Sunday, April 19, 2009AD
2nd Sunday of Easter
Doubting Thomas
The patron saint of Missouri, the “Show Me State” makes his annual appearance in our traditional Gospel for the Second Sunday of Easter. Thomas represents those who demand empirical verification that belief in Jesus is legitimate. When Jesus meets his demand, Thomas’ response is “My Lord and my God.” This is the highest title attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. It brackets Jn 1.14, “The Word was God.” (Recall, the author of The DaVinci Code says that Jesus was not pronounced divine until 325 AD. Funny that he got that fact wrong.)
Many think that the incident of Doubting (Skeptical) Thomas probably represented the last account in the original Gospel of John. If such is the case, Jesus’ words to Thomas at the conclusion of the Gospel today would have originally been the last words of the Risen One in the Fourth Gospel. “You believed, Thomas, because you have seen. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
Is Jesus talking about us? With the Help of the Holy Spirit, indeed, He is. However, it is not that easy. We all experience, at times, the Left Hand of God. In our lives, there are experiences that challenge our faith in the God revealed by our Lord Jesus Christ. We all experience disappointments, rejections, absurdities, failures, troubles and setbacks in our lives. (If you have not yet, don’t look for them; they’ll find you.) Catholics and all Christians should be very circumspect in talking about the depth of our faith. We all want to be strong believers. However, sometimes the vicissitudes of life can challenge an easy faith and make our “credo’s” a little shakier. We might be strong believers one day and, then, on difficult days, “Yo” or “Nes” believers (a la Nicodemus). We pray for the Strength always to be firm in our faith in God. Though we have not seen, may we always believe.”
40 years ago, Pope Benedict wrote about the difference between “believing God” and “believing in God.” The then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, “Only in a lifelong conversion, can we become aware of what it means to say, “I believe.”
St Thomas has taken many hits over the years. Recall how we spoke of the ambivalence of Nicodemus as a disciple of Jesus. We are never really surely where he stands as a believer. Thomas is a different kettle of fish!
He wants his faith in Jesus to be solid and clear and well-founded. His life was Christocentric and transparent. After Jesus called Thomas’ demand, He would have agreed with Pope Benedict’s words.
We distinguish three levels of Catholic faith. First, when we attend on a regular basis on the Lord’s Day, we maintain our acquaintance with Jesus. Second, when we do something because of our acquaintance with Jesus during the week and sometimes, more than once or twice a day, then we maintain our familiarity with Jesus. Finally, and critically, when we spend quality time in contemplation and silence and solitude, we share intimacy with Jesus.
Many theologians have commented that unless Catholic laypeople (the people in the pews) realize that each of them has been called to intimacy with Jesus, then eventually, the familiarity and acquaintance with Jesus might possibly wither and fade away.
There is a sad phenomenon in many Catholic lives that is called the evaporation of faith. It is not that people rebel against Jesus or the Church. It is rather that neither makes a big difference in their lives even if they maintain the acquaintance and/ or the familiarity of faith to the neglect of the intimacy of faith. Faith withers when the human drive to transcendence is neglected or misguided.
Before the evaporation of faith reaches the critical point, its imminence might be seen in a beige Catholicism, a nice Catholicism, a conventional Catholicism, a subscription to what the Catholic version of the American dream. Will Herberg in the 1950’s wrote a pivotal sociology of USA religion, entitled Protestant, Catholic, Jew. He concluded that the three major American religions were three expressions (with appropriate trimmings) of the values of acceptable power, possessions and prestige, in a middle class milieu.
Each week, Catholics profess our faith (our belief in God) routinely as a conclusion to our Liturgy of the Word. We rattle off very quickly (hopefully, not mindlessly) the 14 articles of Christian faith which, we believe, unite us with Christians of the last two millennia. Someone asked another, noted theologian if it were time to change the Nicene Creed, which is, after all, over 1600 years old. The theologian warned against any change in the creed. It might be arrogant to assume that we know the true meaning of certain words. He asked, “What do you mean by “I”? by “believe”? by “God?” by “Father”? by “Almighty”? by “Creator of heaven and earth?” What makes modern people think that we could do the best job naming Christian reality? The same theologian wrote in another place, “The first article of faith equals the last article of faith”. If we believe in God, the Father Almighty, then, we believe in the last article of faith, the Resurrection of the Body and life in the world to come. They are two ways of expressing the same reality of belief in a God Who can give life in any situation, the God of Jesus Christ.St Thomas, after his coming to faith, would have no problem with any of this. Nicodemus, on the other hand, might have had some problems. Do we have any problems? Is faith all pervasive for us as it became for Thomas or is it ambivalent for us as it became for Nicodemus? Jesus met Thomas’ challenge; Thomas believed. With God’s Help, may we who have not seen always believe, on days good and not so good, in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God. 041909AD jfq