2d Sunday of Easter
April 19, 2020
John 20: 19-311 Pet 1: 3-9
Provincial House, New Rochelle, N.Y.
and Salesian H.S. Livestream
Introduction to Mass
Brothers and sisters, on this 8th day of Easter, the end of our
Easter Day festival, we gather at the Eucharist—a baker’s dozen of us in person
[i.e., the provincial residence SDBs] and many more present by grace and t he
mysteries of technology, to profess our faith in the living presence of Jesus
our Lord and God. In this troubled time,
we may come with fear and doubt like the apostles. We pray the Lord to strengthen us, encourage us,
and send on us his Holy Spirit of forgiveness for our sins.
“Thomas said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of
the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks …, I will not
believe’” (John 20: 25).
In his homily last Sunday, Fr. John [Serio] spoke
of the disciples’ missing the signs all around them concerning the life and
ministry, the passion and resurrection, of Jesus. In today’s gospel Thomas the apostle continues
to miss—or rather, disbelieve—the signs.
This is the same Thomas who about 2 weeks earlier had urged his
companions to return to Judea with Jesus and there die with him (John 10:16),
and then with them had witnessed the raising of Lazarus.
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| Incredulity of Thomas (Maerten De Vos) |
Now he’s a skeptic. He must have been afraid to be around his
fellow apostles in the days right after the crucifixion—social-distancing
himself, so that he wasn’t with them when Jesus appeared to them on Easter
nite. Now he’s a skeptic, refusing to
believe they’ve seen and spoken with Jesus risen, and been commissioned by him
to continue his ministry of salvation, bringing divine mercy, the forgiveness
of sins, to humanity (John 20:21-23).
Maybe Thomas is afraid all this is too good to be true; if he doesn’t
raise his hopes, they can’t be crushed—as the hopes of Cleopas and his
companion on the road to Emmaus had been crushed by Jesus’ death (Luke 24:21). (That companion probably was “Mary the wife of
Clopas,” one of the women who stood by Jesus’ cross [John 19:25].) Maybe—in spite of the sign of the raising of
Lazarus—all these reports that Thomas hears now seem to him like nonsense,
wishful thinking produced by the lively imaginations of Peter, John, Mary
Magdalene, and all the rest.
Thomas is slow to believe, or as Fr. John said
last week, slow to interpret all the signs, even the testimony of his
friends. St. John the Evangelist tells
us that Thomas was called Didymas, or the Twin (20:24); we call him Doubting
Thomas. Yet who of us can say for sure
that if we’d been in his shoes—or his sandals—we’d have been any less
skeptical?
Right now, in the spring of 2020, we are
in Thomas’s sandals—not concerning belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus
of Nazareth but concerning belief that Jesus is still present in our midst;
concerning the testimony of the Church, the ongoing witness to God’s mercy, that
Jesus continues to walk with us as he walked with Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas.
Where is Jesus, we may be asking—in all the
suffering around us, in the fear, in the disputes about whence came this virus
and how to respond to it and how soon to resume “normal” life? According to the Acts of the Apostles, the
disciples of Jesus sheltered in place for 50 days between Passover and
Pentecost. How long are we going to be
in lockdown, not “for fear of the Jews” (John 20:19) but for fear of a
microscopic bug? Why is God allowing
this to happen to us?
Thomas had his doubts resolved with a gentle
reproof from Jesus (20:27) and physical evidence. Jesus’ following words are addressed to
us: “Blessed are those who haven’t seen
but have believed” (20:29). We’ll
get no physical evidence that Jesus remains, living, among us, no evidence that
the sufferings of the sick and the anguish of their families are linked to his
passion, to the nail marks in his flesh. Ours is an age far more skeptical than Thomas
ever was, demanding physical, scientific evidence for almost everything—but in
many cases disbelieving such evidence, discerning, instead, “fake news”;
witness the abundance of conspiracy theories about such matters as the death of
Elvis, UFOs in the Nevada desert, and the origins of Covid-19.
How much harder, then, for us to grasp that we
“have to suffer thru various trials, so that the genuineness of [our] faith,
more precious than gold that is perishable …, may prove to be for praise,
glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ,” as St. Peter says in the
2d reading (1 Pet 1:6-7). When Jesus
reveals himself at his 2d coming—with those same nail and spear marks—we’ll comprehend
the mysterious ways in which he’s been with us thru every trial and challenge
all our lives and thruout all the ages—even when mankind’s been harassed by the
4 horsemen of war, famine, plague, and death (cf. Rev 6)—accompanying us toward
our share in his victory. Hence, citing
St. Peter again, even in a pandemic, you can “rejoice with an indescribable and
glorious joy, as you attain the goal of your faith, the salvation of your
souls” (1:9).
In fact, in these days of such trial and suffering,
Pope Francis has been challenging us not just to believe but also to be hopeful. He’s voiced the hope that, as the world has
shared the common scourge of pandemic and—maybe not quite enuf—worked together
to defeat it, humanity might become less divisive and more united than it has
been, united in pursuit of a more universal charity, united in the pursuit of
peace, united in uplifting all who are marginalized and suffering.
In a meditation published in a Spanish magazine on
Friday, the Holy Father says, “If
we act as one people, even in the face of the other epidemics that lie waiting
for us, we can have a real impact.”
Among the things that we can change, he includes
acting responsibly against hunger, so that no one dies of starvation when
there’s enough food for everyone. He asks: “Will we continue to look the other
way with complicit silence in the face of those wars fueled by desires for
dominance and power? Are we willing to change the lifestyles that plunge so
many into poverty, promoting and encouraging us to lead a more austere and
humane life that enables an equitable distribution of resources? Will we adopt,
as an international community, the necessary measures to stop the devastation
of the environment or will we continue denying the evidence?”
“The
globalization of indifference will continue to threaten and tempt our journey.…
We hope our journey will find us with the necessary antibodies of justice,
charity and solidarity.”[1]
Pope
Francis isn’t alone in finding reason to hope amid intense suffering. Pontius Pilate presented Jesus, just scourged
nearly to death and crowned with thorns, to the screaming mob—“Behold the man!”
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| "Ecce Homo" (Antonio Ciseri) |
Of that scene Benedict XVI writes: “In Jesus, it is man himself that is
manifested. In him is displayed the
suffering of all who are subjected to violence, all the downtrodden. . . . There is another side to all this, though: Jesus’ innermost dignity cannot be taken from
him. The hidden God remains present
within him. Even the man subjected to
violence and vilification remains the image of God. . . . So Jesus in the throes of his Passion is an
image of hope: God is on the side of
those who suffer.”[2]
May Christ, victor over death, keep us ever
hopeful. May our faith enable us to
bring his life, his goodness, his justice, and his mercy to a skeptical and
hurting world.
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