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Stapled onto the edge of a sermon or a lesson, right? Creation in God's creation is God's poetry. Christ, the art of God, turned religious and social norms on their head in new and creative ways.

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The church doesn't simply hearken back to a pristine past, but reaches into the margins for forgotten experiences, metaphors and images that speak new words that we improvise under the sign of the cross.

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In this view, the Gospel is forever made strange, exploding in our ears, tearing up false treaties and making rough places plain. So this morning, we eagerly await Dr.

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Penn's third lecture, in which he will explore the marginality of Thomas, the disciple of Jesus. Doctor Penn, we welcome you. Thanks for coming back for this third lecture.

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We moved from Lot's wife to Thomas, so let's get started. Not long ago, while travelling, I sat on my hotel room couch and turned on the television. As I flipped the station, something caught my attention.

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A suit, but not just any suit. Now, I'm a fan of bold patterns and unusual colors, but this one pushed against my love for distinction.

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And so I paused to look and take a good look at this bright pink suit. And it just so happened that TD Jakes was sporting that suit and he was preaching about Thomas Gates, was lamenting loss of, as he put it, a time when we used to believe something.

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We spoke to each other, helped each other. This state of belief, he continued, has been supplanted by skepticism. So pervasive truth is hard to find today. We are in a time of skepticism, he continued.

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Everything is met with a challenge. He then turned from a general lament to target a critique of disbelief within the context of the community of supposed believers. Skepticism, he announced, has filtered into the church.

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And now the church is talking like the world, and the world is talking like the church. The church is skeptical of organized religion, of everything. Prove to me there's a God.

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For him. This is a fatal flaw in that faith. He twisted his body and announced It's the currency of heaven. It's what God uses to transact business, for Jake's Scripture provides narratives

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that help listeners understand these circumstances. Turning to the Gospel of John, Jake's reflected on a time when Thomas didn't doubt, when he stood alone, willing to travel and to die with Jesus. And it is the others at that moment who are cast as a problem.

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He proclaims faith came to a crossing blow, uncertainty. How do the disciples go back home and tell people Jesus wasn't who they thought he was? How to explain this man who died like a thief?

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Most of the disciples ran away to the upper room to avoid being tacked. This is a bleak time for Jakes. This is when looking straight into the camera, he says skepticism came into the room it invaded.

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And that's why when Jesus came to the 10, Judas had committed suicide and Thomas was struck in skepticism. End Quote. According to the sermon, Jake's cast Thomas's absence at the

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appearance of Jesus as a lack of loyalty. Summed up this way, it's easier to talk loyalty than to be loyal. Now Thomas, also known as Didymus, one of the 12,

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was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, we have seen the Lord. But he said to them, unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into his side,

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I will not believe. With Thomas, much of the scholarship and popular discussion line up with him being characterized as problematic, perhaps even a fool who serves as a cautionary tale concerning the nature and

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meaning of faith under the governance of grace. Or, as George Riley insightfully notes, he is a realist more than a doubter. Yet what is distinctive about Thomas's demand for personal experience when, as Dennis Silva remarks, it is often claimed that Thomas simply

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represents the other disciples who also do not express belief until they have seen the risen Jesus? Perhaps the difference is in the nature of the demand. The others express a passive need while Thomas is active, engaged,

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and dismissive of blind consensus. He has come to be called Downing Thomas, and readers of the Gospel of John have assumed this doubt is directed at Jesus. However, one could just as easily say Thomas's

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behavior is defined by a privilege of experience and suspicion concerning the reliability of those who've proven themselves unreliable. Still, John paints him something of an outsider 1 without the same authority and power as the others,

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and this is symbolized through John's presentation of Thomas as absent when the disciples received the gift that separates them from others. Elaine Pagels name's the consequence of this absence. Thomas, having missed the meeting, she writes, is not an apostle,

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has not received the Holy Spirit, and lacks the power to forgive sins which the others received directly from the risen Christ. End Quote. Hence, one could say Thomas is marginal to the

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developing Kingdom, at least as the Gospel of John is concerned. Reflecting on marginality outsider status, I think there is a shared ideological demand by the two Judases, Iscariot and Thomas,

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whose proper name is Judas. Judas Iscariot demands response to world circumstances promised by Jesus, and Thomas demands physical evidence of the wounds resulting from the work. One, Judas Siskiaret, demands a direct confrontation with power,

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and the other story is meant to safeguard the mechanisms of control exercised by the powerful. In either case, embodied action is understood as the best way to counter ideological contamination.

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Embodied action is understood as the best way to counter ideological contamination and the best way to counter ideological contamination and the authority of the elite. In both cases, those in authority, those with the means to tell the story

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and shape the narrative, for example, label Judas and Thomas problems as doubters, either by surrendering their leader or by demanding to see and touch the leader who seek to disrupt that work against the grand scheme and its theological, ideological underpinning.

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Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into a side, I will not believe I want to argue. The discussion of Thomas that often revolves around the signs of faith is too concerned with the content of the story, such as its theological principles and

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religious social dictates. Over against that approach, I think there is much to be gained from what Thomas tells us concerning the manner in which we interpret content, that is to say, not the story of salvation itself,

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but rather the manner in which such stories privilege certain tools of evaluation or engagement over others. He is raising questions concerning the manner in which evidence is gathered and attested to.

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Thomas draws on these senses, embodied engagement, and understands the workings of the senses as a means by which to test the validity of truth claims and ethical pronouncements. In his demand, and the hermeneutic enabling it,

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we get a posture to a power in the housing of knowledge that is later embraced and advanced by liberation theologies who we've come to value, teach, research, and preach, such as black and womanist theologies. This is a reading of Scripture through what James Coleman calls concrete

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humanity, and if Cone is correct, that oppressed humanity is the point of departure of Christ himself, Any useful hermeneutic for exploration of and interrogation into the nature of this presence has to be embodied and tied to flesh.

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True enough, familiar narratives of the resurrection story are not without at least indirect recognition of a body through appeal to some of the senses. The Gospel of John, for instance, introduces the truth of the Christ event

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through sound. They hear of him risen and sight. They see the empty tune, and then they see Him. The terms of engagement, and hence the dynamics of critique and

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affirmation, recognize a functioning body. This disrupts assumptions concerning the proper language of encounter and therefore meaning, pushing beyond words and ephemeral claims to bodies emotion and countering the world.

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However, the tone of Scripture seems to suggest limitations to the importance of what that body tells us about the Christ event. Yep, Thomas pulls in and centers knowing around the interpretive value of bodies, highlighting within the process for

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knowing what the others aren't willing to actively name touch. Thomas moves to an active demand to see and touch and thereby bring together desire and purpose, which entails embodied knowledge available through a hermeneutic that privileges physicality.

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This is the case because intersection of horizontal circumstances and vertical aims is, as Thomas notes, lodged in flesh. Bodies bear the marks of our activities, desires, and calling. He privileges experience over tradition, where tradition is understood as the

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collective perspective of the other disciples. We heard about him and we saw him. This is not enough. Thomas demands presence, and presence that isn't 2nd order but

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primary and material involvement with. In this context, revelation would be an embodied existential awakening to circumstances and to tools available for addressing those circumstances.

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Revelation has to do with knowledge and decisions within the context of historical arrangements dealing with people making determinations. And shouldn't those determinations reflect our presence and experience as in body beings?

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Musa Dube says it well when discussing a proper hermeneutic. She argues a proper hermeneutic approaches interpretation with the understanding that any text that has been separated from its original context and subsequently has become part of a universal tradition requires an

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integration into the reader's contemporary situation. This hermeneutical approach, she continues, suggests that biblical interpretation is a reading activity that involves living in the present as well as reading the past.

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Touch not text, or maybe by touching the body, find the text. If by text, remain source of meaning. Thomas makes clear that at the point of our greatest exposure,

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the world rendered void through a cosmic impingement. A new hermeneutic and a new standard of engagement and verification is needed, one that mirrors the nature of that impingement as embodied opportunity for transformed existence.

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Drawing on progressive moves related to liberation minded religious thought, one might argue he offers a hermeneutic of suspicion, and there's something to this. But I suggest suspicion is only the first phase of his engagement,

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which is followed by a confrontation calling for connection. More to the point, through confrontation it becomes an in fleshed hermeneutic. It is a hermeneutic centered on decay, that is to say,

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highlighting change in such a way as to recognize the complexity of its presentation, both appealing and appalling. It is a process of interpretation comfortable with discomfort that marks discomfort as a break with the status quo and traditional narratives,

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and opens opportunity for considerations deeply linked to the movement of despised bodies. Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into his side, there's a shift taking place.

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Thomas ushers in an altered posture towards presence and evidence of presence pushing against being told and toward touching for oneself. The demand made by Thomas might be said to shift power dynamics, which is to call for fleshy evidence over against the word of untrustworthy figures

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brings Jesus to him. Of course, it should be noted that Thomas's approach is at odds with Jesus's posture towards verification. But Jesus doesn't deny Thomas's demand.

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Rather, he responds, he shows up, he presents himself, He privileges the materiality of material evidence over against the distance entailed by sight and word. Everything about the moral and ethical lessons embraced by Thomas and the others

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have to do with physical geographies of expression and interaction. These lessons are worked out as people occupy time and space and attempt to do so, forming new relationships of meaning. One need not read the narrative as being about relationship to Jesus teachings or

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associated moral and ethical demands that pull us out of ourselves. Rather, it is about the shortcomings of community, accountability and material experience as the corrective. We have failed to properly understand and identify the target of his doubt.

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While we disagree on some aspects of Thomas, I would agree with Johnson, Tom Cuddy regarding this point. Thomas is one who demands evidence and for whom quote, faith is not merely an internal attitude, but rather action oriented and

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progressive. End Quote. But this alone is an insufficient take away. What 1 gets is not the introduction of seeing,

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but the active engagement with experience as the central element of a hermeneutic of engagement and transformation that centers on the informative nature of the body as it occupies time and space. Thomas will not believe the disciples, and so the demand isn't an act of

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disbelief. It is a critique of the disciples recognition of their failures, as opposed to a statement concerning Thomas's positioning and relationship to Christ's ministry.

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This is a challenge to human presentation and speculation, human claims to truth. What we have with the authority of the disciples is a certain establishment of power, a particular framing of knowledge and truth that ties it to privilege in ways that exclude the markings of the body.

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Theirs is an affirmation of suffering without demanding recognition of the wounds. Still, we also gain a sense of the power and pervasiveness of this dominant approach, and that the opposition of Thomas to it

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is subdued, which is to suggest the demand to center the marginalized, to recognize the wounds of protest is ongoing and marginalized perspective always at battle within an elite understanding of power.

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Undergirding comments's statement are important questions posed through posture and mood to the other disciples. Who are they to say? What were they positioned to identify after their crude denials of Jesus at the

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moment of greatest urgency? Who can bear witness to the demand of transformation? Who can be trusted to announce and point in the direction of this radical alteration?

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Scholars have noticed and spoken to this questioning of the disciples, including Ismo Dunderberg who writes he quote does not believe the other disciples testimony of meeting the risen Lord. This is a courageous response.

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End Quote. While this is a turn away from the disciple defined solely by doubt of the Christ event, I don't believe it sufficiently appreciates the importance of the hermeneutical shift at work.

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Again, what one finds with Thomas is a shift and what authorizes the truth, a questioning of the mechanisms of authority and power assumed by the disciples. As Johnson Thomas Cuddy argues quote he never doubts Jesus,

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he has to experience what the other disciples have experienced. End Quote. On this point we agree. However, I would suggest there is more to it than

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a desire to have what the others have. It is a critique of the disciples as a community of accountability. Hence, Thomas does not deny the possibility of new relationship to life and death is captured in the New Testament through

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Jesus. He considers the source of the information, disciples whose allegiance was questionable and the word of little meaning.

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Dorothy Lee notes that quote. Thomas is in the same position as the other disciples before their encounter with the Risen. 1.

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He is no more doubtful than they are. Just as we find them cowering behind locked doors after Magdalene's witness, so Thomas refuses to believe their witness. End Quote.

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After all, Peter vowed never to leave or deny Jesus, and we know what happens there. It isn't Thomas's commitment to the moral and ethical vision of a new life that is suspect.

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Instead, he questions the disciples as constituting an accountable community capable of holding that truth. This is not the first time Thomas is disappointed with his supposed fellow travellers, and he is not the first to affirm the

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importance of materiality. The others believe after seeing Jesus, they simply didn't have the hermeneutical insight, the presence of will, to position this contact as the measure of their affirmation.

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They are passive. Thomas's demand is active. Peters is a denial of the moral and ethical framing of life that was to be to mark ministry.

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Thomas's is a rejection of the authority of this community to recognize this moral and ethical framing. Peter's denial is vertical and Thomas's rejection is horizontal. Again, there's a shift in whom Thomas is asked

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to believe. It isn't the disciples whose reliability and commitment have always been suspects, who have failed to appreciate and understand the natures of Jesus ministry, and who refused to die with him.

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He is suspicious of their testimony. But again, this is not the same as saying he is suspicious of Jesus. He denies the merit of sight, the hermeneutic utilized by those who

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were afraid of suffering and death. How can they know the look of death and life if their actions have been tied to an effort to deny the former? He denies the merit of sight, the hermeneutic utilized by those who

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were afraid of suffering and death. How can they know the look of death and life if their actions have been tied to an effort to deny the former, to deny death? That question points to epistemological opacity.

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Or one might say, it is to hide A theological problem in plain sight. So much of religious narrative and conditioning has to do with secrecy, a type of epistemological restriction that is meant to suggest the need to

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secure a special status. Comics disrupts the reign of secrecy by forcing exposure, by demanding an opening. By extension, there's something about Thomas's statement that points in the direction of sociality.

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Something about profound claims must bear the weight of social interaction. He, in a sense, wrestles to the ground such claims. How could he trust that something wasn't left out, that Jesus hadn't expressed some truth not captured by those who couldn't

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withstand the demands of the moment, but ran instead? Christ is said to have come in the flesh. Then why shouldn't Thomas want to experience that broken flesh? He could only gather what was needed by direct encounter, by pressing the flesh,

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so to speak. All is dependent on this statement by Thomas. The conclusionary statement by Jesus, so lauded by commentaries, is brought about through a demand for embodied encounter.

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Thomas's hermeneutic makes possible a shift in the geography of recognition. If there is something to the sense of the liberative potential grounded in a transformative existential material encounter, what Christians call the Christ event, shouldn't the evidence of this event be

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grounded in material encounter? Yet there is what Jesus does by showing up, and there is what Jesus suggests through his statement after appearing to Thomas. Yet there is what Jesus does by showing up,

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and there is what Jesus suggests through a statement after appearing to Thomas. It isn't that those who would come later are better for not having this experience. It is unavailable. But yet Christians beyond this moment seek to experience the flesh of Christ,

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to touch, to feel. This is surely one way to think about the elements of communion handled with Jesus last pronouncement. There's privileging of distance asiding with no evidential affirmations.

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Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. But does this mean we should endorse such practices, particularly in that this epistemological insight isn't used to condemn Thomas,

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but rather to contextualize Thomas in relationship to what would come to be the church and its demand for obedience as righteousness performed? But does this mean we should endorse such practices, particularly in that this epistemological insight isn't used to contend Thomas,

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but rather it's used to contextualize Thomas in relationship to what would become the church and the church's demand for obedience as righteousness performed. Much of what takes place in the Gospel of John is marked by either presence or absence.

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Jesus is present or Jesus is absent. Jesus goes or Jesus avoids going. The occupation of time and space, then, is the geography encounter, the location of our wrestling with fundamental moral and ethical concerns.

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The utility of language, of words to describe and capture is undone. They fail in the face of the materiality of trauma and misery. Words can't carry adequately the nature and consequences of this destruction,

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but the body has the capacity to show it, to mark it out through blood and flesh. It is a call to read in light of the body holding the book. This is what Vincent Wimbush might name an approach to understanding. That quote requires all the senses, all the emotions,

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different types of memory, the discipline, creative coordination of mind and body, the engagement of the whole inquiring, interpreting self. End Quote. The text doesn't provide one meaning, one orientation that must be followed.

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Instead, there are a variety of possible meanings, some in conflict, that are tested within the arena of existential commitments and embodied experience. This alters the power held by scriptural proclamations, both overt and as subtext,

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by forcing a shift away from postures that tend toward a spiritualizing of circumstances or an ignoring of those whose condition is most challenging. That is to say, as Thomas points out, we must privilege the markers of struggle embedded not in words but in the actions of the body.

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Thomas doesn't seek an encounter with the perfected presence, but with the embodied presence that speaks the moment, that represents the encounter that demonstrates the struggle. The 10 disciples wanted abstracted meaning,

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and Thomas wanted intimate encounter. This seems reasonable, and that, as Alan Callahan argues, the prologue of the Gospel of John situates meaning within flesh. Why then not turn to that flesh for what it might tell us?

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The demand to ignore embodied evidence and rely on what has been told serves to safeguard hegemony through structures of encounter and exchange that privilege those who are in a position to tell rather than simply be told. Keep in mind, the disciples embraced this model,

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but they are the same ones who jockeyed for position and power within a new world order. And the Apostolic Church is no less conniving in its effort to safeguard its presentation of fact and practice.

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Even the oppressed have approached the Bible, typically through a memetic process of replication. It is an aping of proclamations, something of a viral engagement with the stories of another, and in this way bringing them through

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time and allowing them to define a different context. Yet this process has done little to nothing regarding a shift away away from normative logic of those stories. This too has been transferred and this might explain why the oppressed don't

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claim in any sustained manner the positioning of the despised like Lot's wife or Thomas. What Thomas exemplifies and the reason he is denigrated is the manner in which embodiment, existential circumstances and material

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experience become the basis for reading the biblical claims. That is to say, he demands accountability that is measured through the body not as content of the story, but as modality of interpretation for its truth content.

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The goal here isn't to assert a particular ideological position or stance regarding the truth and fiction of scripture, but rather to explore ourselves through attention to the underside of scripture, that which isn't highlighted for consideration.

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The aim is to short circuit effort to end questions. The approach here is to keep questions alive, to press and push against the affirmation of standard narratives to the degree one might recognize the manner in which those traditional readings of narratives

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privilege some and disadvantage many more. Thomas, I would argue in part, is belittled because he takes issues of belief that are typically grounded in abstract theological faith and makes them issues of materiality verified.

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It is not that Thomas has no interest in the moral ethical demands and practices that mark the movement to which he'd been involved these past few years, but rather that the manner in which those religious claims are assessed is through the relationship to embodied experience.

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I would argue the story isn't simply about Jesus, but rather our response to the absence of what we have come to value, the rupture of community, and the ways in which we frame and interpret life.

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In light of this loss, Thomas poses an approach that values a set of virtues but demands recognition of the material to reign against which these virtues operate. Thomas raises questions concerning the new formulation of relationship and the

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mode of interpretation that will be used to assert and shape it. If the Gospel of John is concerned with the nature of family as a way of capturing the changed constitution of relationships in the age of grace, Thomas challenges the constitution of this family.

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Matristic Christianity, a type of evolving community or family, claims a horizontal intervention that is grounded in and represented not through the dismissal of materiality but rather through the consumption of it. Yet the hermeneutic use seems out of step with this.

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That is to say, faith as often presented fails to account for the earthiness of belief, the earthiness of witness, as with the Church Fathers for whom Thomas raises the question of how Jesus moved, how Jesus entered the room, the nature of his body.

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Theirs is a hermeneutic that decenters the human experience of the other, that denies the full touch of the other and seeks to measure encounter through something other than the dynamics of the full materiality of our experience. Not all church leaders rejected or chastised Thomas for his demand.

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Rather, for some, such as Pope Gregory the Great and St. Admirals, there is spiritual merit in his desire for physical closeness to the risen figure. And this merit has both spiritual and secular significance regarding the

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importance of evidence and examination. However, one should not assume this means a positive relationship with the human body by extension or embodiment in more general terms as a positive theological category.

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To the extent the Church appreciates Thomas, it is not for his hermeneutic, but rather the manner in which Jesus's response affirms their theological assumptions and by extension affirms the Church's authority and ritual dominance over physical and non physical life.

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In opposition to positive depictions, the criticism of figures such as John Calvin, for whom Thomas was best understood as stupid and monstrous. There is much harshness in Calvin's depiction when,

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according to Shelley Rambo, he describes Thomas as quote, a lazy, reluctant, obstinate disciple, one who, contrary to the vision of him as the intellectual, is dull and apprehensive. End Quote.

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One might think of general Protestant Catholic divide on Thomas along these lines. Unlike Protestant reformers, writes Aaron Benet and Lisa Refinelli, who saw disbelief as inherently heretical, Catholic theologians argued that doubt

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provided God the opportunity to shape man in a positive way. End Quote. As Shelley Ramble makes clear, the wounds are central. Marking out the physical and effective suffering are ongoing, present,

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embody after body, and it is the ongoing embodied trauma that caused us to think through this narrative, not in light of special disembodied knowledge, but rather through the knowledge made available through the physicality of the

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wounded body as it confronts us. The body, as the Gospel of John seems to have it, is of no significant importance after the resurrection. At that point, testimony is meant to distinguish a

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particular class of knowers, and the body itself becomes a sign of human destruction, to be cast off through a turn to vertical arrangements of relationship cast in terms of grace offered to the undeserving. Yet the body is present, appearing on several occasions as a way

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to affirm really its lack of importance, to the extent it is meant to point beyond flesh to what is a real substance and eternal importance. Thomason is not alone in searching for the body, but he stands alone in understanding the hermeneutical significance of the

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embodied body as present. That is to say, unlike the other disciples, he reads theological claims on and through the embodied body. However, it is not simply wounds or trauma that

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matters here, and that these wounds can't be divorced from the body that holds them, from the marginalized and targeted body. In this regard, not all bodies are the same, and Thomas recognizes this.

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For Thomas, practices of redemption, of moral and ethical weight, are carried in and served to mark the body. I would not say that Thomas's hermeneutical demand perpetuates violence by calling attention to it.

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Rather, it calls attention to the bodies that suffer and affront the comfort of the powerful. In this way, Thomas invites readers to extend and in fleshed hermeneutical, what one might call a hermeneutical

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embodiment that grounds moral and ethical claims and what bodies can bear. This perhaps might serve to force renewed awareness on the pain certain practices can produce. Perhaps this is what Rambo points to.

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Or at least it might be used in this way without taking the claim too far from her intended point when calling on readers to quote attend to wounds rather than to erase them. End Quote.

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Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into his side, does Thomas actually examine the wounds? Does he penetrate the flesh and in this way know something of the experience by giving feeling and expression to suffering?

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Perhaps he does, perhaps he doesn't. There are benefits in the demand for evidence concerning the dynamics of relationship in exchange between the system and systemic change. Thomas is criticized for requiring what the disciples will use as a selling point

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in their missionary work and what Paul will try to overcome. First hand experience or a touching of Jesus as proof of the messages relevance and certainty. Thomas is denied the very level of experience that distinguishes the

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disciples. People are to believe because the disciples speak from existential material experience. This is the barrier Paul works so hard to overcome.

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One might say that the other disciples are somewhat content with the discursive body of Jesus, the one without visible wounds, the one that is constructed and encountered through language of transformation.

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But Thomas demands an encounter with the physical body, the one whose commitments and activities are mapped through wounds. With the former, it is a religious body with a fixed meaning and a limited truth provided by those with the power to control the means

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of production and pronouncement. This makes meaning manageable and determined outside the range of felt encounter with the world. In this way, what matters is outside of us,

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distinguished from the embodiment that marks our movement through time and space. The Gospel of John means for us to limit the body, to see through it, so to speak, and Thomas caused attention to it and finds deep value, a certain kind of truth within its markings.

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The body itself holds religious content. The others are content with the body, a sign, but Thomas calls attention to the importance of the material, physically positioned body.

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They deny the impact of materiality on our condition in the world, although they hide a way to protect their bodies and instead seek to deny the significance of this body. And in this way they lose some of the sense of the world to which they believe

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themselves to respond. The others seem to think the body and object that must point beyond itself. Hence the ghostly Jesus encountered in order to have significance, whereas Thomas sees the material body as meaningful as a guide to the performance

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of meaning. The body they once followed they now opposed engaging. Thomas said Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into his side.

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What we get with Thomas is recognition of an alternate audience, one whose relationship to flesh and blood differs, one who represents a more embodied and materially sustained presence that doesn't shy away from the trauma of life but confronts it in more than words.

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This is an audience, A presence that requires A synergy between claims and physical accountability. Thomas brings to the fore what the others are comfortable keeping along the periphery of speculation.

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One might think after Thomas that for those demanding justice of radical change to life, nothing is beyond questioning. Everything must respond to and be read through the existential nature of our existence.

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After all, he was willing to die with Jesus. What is vital here, what stands out, is the moment of hermeneutical shift. To suggest that Thomas fails is to assert the plausibility of only one meaning to its request, the disciples limiting conversations.

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The Gospel. John and its range of meanings distinguish memory from the body. What they know about a certain structure of meaning, of moral and ethical obligations, is detangled from the material body that

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bears the weight of those obligations. What they believe could be the case supersedes any physical knowledge. They need this to maintain authority and the churches stemming from this needs. They need this to establish authority and the church is stemming from this need

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such an arrangement to maintain their status as unique. Thomas in this pause to question and propose an alternate hermeneutic for assessing meaning gives the privilege place to the source of activity in the world over against mere belief against the world.

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This is a matter of the embodied response shaping what is thought as opposed to thought shaping what we believe about the body in certain theological ways. One could label this a debate over the dominance of soul or body that dismisses something of Thomas's intent, which is to use the material body as a

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hermeneutical tool for measuring claims as opposed to the articulation of claims regarding disembodied salvation. The other disciples are moved by the ill defined workings of spirit, of regulations and processes that exist outside the demands of flesh.

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But for Thomas, the flesh, the body, must affirm such practices and teachings if they are to be real and have any meaning within the social world. The other disciples privilege the body of Christ, which, as Maito Rivera points out, has to do with the community of believers over which they have authority,

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whereas Thomas calls attention to the embodied Christ, whose wounds point to the poorest nature of encounter and serve to call attention to the margins of existence. The body tracks the pressure of moral and ethical claims on practices in the world,

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and it is to this that Thomas calls attention. What Thomas demands is what is most difficult, what requires a shift outside of the parameters of comfort and regularity it exposes by overlap.

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That is to say, it intermingles in a way that avoid distinction and in so doing requires a higher degree of accountability, a deep rootedness in the materiality of existence. Such isn't lost on scholars such as Mitzi J Smith who writes she approaches the

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Bible in light of her quote, locatedness and embodiment. End Quote. For her this involves a type of sass or back talk and for me it is a reading the Bible against the Bible.

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Jean K Kim provides another way of speaking this type of reading with saying to deconstruct the text is to open it to release the possible positions of its intelligibility, including those which reveal the partiality of the ideology inscribed in the text,

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but refusing to identify meaning with the a thorough intentions. Deconstructive reading locates its meaning in areas that traditional interpretations have marginalized, Kim continues. In its margin, the text contains the critique of its own

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values through which a new meaning can be produced. Yet this can only happen when a flesh and blood reader is engaged in the reading process. End Quote.

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In this sense, resistance to dehumanization is present in that the body becomes an important and vital mode of expressing love to the world. Through such thinking, we gauge who Jesus was in human flesh,

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the divine, housed in a body like ours. Such readings are uncomfortable if not considered irreverent, to the extent they seek to do what Jane Schauburg calls a quote translation that is open to what lies beneath and beyond the text.

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End Quote. The text can't matter more and better represent life than what Nasha Junior identifies as quote, the particular real life experiences of real flesh and blood.

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End Quote. This is not to make something different of the text, but rather to surface and highlight a meaningfulness typically relegated to the margins.

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Thomas's call to see the wounds centers the misery not because the wounds can be healed or erased. If that were the case, perhaps Thomas wouldn't have called to touch him, but rather because they must be

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remembered. Dean Ward describes Thomas as a thinker and experimenter who believes in the evidence of the senses. Does this fully capture the term made by Thomas?

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The importance here is not simply the physicality of material, but also vital importance is the hermeneutical significance given to materiality through Thomas. With Thomas is a recasting of hope a grounding of hope, so to speak,

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by means of which hope becomes the reflection of our movement through our existential circumstances. Hope is the assertion, a demand to be present. The affirmation is a secondary enterprise.

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The primary task is a centering of misery and suffering, and in this way to understand the world and our place in it through the contours and experiences of our values and virtues, tested through our embodied selves and relationship to others in the world.

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If we do this, we might find value in recognizing that Thomas doesn't move in isolation, but rather he calls on readers to join him in using their hands. Thanks so much.