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.  If ever I become Pope (a long shot, to be sure!), I think I would choose to be called Thomas.  (Although now that we have Pope Francis – not to mention our two new saints this weekend, John XXIII and John Paul II – it might be hard to make up my mind!)

 As a person with a math and science background, I appreciate Thomas’ inquisitive nature, his need for evidence, for proof.   Thomas wants to know, to understand, to see for himself.   Think about it: Jesus was the person Thomas admired most in all the world.  He had left everything – job, family, friends – to follow Jesus.  He was part of Jesus’ inner circle.  He had seen his Master mocked, condemned, tortured and crucified – while he and the others ran away.  Then three days later, first the women, then the other Apostles report that they have seen, met, touched Jesus.  What was Thomas feeling?  Envy?  Hurt?  Disappointed?  Left out?  In any event, we know that Thomas was not content with a second-hand report.  Jesus appeared to the others, so why not to him?  Thomas wants to see Jesus.  To touch him.  To know “for sure.” 

So Thomas seeks 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 still has an “instant  recognition” factor.  Even people who have never read the Bible know what a “doubting Thomas” is!    

We live in a world where it is the champions of “the new atheism” – the Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens of this world – who top the best-sellers list.  For many people, the credibility of the Christian faith – and in particular, the Catholic Church – has been seriously compromised.  In spite of the immense popularity of Pope Francis, who this weekend will canonize two great witnesses of faith of love, two Popes whose ministry has shaped the modern church and world, John XXIII and John Paul II, there are still a great many people who find it hard to believe or trust – in the church, and even in God?

As most of you know by now, I love good books and good movies.  I especially like great movies based on great books!  I haven’t yet seen “Heaven Is For Real” or “God Is Not Dead” – two “Christian movies” currently doing well in the cinemas – but a favourite film of mine is Monsignor Quixote, based on the Graham Greene novel.   Set in late-1970s Spain, it tells the story of a simple priest, Fr. Quixote, who befriends “Sancho”, the Communist mayor of his village of El Toboso.  Once an ardent Catholic and devout seminarian, Sancho has rejected God and the Church; he prefers to place his faith in Marx and Lenin.  Fr. Quixote, for his part, is a humble man with a simple, uncomplicated faith and a gift for friendship.  After a gesture of hospitality leads to his promotion to the rank of Monsignor, the priest and the Marxist set off on a motor holiday through the Spanish countryside.  Along the way, their adventures are punctuated by a series of theological conversations, focusing on the theme of faith and doubt. 

Fr. Quixote admits he is no great theologian.  He has long given up referring to his old seminary theology textbooks, preferring to rely on the Gospels and the lives of the saints for guidance as he ministers to his flock.   While firmly hoping that Catholicism will lead his people to a happy future, he confides to Sancho: “Despair I understand, and sometimes, doubt.”  Then, conspiratorially, he adds: “I hope you doubt too, Sancho.  It’s human to doubt.”      

As the story unfolds, and as their friendship deepens, Sancho and Fr. Quixote become less defensive of their own certainties, less inclined to seek to convert one another, more ready to confide their fears and doubts to one another.  Quoting the poet Unamuno, Sancho reminds his priest-friend that “There is a muffled voice, a voice of uncertainty which whispers in the ears of the believer.  Without this uncertainty, how could we live?”  (112) 

Through their adventures, many of the “certainties” Fr. Quixote has taken for granted as being part and parcel of the faith get challenged; he is forced to ask new questions not only about faith, but about himself, about his vow of celibacy, about the meaning of his priestly vocation. 

The only time Fr. Quioxte becomes angry with Sancho is when he accuses his belief: “At least I know Marx and Lenin existed.  You only believe.”  Emboldened by faith (and a lot of wine!), Fr. Quixote responds: “Oh, I know what you think.  You think my God is an illusion, like the Don’s windmills.  But he exists, I tell you.  I don’t just believe in Him.  I touch Him.”  (Gesture)  Later, he confides: “There was so much I was supposed to teach as a parish priest that I didn’t understand.  The Trinity.  Natural Law. Mortal Sin.  I taught words out of textbooks.  I never asked myself, ‘do I believe these things?’  I went home and read the Gospels, read my saints.  They wrote of love.  I could understand that.  The other things didn’t seem as important.”

More than any argument from reason or revelation, it is that love, that profound humanity, that great capacity for friendship embodied by Fr. Quixote, which remain with Sancho.  Having experienced this love, Sancho must now reconsider his own Marxist faith, whose materialist vision of the universe left no room for God.   Sancho is not yet sure whether God is real; but the friend and companion he has learned to love tells him: “come with me, and you will find the kingdom.”  Through Fr. Quixote, who touches God, God touches Sancho.  The seed of faith has been planted. 

Okay – now let’s get back to the Gospel! It is very tempting to criticize the “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."   But do we need to see Jesus’ message 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.  Confronted with Thomas’ doubt, Jesus responds not with condemnation, but with great compassion and mercy.  In response, Thomas makes the most explicit affirmation of faith in Jesus in the entire New Testament: “My Lord and my God!"  

This is not 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 2^nd Sunday (or Octave) of Easter is now known also as Divine Mercy Sunday.  And indeed, it is no coincidence that the canonization of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII should be happening today.   On October 11, 1962, in the speech that opened the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII affirmed that the Church should not be seen to be issuing harsh judgments and condemnations, but rather “desires to show herself to be the loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of mercy and goodness toward all her children.”  With courage, confidence, compassion, and a wonderful sense of humour, John opened the windows of the church onto the world, so that each could learn and grow from the other.  He entrusted himself, and the church he served, entirely to the mercy of God.

And what a powerful link exists between the Saint we now know as “John Paul the Great” and the reality of Divine Mercy!  Indeed, it was through the Polish Pope – the first non-Italian to serve as the successor of Peter in nearly 500 years – that the Church came to know of the devotion to the Divine Mercy popularized by St. Faustina Kowalska, a Polish nun who died in 1938.  Fittingly, after a long, courageous battle with Parkinsons’ disease, Pope John Paul II departed this world for his heavenly reward on April 2, 2005: the eve of the Feast of Divine Mercy.   At St. Faustina's canonization on April 30, 2000, he had proclaimed: "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." 

Therefore, the feast of Divine Mercy represents not the canonization of one pope’s private devotion, but rather the recovery of an ancient liturgical tradition: 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.  Divine Mercy Sunday IS the Octave Day of Easter, in which we celebrate the merciful love of God shining through the whole Paschal Triduum and the whole Easter mystery.  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!!

St. John XXIII – pray for us. St. John Paul II – pray for us. St. Faustina and St. Monica, pray for us.