As we complete our Easter octave, today’s Gospel presents us with the encounter between the Risen Christ and the struggling Apostle Thomas.  I have always liked Thomas.  I can relate to Thomas.  I have even joked that if ever I became Pope (a long shot, to be sure!), I would choose to be called Thomas.  Having a science background myself, I appreciate Thomas’ inquisitive nature: his need to know, to understand, to see for himself.  

Think about it: Jesus was the person Thomas admired most in all the world.  Thomas had left everything – job, family, friends – to follow Jesus.  He is called by John “the Twin” – maybe he even had to leave his twin brother behind when he made that fateful decision to cast his lot in with Jesus.  As part of Jesus’ inner circle, Thomas knew the secrets of Jesus’ heart.  But now, he had seen his Master betrayed, mocked, condemned, tortured and crucified – while he and the others ran away.  Then all of a sudden, just three days later, the other disciples report that they have seen, have met, have even touched Jesus.  What was Thomas feeling?  Jealous?  Hurt?  Left out?  In any event, Thomas refused to be satisfied with a second-hand report.  Jesus had appeared to the others – so why not to him?  He wants to see Jesus.  To touch him.  To know “for sure.”  

Not surprisingly, when Thomas hears the news of Jesus’ Resurrection, he hesitates to jump on the bandwagon.  He asks for evidence: to touch, with his very own hands, the wounds in Jesus’ hands and side.  It’s quite an outrageous request, when you think about it. 

For this reason, the Apostle Thomas has gone down in history as “Doubting Thomas”.   Like “Good Samaritan” or “Judas”, it’s one of the few biblical references that retains instant recognition.  Even people who’ve never read the Bible still typically know what a “doubting Thomas” is: someone who is skeptical about everything, who demands an unrealistic level of proof, who takes nothing on faith. 

And yet, doubt is part of the fabric of our lives.  To quote Fr. Brendan Flynn, as portrayed in the movie Doubt by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman: “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, when you doubt, you are not alone.”  Fr. Flynn’s penchant for doubt and ambiguity is contrasted in that film with the figure of the Mother Superior, brilliantly incarnated by Meryl Streep: she relies on what she calls “her certainty” to ground her belief in some horrific accusations against Fr. Flynn: “I may not have any evidence,” she tells him, “but I have my certainty.”    

In his homily reflections for this Sunday, Fr. Tom Rosica expresses well the power of this story:  John’s story of Jesus and Thomas provides us with an archetypal experience of doubt, struggle and faith. Herein lies every Christian's challenge: to believe without having seen. Thomas is not the eternal skeptic, nor the bullish, stubborn personality that Christian tradition has often painted. The lexicon translates the word "skepsis" as "doubt, misgiving, hesitation, and disbelief." Thomas, the doubter, was permitted to do something that we would all like to do. He was allowed to touch and "experience" something that by human means was not possible. For us it is more difficult. We need to begin with faith and then blindly touch our way to the heart of our lives.

Though we know so little about Thomas, his family background and his destiny, we are given an important hint into his identity in his Greek name: Thomas (Didymus, in Greek) means "twin". Who was Thomas' other half, his twin? Maybe we can see his twin by looking into the mirror. Thomas' other half is anyone who has struggled with the pain of unbelief, doubt and despair, and has allowed the presence of the Risen Jesus to make a difference. When this happens, the ice of skepticism thaws. Thomas and his twins throughout the world risk everything in Jesus and for Jesus and become sources of blessing for others, in spite of their doubts and despair – indeed, because of these.

Let us pay close attention to our Gospel text.  Preaching on this passage has often focused on the so-called “weakness” of Thomas’ faith, as if Jesus’ words to him are some kind of a reprimand: "You believe in me, Thomas, because you have seen me.  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."  Living in a modern world, marked by the notion that scientific method is the only path to objective knowledge of the truth, many of our contemporaries hear these words and object to the praising of so-called “Blind faith”.  It’s exactly the kind of idea that infuriates the modern scientific-materialist atheists – from Richard Dawkins to Sam Harris to Christopher Hitchens.

But do we need to see Jesus’ words here necessarily as a criticism of Thomas?  Maybe not.  After all, Thomas asks only what the other disciples had already experienced: to see and touch the risen Jesus for himself.  Thomas needed to encounter Jesus not just from hearsay, but in the flesh: in a real, personal way.  And confronted with Thomas’ honest seeking, Jesus responds not with condemnation or withdrawal, but with great compassion and mercy.  In response, Thomas comes out with perhaps the most explicit affirmation of faith in Jesus’ divine identity in the entire New Testament: “My Lord and my God!"   Not just a theoretical kind of faith, as when we mechanically recite the Creed as a set of “beliefs about God”, with neither thought nor feeling.   Thomas expresses his faith in someone real, in a risen Christ who has reached out and touched him right where he needed to be touched, in his own fear and guilt and loneliness.

Does Jesus not desire the same experience for you, and for me?  Do we dare to come to him – with all our doubts and questions and fears, with the different wounds we carry – and recognize in his wounded, Risen Body the possibility that we too can rise to new life, even in our own woundedness? 

This past Friday, our Video Divina series “Looking at life through the lens of the sacraments” considered ordained ministry and consecrated life, as featured in two episodes of the 1997 TV series “Nothing Sacred”.  Set in a fictional inner-city parish named “St. Thomas”, one of the major characters is Father Leo, who is a recovering alcoholic and serves as a wise mentor to the hotheaded young pastor, Father Ray.  After a long absence, he returns to the pulpit and preaches a short but powerful homily on the Gospel text we have just listened to:

I stopped preaching when I lost my faith in the resurrection.

It was the wounds that did it, I suppose.

You see, when God brought his son back from the dead,

he left five gaping wounds in his body.

It seemed cruel to me.

If he was going to bring his son back to life,

why didn’t he heal his wounds? I would have.

St. Thomas, after whom our church is named,

had his doubts about the resurrection too.

But Jesus came to him and said,

“Come here, Thomas, give me your hand.

I want you to put your hand into my wounds.  Feel that I am alive.

That’s what wounds are for - places to enter each other’s lives.

They are honorable things, even though we spend most of our time

trying to hide them...

 

In his seminal text “The Wounded Healer”, Fr. Henri Nouwen expressed a reality frequently overlooked, but one those who serve in ministry and the other helping professions ignore at their own peril: that we minister to others most effectively not out of our strengths and talents and giftedness, but out of our wounds and weakness and vulnerability.  The risen Christ appears in today’s Gospel as the archetypal Wounded Healer: Jesus’ glorified Body does not cease to bear the mark of his wounds, but they are glorified wounds, wounds into which we can plunge safely without hurting him, which become a source of identification and healing, of hope and refuge for us who reach out and touch him.

__________________________

In closing, I would just like to say a few words about the new name now given to this celebration of the 2^nd Sunday of Easter: Divine Mercy Sunday.

Far from a liturgical innovation canonizing a private devotion, the feast of Divine Mercy recovers an ancient liturgical tradition: that the "mercy and pardon" won for us by Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection demand not just a day, but a whole week of solemn celebration, filled with joyful Alleluias!  Divine Mercy Sunday IS the Octave Day of Easter: it celebrates the merciful love of God shining through the whole Easter Triduum and the whole Easter mystery.  

Last year, Pope Francis canonized Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II on this feast of Divine Mercy. In his homily, he cited the words of (now) St. John Paul at the 2000 canonization Mass for the Polish mystic St. Faustina, to whom we owe the renewed devotion to this beautiful icon of God’s infinite love and compassion:

"As Jesus shows his hands and his side [to the Apostles], he points to the wounds of the Passion, especially the wound in his heart, the source from which flows the great wave of mercy poured out on humanity." 

Our current Pope Francis has also emphasized this beautiful message of divine mercy throughout his brief pontificate, in his words and perhaps even more powerfully in his gestures of kindness, tenderness, and humble service.  Recently, after presiding over a celebration of reconciliation in St. Peter’s Basilica, he announced an upcoming Holy Year dedicated to the theme of God’s Mercy:  

“The call of Jesus pushes each of us never to stop at the surface of things, especially when we are dealing with a person. We are called to look beyond, to focus on the heart to see how much generosity everyone is capable. No one can be excluded from the mercy of God; everyone knows the way to access it and the Church is the house that welcomes all and refuses no one. Its doors remain wide open, so that those who are touched by grace can find the certainty of forgiveness. The greater the sin, so much the greater must be the love that the Church expresses toward those who open their hearts to God’s love.

Dear brothers and sisters, I have often thought about how the Church might make clear its mission of being a witness to mercy. It is journey that begins with a spiritual conversion. For this reason, I have decided to call an extraordinary Jubilee that is to have the mercy of God at its center. It shall be a Holy Year of Mercy. We want to live this Year in the light of the Lord's words: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

This Holy Year will begin on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, 8 Dec 2015, and will end on November 20, 2016, the Sunday dedicated to Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, and Living Face of the Father’s Mercy. I entrust the organization of this Jubilee to the Pontifical Council for Promotion of the New Evangelization, as a new stage in the journey of the Church on its mission to bring to every person the Gospel of mercy.

I am convinced that the whole Church will find in this Jubilee the joy needed to rediscover and make fruitful the mercy of God, with which all of us are called to give consolation to every man and woman of our time. From this moment, we entrust this Holy Year to the Mother of Mercy, that she might turn her gaze upon us and watch over our journey.

So let us respond positively to Pope Francis’ invitation, to the invitation of Jesus himself, to allow ourselves to be embraced by divine mercy, and to give flesh to that mercy, the loving compassion of God, in all that we live and do.  We are all utterly dependent on the mercy of a God who reaches out to us in our doubts and in our fears, inviting me to take refuge in his wounded side. 

So as we continue to celebrate the Lord’s resurrection on this “Easter day”, may our lives also be steeped in the God who is “mercy within mercy within mercy.”  Amen!  Alleluia!!