The Sunday of Apostle Thomas, known in Russian as Antipascha (“opposite Pascha” or “after Pascha”), is the first Sunday following the Feast of the Resurrection. It commemorates the Apostle Thomas’s encounter with the risen Christ eight days after the Resurrection, as recorded in John 20:24–29. This event is central not only to the post-Resurrection appearances of Christ but also to the Church’s proclamation of the reality of His bodily resurrection. Among the Orthodox Old Believers, this feast carries a particular depth of meaning, bound to our emphasis on continuity, physicality, and uncompromising faithfulness to the traditions handed down from the pre-Nikonian Church.
The key passage is from the Gospel according to John: “Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!'” (John 20:27–28)
Thomas is often unjustly called “Doubting Thomas,” as if he were some sort of sceptic or unbeliever. This label is both misleading and unfair. Thomas was not doubting the possibility of Christ’s resurrection in a rationalistic or modern sense; he was demanding to see the marks of the nails and the wound in Christ’s side because he knew what had happened at Golgotha. He had seen the crucifixion with his own eyes. He had seen the Lord’s body broken, His side pierced, His blood and water poured out. He wanted to be certain that the one appearing to the other disciples was not a vision, not a ghost, and not a deception of grief or the imagination. He was not content with second-hand reports, even from the other Apostles. He wanted personal knowledge. His words—“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25)—were not words of defiance, but of rigorous integrity. He would not proclaim the Resurrection unless he was certain that it was the crucified Lord Himself who had risen.
Christ, in His condescension and patience, does not scold Thomas. He appears again, this time for Thomas. “Peace be with you,” He says, and then He invites Thomas to touch His wounds: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe” (v. 27). He does not humiliate him. He meets his need. He offers His risen body for inspection. There is no dismissal, no belittling. He gives Thomas what he asked for, because faith in the Resurrection must be grounded in the reality of the Cross. The risen Christ still bears His wounds. The wounds are not erased; they are glorified. They are marks of identity, not shame. Thomas responds with the clearest and most theologically rich confession in the Gospels: “My Lord and my God!” (v. 28). He does not call Him teacher, or Rabbi, or Messiah. He calls Him Kyrios and Theos—Lord and God. This is not doubt. This is certainty. And it comes from contact with the wounded, risen flesh of the Saviour.
Christ’s next words—“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (v. 29)—are not a reproach to Thomas. They are a beatitude for us. Thomas was not excluded from Christ’s blessing; he was the occasion for it. The Lord is not rebuking Thomas but strengthening the faith of those who will follow. The Apostles saw, touched, and heard. But the generations to come will believe without seeing, without touching. They will believe the apostolic word. They will trust the Gospel. And Christ calls them blessed. This includes all who have held fast through persecution, exile, and loss—such as the Old Believers, who, though they saw the collapse of the canonical order in Russia, remained steadfast in faith passed down by those who had seen.
Thomas is not the patron of doubters. He is the witness of the wounds. He reminds the Church that faith must be in the crucified and risen Christ, not an abstract idea or a moral teacher. He demands to see the marks of death, and in seeing them, confesses the Resurrection. His insistence is not unbelief; it is fidelity. And our Lord, in His mercy, answers it—not with a lecture, but with His body.
Liturgical Observance
The Sunday of St. Thomas is celebrated with full Paschal joy. The hymns of the Octoechos, still chanted in the Old Rite according to pre-Nikonian rubrics, carry over the Paschal tone, and the greeting Christ is risen! (Christos voskrese!) continues to be used. The Divine Liturgy retains much of the Paschal character, affirming that the Resurrection is not a one-day event but a forty-day celebration culminating in the Ascension.
In the pre-Nikonian Typikon, Antipascha marks the first day when the faithful return to normal prostrations during prayer. However, the Paschal joy is not diminished. The fact that the Church appoints the reading of Thomas’s confession—“My Lord and my God!”—for this Sunday demonstrates that this declaration is the very heart of the Christian proclamation.
Old Believer Perspective
The Old Believers, who rejected the unlawful and foreign-imposed liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon in the mid-17th century, have preserved an unbroken continuity with the Russian Orthodox tradition as it stood before the apostasy of the synodal hierarchy. For us, the Sunday of Apostle Thomas is not just a calendar event but a spiritual touchstone—a confirmation of our witness to the truth, even when we are slandered, exiled, and burned for it.
Firstly, our strong emphasis on the integrity of the body and the preservation of the physical forms of worship corresponds directly with the Gospel message of the physical resurrection. The Incarnation was not symbolic. The Resurrection was not an allegory. They were real in the most tangible sense. The Word became flesh, not idea. He rose in the same body in which He was crucified, with the wounds yet visible. This truth strikes at the heart of modern spiritualist errors which reduce Christ to a figure of inward experience and liturgy to a theatre of preferences. Thomas’s demand to touch the Risen Christ was not irreverence, nor stubbornness, but a desire for holy certainty—a certainty grounded in the real and visible body of the Lord. It is this same desire that led the Old Believers to resist any and all innovations in ritual, texts, and sacred traditions, no matter how subtle or how loudly their proponents appealed to Greek precedent or imperial pressure. The Resurrection is a reality that touches flesh and bone. And so must our worship. If the faith is embodied, then so too must be its expressions—gestures, words, icons, chant, and books, preserved without alteration, because they were received as sacred. Just as the Apostles could not reimagine the risen Christ in a different form, so we cannot tolerate the revision of rites once hallowed by centuries of use and sealed by the blood of martyrs. The Old Rite, in all its visible forms, is a proclamation of the Resurrection, because it confesses that Christ came in the flesh and rose in the flesh. To mutilate the inherited rites is to mutilate the witness of the Resurrection itself.
Secondly, the very act of holding fast to ancestral rites mirrors Thomas’s clinging to the visible and tactile reality of Christ. Thomas would not rest content with a report, however reliable. He sought to see and to touch. Likewise, the Old Believers have not accepted reforms handed down by imperial fiat or synodal decrees backed by bayonets. We remain bound to the Church of our Fathers—not to a church restructured by modernising bureaucrats in cassocks. Every gesture, every syllable of the old chants, every prostration and every use of two fingers to sign the Cross, is our confession of fidelity to the Christ who showed His wounds to Thomas.
When we chant “Alleluia” twice instead of three times, as we always did before Nikon’s betrayal, we are not arguing over numbers. We are defending the unaltered voice of the Church. When we resist the addition of the third “Alleluia,” we are resisting the notion that sacred things may be tampered with because of political convenience or foreign fashion. When we cling to the old liturgical books, handwritten and preserved through the centuries, we are not nostalgic; we are obedient. For “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). To us, that is not poetry. It is theology. It is fact. The modernist urge to change sacred things on the basis of scholarly consensus or foreign usage is, for us, not an intellectual exercise, but a spiritual betrayal. It is akin to denying the reality of Christ’s wounds, to claiming that His risen body could be adjusted, streamlined, or reinterpreted for a new generation. It is no coincidence that those who altered the rites also opened the door to secularism, rationalism, and eventually atheism in Holy Russia. It began with changing “Alleluia.” It ended with Lenin. Such is the fruit of innovation.
We who are called Old Believers do not take that name in pride but in faithfulness. We do not invent. We do not adapt. We receive and we preserve. Like St. Thomas, we place our fingers in the nail-prints of the inherited tradition, and we confess, with full voice and unwavering heart: “My Lord and my God!”
Martyrdom and Confession
Thomas’s exclamation, “My Lord and my God!”, is a confession—a solemn proclamation of faith in the risen Christ, who stands before him bearing the marks of crucifixion. This confession comes not from theory or argument, but from direct encounter. It is the confession that every Christian is called to make—not once, but constantly, through word, action, and above all, through endurance in the face of suffering. In the tradition of the Church, the term confessor has a precise meaning. It refers to one who has suffered for the faith, who has endured persecution, torture, exile, or imprisonment for the sake of Christ, but who has not died a martyr’s death. The confessor is one who has borne witness under duress and has remained unshaken. In this sense, the Old Believers of the 17th and 18th centuries are confessors. They were hunted like criminals, imprisoned, mutilated, tortured, and burned alive by the Russian state and by the reformed Church hierarchy under the influence of Nikon and the imperial court. Their only “crime” was faithfulness—faithfulness to the rite, the prayer, the gesture, and the language sanctified by centuries of use in the Russian Orthodox Church before it was forcibly aligned with foreign models and altered by decree.
They would not cross themselves with three fingers, because their fathers had crossed themselves with two. They would not bow to liturgical books corrected by Protestant scholars in Greek, because their inherited books were sanctified by the blood of the saints. They would not accept a council summoned by the Tsar and dominated by Latinising influences. And so they were mocked, labelled schismatics, exiled to the wilderness, and murdered without mercy. Whole villages were burned. Monasteries were destroyed. Women and children were locked inside wooden churches and set alight by government troops. But they did not recant. Like St. Thomas, they held fast to the incarnate reality of their faith. Their confession was not grounded in emotional fervour or intellectual protest, but in holy certainty—a certainty that the faith handed down by the Fathers was not to be “updated,” “reformed,” or “improved.” It was to be kept. What they preserved was not a cultural relic, but the lived memory of the Body of Christ. And so must we.
Our churches are adorned with icons painted in the traditional Russian manner—ascetic, severe, luminous with the light of the Kingdom, not corrupted by the sentimental and theatrical style imported from the West after the reforms. These icons are not art; they are dogma in colour, theology in line and form. They reveal the spiritual world, not the emotions of the painter. They do not flatter the eye; they elevate the soul.
Our chant is znamenny, a solemn and unadorned mode of prayer, structured to lead the heart upward without distraction. It is not polyphonic, not Italianate, not romanticised. It is the voice of the Church as she prayed before Peter the Great began remaking her in the image of Western courts and theatres. Znamenny chant is slow, deliberate, and sober—like the true Orthodox faith. It does not seek to entertain. It exists only to glorify God.
Our confession, then, is not a museum of customs frozen in time. It is the continuation of the Apostle Thomas’ exclamation. When we hold to the Old Rite, we are not being archaic. We are being faithful. Each gesture, each prostration, each psalm chanted in the old tone, is a repetition of “My Lord and my God!” Each refusal to compromise with modern liturgical innovations is a defence of the same truth Thomas saw with his eyes and touched with his hands—that Christ is risen in the flesh, that the wounds are real, and that the faith does not change.
The Old Believers were called stubborn. But they were steadfast. They were called heretics. But they were confessors. In their simplicity and endurance, they were closer to Thomas than the reformers who persecuted them. And if we would stand with Thomas, then we must continue standing with them—not in name only, but in rite, in life, and in witness.
The Resurrection and the Church
The Sunday of Apostle Thomas affirms that the Church is founded not on speculation, nor on private revelations, but on the testimony of those who saw the Risen Lord with their own eyes. “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.” (Acts 2:32) The Apostles did not preach dreams. They preached what they had seen and handled. “We have seen the Lord,” they said to Thomas (John 20:25), and later, they would say the same to the nations. This apostolic witness is the rock upon which the Church stands, and it cannot be replaced by opinion, modern theory, or changing cultural sentiment. But the Sunday of Apostle Thomas also contains within it a word to us, who have not seen. The Lord says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” This is not a lower form of faith, nor a consolation prize. It is a commendation of the faithful across the generations, who, without visions or miracles, have clung to the tradition with unwavering fidelity. In our tradition, especially among the Old Believers, this is understood as a high calling. We do not walk by sight, nor are we sustained by signs. We do not see the wounds, yet we believe. We do not hear the Apostles’ voices, yet we preserve their prayers word for word. We have not touched the risen body of Christ, yet we confess His Resurrection with boldness. To preserve the faith intact, unchanged, and handed down without adulteration is itself an act of faith. It is to believe as Thomas believed—without seeing, but with certainty.
This is why the Sunday of Apostle Thomas holds a special place in the pominki—the memorial gatherings of the faithful for the departed. On the Monday following, which we call Radonitsa—the “Day of Rejoicing”—the Church turns to the graves of the faithful with the proclamation of the Resurrection. In many villages, processions go to the cemeteries. Graves are cleaned. Paschal foods are shared. Psalms are read. And above all, the Paschal greeting resounds over the tombs—Christ is risen!— This is a theological statement, a declaration of dogma. We proclaim the Resurrection where the world sees only decay. We confess life where others see only bones. Among the Old Believers, this day takes on even deeper meaning. So many of our martyrs and confessors were buried in secret, or in mass graves, or in the wilderness where they fled from persecution. But we do not forget them. Their bones are not forgotten. The Resurrection of the body is not a metaphor for us. We do not speak of “resurrection” as a symbol of spiritual renewal or moral improvement. We speak of real bones, real flesh, real glorified humanity rising from the grave, as Christ rose. “Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!” (Isaiah 26:19) We say these words with full belief that these bodies will be raised.
When we chant “Christ is risen” over the tombs of our forebears, we are not reciting poetry. We are repeating what the Apostles preached. We are joining Thomas in his confession—not in a room behind locked doors, but standing among the graves, proclaiming to death itself that it has been conquered. As we bow before the crosses marking the resting places of our fathers and mothers, we are saying with unwavering conviction that death has no dominion, and that this faith, preserved without corruption, is the faith that saves. Thus, the Sunday of Apostle Thomas is for us not only the beginning of the second week of Pascha, but also the opening of the great and final hope—the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. It binds the testimony of the Apostles to the faith of the faithful departed. It confirms that our hope is not buried in the past, nor severed by time, but alive, because Christ is risen indeed.
Conclusion
The Sunday of Apostle Thomas reminds the Church that doubt can lead to the clearest confession when it is honest. The Old Believers embody this confession—not in words alone, but in lives sacrificed for fidelity to the Risen Lord. Like Thomas, they refused to accept a second-hand gospel or a man-made ritual. Today, as did our forbears, we demand to see and touch what was handed down from the Apostles and the Fathers. And if we find it threatened, we will give up everything to preserve it.
Christ showed His wounds to Thomas not because He had to, but because He honours the seeking heart. The Old Believers of the past, for all their severity, have continued this sacred seeking. They are not antiquarians; they are witnesses. We continue this today without compromise! As it is written:
“Do not doubt but believe.” And our answer, like Thomas’s, is clear: “My Lord and my God!”
May God bless you +
Fr. Charles
27 April 2025
Sunday of Apostle Thomas
