Reflection on the Readings for the Second Sunday of Easter
Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31
The Incredulity of Thomas. Caravaggio, Italy, 1602.
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were
locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood
among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them
his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the
Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me,
so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,
“Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if
you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them
when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But
he said to them, “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.”
A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them.
Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said,
“Peace be with you.” 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!” Jesus said to him,
“Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have
not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not
written in this book. But these are written so that you may continue to believe that
Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have
life in his name.
There were years in Ireland in the past when Catholic faith had to be practiced
underground. The faithful gathered on the mountainsides or in the glens and in the
forest in secret at Mass rocks, some of which can still be visited today. Nature itself
became the hidden cathedral and secret churches. Of that day – and it is not so long
ago – a modern poet Patrick Kavanagh has written of his fellow farmers:
Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap
three men know God the Father in a tree:
the Holy Spirit in the rising sap,
And Christ will be
in the green leaves that will come at Easter
from the sealed and guarded tomb.
The sealed and guarded tomb was of course Ireland – all political poetry is cryptic – and
Easter with Christ coming forth in the green leaves was the day of future deliverance.
Has that day come? If you know that history of that troubled island you may judge for
yourself. This much at least can be said: the history of violence among Christians
around the globe is such that the continuing power of sin is absolutely clear. Jesus has
come froth from the tomb as a reality of the first century yet is still imprisoned there by
all who proclaim his resurrection religiously while denying it humanly.
This is a somber reflection for the eighth day of the feast – the Second Sunday of
Easter — because the church that we are lives with a painful paradox. On the Lord’s
day we “declare…what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have
seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning
the word of life” (1 John 1:1). We are conscious that if he is not alive in us “we lie and
do not do what is true” while “if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have
fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin” (1 John
1:6-7). If we perpetuate wars and killings, starve the poor, damage reputations, warp the
young, then we engage in the rhetoric of religion without doing the works of religion. We
proclaim faith while perverting faith, sing “Hosanna” and “Alleluia” while bringing down
on ourselves a curse and not a blessing. Surely that is not our intent. Yet we must
remind ourselves of the perilousness of our Easter profession, the awesomeness of our
hope that “those who believed were of one heart and one soul” (Acts 5:32). It must be a
good for the world that there are Christians. Is it? Are there among us the signs of the
apostles – healings, cures, the soothing of troubled spirits, the generous sharing of
goods? Does Easter mean waling abroad on the earth of the risen Lord in us in whom
he lives?
The fact must be faced that as the world becomes increasingly secularized, faith loses
its grip on the world’s population. Less and less does religion provide answers to the
questions people are asking. People see their needs met in other ways: by the food
they require, the technical progress that gives them a better life, the recreations and the
sports and the arts however debased that provide relief from daily drudgery. Religious
people like to suppose that the great mystery of life and death is met by none of these
things, that eternal hungers continue so long as mortality persists. It may very well not
be so. If it were, the Christian churches of the globe would be filled every Sunday. But
they are not filled. The fact of having to die is probably not humanity’s greatest problem.
Having to live is. Can Christian faith resist cultural erosion? The root question is whether
the risen Lord has anything to say about the living of a life. For, in fact, his triumph over
death seems to be a matter in which the Christian world has a very modest interest.
“Jesus came and stood before them. ‘Peace be with you,’ he said (John 20:19). Then
he sent his disciples out with a task, even as God had sent him. He breathed upon them
the breath of God making them the agents of divine forgiveness — or the withholding of
it if there is no change of heart. “Do not persist in your unbelief but believe…Blessed are
they who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (vss. 27c, 29b).
The resurrection of Jesus is all about a lived human life. It holds out the possibility of
peace where there is no peace, of mutual forgiveness in a community that is defined as
a forgiving community. Is there a proven human need for these tremendous gifts? I think
you can say that a war-torn, starving, exploited, anxious, and unreconciled human
family needs nothing so sorely as what the risen Christ stands ready to give – if we
have not seen will only believe.
Kevin+
Recent Comments