“Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed,” Jesus said to a once doubtful Thomas. Well, I guess that includes you and me. We have not seen the risen Lord and yet we believe he is risen. Like us, many early Christians never saw Jesus during his earthly ministry either. Their belief rested on the faith and spoken words of others who had. Like them, we received our faith in the same way.
On Easter Sunday we heard about the resurrection with the discovery of the empty tomb. Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter were the heroes in that story. Mary and her friends had gone to the tomb before daybreak and discovered that the body of Jesus was missing. They shared the news with the eleven and others gathered in the upper room. Peter ran to the tomb and went away amazed at what had happened. He found the tomb to be just as he had been told.
Even though Jesus had foretold what would happen, the disciples didn’t consider the possibility of resurrection. Had their unbelief persisted, a community of faith would never have emerged. Deceived and let down, the disciples would have gone their separate ways. Peter and Andrew would have gone back to fishing for a livelihood. With Jesus dead and gone, what would have kept them together? Yet, we are gathered here today because something astonishing happened. They witnessed the risen Lord and came to believe in all that he had told them would happen.
How did that transformation from unbelief to belief take place? When Jesus appeared in their midst that first night, the disciples at last believed in the resurrection. Jesus identified himself by showing them his wounds. Now, fully convinced that he was no ghost, they rejoiced. The exception was Thomas, who wasn’t there that night.
Thomas is often given the bum rap for being doubtful but his initial response makes sense. Wouldn’t you have reacted in the same way if your closest friend made such an absurd claim? He insisted that he could not believe what he was told without some proof. A week later, Thomas got the proof he demanded when Jesus appeared and invited him to see for himself the wounds that he had endured. “Do not persist in your unbelief, but believe!”
Jesus then asks Thomas, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”
Perhaps you have heard of Flannery O’Connor, a Catholic author who lived in Georgia and died nearly 60 years ago. She wrote of faith as being a life long process of moving from a child’s unquestioning faith to a mature, tested faith. There is much suffering in the doubts of those who want to believe, she noted, yet that is the way to a deepened faith. In The Habit of Being, she writes,
“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and is all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as in every other way, though some never do.
“What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must as least do this; keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.”
In his prayer, “blessed are they who have not seen and have believed,” Jesus is speaking of us and all other Christians who have come to faith in the resurrection and his divine mercy since that profound evening, not by seeing firsthand the wounds of his side but by the testimony of others. Jesus is speaking to you and me, to those who dare to stand together publicly and profess the faith that has been handed on to us. Jesus is speaking of us as being blessed because someone, most likely our parents, cared enough to share their faith in the risen Christ with us. Jesus is speaking of you and me, trusting that we will follow in the footsteps of past generations, passing on the good news to the children of today so that future generations will never be denied the opportunity to live with trust in the risen Christ.
Speaking of trust, today we honor Jesus by trusting in him. At the start of this millennium, Pope John Paul instituted this feast to remind us that God’s divine mercy is greater by far than our sins. God seeks to forgive us, yet do we trust God to do that? All we need to do is approach God with a contrite heart. Yet like Thomas, we find that challenging to truly believe the good news of divine mercy that Jesus offers us.
We cannot place our fingers in Jesus’ wounds, but we can say, as Thomas did, “My Lord and my God!” Doing so entails deepening our faith and not taking our belief for granted. Just as Thomas did, we need to ponder our faith in Jesus and our Catholic beliefs. In these difficult times, when coping with inflation, the war in Ukraine, the pandemic, issues that impact us close to home, we can be tempted to lose our trust in Jesus, yet now more than ever, we need to trust that God is with us, urging us to live with a faith that sustains us in our most trying moments. Jesus is speaking to us now, just as he did to the apostles, “Peace be with you! Be not afraid! I am here to free you from your fears.”