Saturday, April 09, 2016
II Easter, April 3, 2016
Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter
Year C ~ April 3, 2016
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
"I am the Alpha and the Omega," says
the Lord God,
Who is and Who was and Who is to come, the
Almighty.
+In
the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Everyone has to believe in Something.
Right now, I believe I’ll have another beer! OK. Ha Ha. This old, low tavern
joke is useful, though because it illustrates how believe can have several meanings. It can refer to an opinion, a hope, or a decision. Or confidence in
another person or institution. In Greek, it can also mean being faithful. So when Thomas says “Unless I
see I will not believe,” what exactly did he mean?
Maybe not that he doubted. The “finger
of doubt” which he insisted on thrusting into our Lord’s wounds before he
believed, may be a bad rap. The account is careful to remind us that Thomas was
called the Twin. As previously
observed on this occasion, this may refer to his double character: fidelity
and doubt. For Thomas was certainly
the most loyal of the disciples. He it was who said “Let us go with Him and die
with Him,” when the others were trying to dissuade Him from going to Jerusalem.
Doubt, double, twin – there is here
something more than the mere fact that Thomas had an identical brother
somewhere. So maybe it is his double character as a loyal skeptic.
Then again, maybe not. Maybe it refers
to the various meanings of the word believe.
Maybe Thomas’s twinness meant that he
exemplified two kinds of belief: fidelity and discernment. In that case, the Lord’s remark applied to him in both
parts: You have believed because you see;
blessed are those who believe though they have not seen. And Thomas is part
of the latter group, too. Thomas surely didn’t mean that he would not be faithful unless he touched the risen
Lord. The most loyal Apostle would not forsake Him. I think Thomas was faithful
even before he saw. He may not have held the opinion that Jesus was Risen, but
he was still loyal. And THAT led to his vision – his discernment. And THAT led,
in turn, to the blessing of confidence and hope.
Blessed are those who have not seen and
yet have believed.
Thomas is one of those, as we are. Not
just some materialistic skeptic, but one whose faith leads to a new,
unspeakable reality.
What if the Lord’s remark about seeing
and believing is not meant to contrast Thomas with those who believe though
they do not see, what if it refers to different meanings of believing? After all, the rest of the Apostles also
believed only after they saw. What if the Lord’s words refer to Thomas in both
instances: in one sense, you have seen and then believed, but in another sense,
you also have been faithful and thereby come to see what has never before been
seen. Perhaps Thomas is our model in that. Is that not the task of every
disciple in every age?
Could it be that the Lord’s remark
invites us to notice that Thomas believed because he has SEEN and not because
he has TOUCHED. He DISCERNS the Body of Christ in the locked Upper Room, even
though he does not come into contact with it in the way he had previously
demanded: as though the Risen Body were an ordinary body. What he saw was so
much more than that that the physical touching of what he beheld was
irrelevant. What he saw was the One Who says
I am the Alpha and the Omega, Who is
and Who was and Who is to come, the Almighty.
His experience in the locked room was
so overwhelming – so beyond ordinary experience – that he forgot all about his
insistence on material verification: whatever he saw made him forget about
inserting his “finger of doubt” into the wounds or his hand into the Lord’s
side. Even though Jesus invited him to do so. What he saw made all that
irrelevant, and he jumped immediately to adoration: “My Lord and My God!”
The locked Upper Room is the
intersection of time and eternity, the vestibule, in which creatures of time encounter
the Alpha and Omega, Who was, and is, and
is to come. It is the Eucharistic community of the Church. This is not the
commemoration of a past event only, but the ongoing presentation of eternity coming into history, in which the past event
is made PRESENT in anticipation of FUTURE consummation.
In the East, right after Communion the
Deacon says:
Having beheld the Resurrection of Christ, let us worship the holy Lord
Jesus…
Here is the pattern of Thomas the Twin
–behold and then worship. And later,
..we have seen the true light, we have
received the heavenly spirit, we have found the true faith.
Those who come into the vestibule of
eternity SEE as Thomas saw, the True
Light, and further material verification is irrelevant. We FIND True faith – confidence and hope. We
also RECEIVE the Heavenly Spirit, as they did in the Upper Room – the divine
power to forgive sins, conveyed by the Blood of Christ, which we drink. In
exercising that power, we make the Resurrection present right now – we re-present
it. The unseen realities of infinite
love and eternal life are seen, so
that those who trust are blessed not because they are somehow better than
Thomas, but because they have come to see just as he came to see, and to
proclaim the Paschal and Eucharistic Mystery:
Christ has Died,
Christ is Risen,
Christ will come again!
