The teaching of this Gospel is that our contact with the Risen Lord is through faith. This Gospel reading is not primarily about Thomas and his doubts. It is about us and our faith. Faith is the core thread of St. John’s Gospel. In his famous prologue, St. John writes that all who accepted Jesus and believed in Him were empowered to become children of God. Every one of the next twenty chapters after that is about faith, its importance, its loss and all the ways people came to belief in Jesus. Finally, in the end, Jesus says to Thomas and to us, “Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed.” John concludes by writing that all that he wrote is to help us believe.
In these days of the Easter season, the Church invites us to experience the Risen Lord in our lives. When we read or hear about the appearances of Jesus to his friends in the days immediately following the Resurrection, we feel a kind of envy. For us, Christ seems to be a very distant figure, right? The resurrection belongs to the past and the Gospels refer to events that happened over 2,000 years ago.
The other day I heard someone speaking about the faith of the apostles. That person said that the apostles’ faith in Jesus was really easy to understand because they had lived and seen what they believed. For them Jesus was not an historic figure, someone they had come across in books or in arts. He was real, so real that one of them, Saint John, writes in his first letter that they were able to see with their eyes and touch with their hands the Word made man, Jesus the Lord.
We have to trust and believe that Jesus performed the miracles spoken of in the Scriptures. They didn’t! They saw those miracles with their own eyes. They were there with Him. They were eyewitnesses to Jesus’ public life. In today’s Gospel, Thomas believes again not by reflecting on ideas or spending time in readings or long prayers, but by touching Jesus’ wounds. For the apostles faith was something very tangible. Even for the first Christians, faith was something very physical. The first line of today’s first reading says that “many signs and wonders were done among the people at the hands of the apostles”. They would bring the sick to be touched by the shadow of the apostles and they were all cured.
Our faith seems to have nothing to do with theirs. Their faith was made out of flesh and bones, dust and sweat, signs and miracles. They could speak with the Risen Lord face to face. We struggle to believe and trust in Christ because we don’t see him with our eyes. We can’t hear his voice. We can’t touch his body as Thomas did.
Woody Allen is quoted as saying: “if only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.” That’s how we feel sometimes. We think we need some clear signs to believe.
Well, this is the point of the season of Easter. The Church challenges us to have the same experience that the apostles had. Christ is as present to his Church today as He was to the apostles after his Resurrection. He wants us to see Him, and touch Him, and listen to Him, and talk to Him. At Easter we are reminded that Christ is not buried in the past - He is alive! It was not an idea, nor a religion or a philosophy that rose from the dead, but Jesus’ body! He took his wounds to heaven and he comes to us when we doubt just as he went to Thomas that morning, this morning.
Today’s Gospel is not just a page in the life of Thomas. It is an invitation for you to really touch Christ, to really encounter Him alive, to really pass from former ways to newness of life. I guess what you might be asking yourself now is: “Yes, I want to -- but how? How can that happen to me?”. The first step is to believe: “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed”. Seeing is not believing, because believing is accepting something without seeing it, but with God the opposite is true according to the gospel. Believing will lead to seeing. But we have to believe first.
The second step is to be part of the Church: Thomas couldn’t see Jesus the first time because he was not with the other disciples. He met Christ when he rejoined the other apostles. Jesus didn’t appeared to him alone. He met Thomas when Thomas was with his friends, together.
Our trust is secure in Jesus but we all wish the Lord would give us a little more proof, as he did to Thomas. Three times John’s gospel tells us Thomas was called the twin. Why do you think John made such a point of the fact that he was a twin? Perhaps in a symbolic way we are his twin, wanting proof like he did. I have to give Thomas credit. He could have walked away and said “you’re all crazy. I’m getting out of here.” He stayed with them through what must have been a very difficult week for him. I think there’s a reason here. When we have doubts and questions about our faith, we need to stay with it and not walk away. If Thomas had walked away, he would never have seen the Lord. The gospel is telling us, if we stay with it, the Lord will reveal Himself to us.
Trying to live an individualistic faith is the fastest way to end up losing the Faith. In the Church we are not perfect, just as the apostles were not perfect, but it is the place where Jesus manifests himself and comes to us. We can touch his body in the Church, especially in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and in the poor. We can listen to his voice in the teachings of the Church, in the Word of God at every Sacrament we celebrate. We can come to believe in Him by giving ourselves to Christ and by surrendering to the mystery of the Faith.
Let’s ask God to help us experience what those first apostles did. Let’s reflect these in these days of Easter on the gifts we are given. Let’s take advantage of the many opportunities St. Anne gives us to encounter the living Christ. On this feast when we celebrate Divine Mercy, let’s open ourselves up to the love of God, which is all encompassing and everlasting.
