he would have to die again but Jesus went on through death and out the other side and that's the extraordinary thing which blows the mind and blows the imagination and that's of course why Thomas had such a problem with it but I see that as a mandate for many people in our own day who find that inquirers come or somebody hears a sermon or hears a bit about Christianity and has a lot of questions and some pastors will tell them perhaps unwisely you shouldn't ask those questions. Those questions arise from your doubt. You should simply be prepared to believe. It's not what Jesus does. Jesus says to Thomas, okay you have these questions. Here are the answers. We ought always to be ready to provide answers to good questions and it really was a good question. It should be, this has never happened before. Everybody knows that dead people stay dead. Ah, but everybody didn't realise that God the Creator was present in and active as Jesus so that Thomas then takes this flying leap of faith and for the first time in the whole story of the Gospel somebody uses the word God directly in a you mode to address Jesus, my Lord and my God. This joins together the whole Gospel. In the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God and now yes, my Lord and my God. And so John drawing the threads of his narrative together before the extra bit which he tax on at the end which we call chapter 21 says these things are all written so that you may come to that same faith so that you may believe that the Messiah, the Son of God, for whom Israel had been waiting, for whom the world had been waiting did it but know what it was about. This Messiah, this Son of God is none other than Jesus and when you believe in him not only does he have the life of God's coming age but you too will have life in his name.