Doubting Thomas

On the map of human experience,
doubt is a place somewhere between belief and disbelief.

Doubt lives in a heart unable or unwilling
to accept something proposed as true, real,
something to be believed —
as when “Doubting Thomas” told the other apostles,
“I will not believe” what you have told me.

If the opposite of doubt is trust, belief,
and a certain confidence that binds the believer to commitment,
then doubt is that holdout between belief and disbelief
that gives way to uncertainty and mistrust,
to an isolation detaching the doubter from the bonds believing offers.

It’s important to distinguish here between doubt and inquiry,
between doubt and seeking understanding,
between doubt and the pursuit of truth.

It’s one thing to seek to understand one’s faith better and more deeply:
to ask questions, to probe and to test.
It’s another thing to reject what one has come to know and believe
or worse, to be suspect of proposed truth
simply for the sake of being suspect.

The Web of Love

A Body to Touch

We like Thomas are called touch Jesus’ glorified body as a reminder that every body, every person, all of creation is destined to share in the glory of God. We like Thomas are called to touch Jesus’ wounds as a reminder of how many real physical wounds continue in our world—wounds of sickness and violence, of prejudice and sexism, of poverty and war. Our mission is not to escape the world but to confront the evil of the world and to bring God’s love and kingdom into the lives of the flesh and blood brothers and sisters with whom we share this planet.

We do not believe that Jesus was simply a spirit, that he only seemed to have a physical body like ours. We believe that Jesus was human and that he was like us in all things but sin. We see God’s raising up Jesus from the grave as God’s commitment to heal the brokenness of our physical world, the actual human woundedness of all of us. We who follow Jesus commit ourselves to work until that day when God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Three Tasks of the Church

Divine Mercy Sunday

Today is the Divine Mercy Sunday! We rejoice in the risen Lord. The second reading of today reminds us that God’s divine mercy comes to us as a result of Christ’s resurrection from death. As such, the merit of Christ’s suffering and death is the Divine Mercy. It is a hope, an inheritance that can never be spoilt, soiled nor fade away because it is kept safe in heaven.

Leaping into the Arms of Divine Mercy

The Second Sunday of Easter every year has the same Gospel: we usually call it
the Gospel of Doubting Thomas. It is embarrassing to doubt. It is also human. We are all embarrassed when we go to Church and while we are there some thoughts fly through our mind, and we begin to doubt God’s very existence. We feel embarrassed because here we are before God, and yet we are still questioning Him. It is embarrassing, but it is also human to doubt. We will always doubt until the day we know, and that knowledge comes after the conclusion of our lives, when we see God face to face.

Consider Thomas’ doubts. What if you or I were part of that intimate group Jesus
called, but, like Thomas, were not in the room when Jesus first appeared to them after the resurrection. Would we have believed that bumbling fisherman, Peter, those scheming brothers, James and John, that former tax collector and thief, Matthew, that political nutcase, Simon the Zealot, or any of those guys? Probably not. For one thing, these same people, commoners all, believed that they would soon be princes in a new Kingdom. They were delusional.

The Sacrament of Reconciliation: Jesus’ First Post-Resurrection Gift

It is not by coincidence that Jesus gave us the sacrament of reconciliation as his first gift after his resurrection, said Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York. When Jesus appeared to his apostles that evening, he did not say, “I promise you eternal life!” or “I have conquered Satan for you!” No; “what he most wanted to give his Church was mercy for sins.”

2020 Homily: During the Lockdown

On the first Easter the Apostles locked themselves into a room because they were confused and afraid. This Easter people were locked in their homes, confused and afraid…

We do not have the opportunity right now to focus on the communal life because it is hard to develop community at six foot intervals. Neither do we have the ability to devote ourselves to the breaking of the bread, or the Holy Mass, because we are not able to be at Mass…

If you find yourself locked in your house, try to turn your house into something of a monastery or a hermitage for the present time. Set a schedule for prayer and for work. This is what the monks and nuns do…

If we are frightened and confused, this tends to lead to behaviors that are not good for us. If we are bored we are more prone to fall into sinful activities. Try keeping the computer and TV to a minimum. It may take a bit to adjust to the silence, but once you do, you will love it! The silence allows you the opportunity to speak with the Lord throughout the day or, if there are no words, to just be with Him in the silence.

See His Wounds, See God

The scars were the main way our Lord confirmed to His disciples that it was truly Him, in the same body, now risen and transformed. St John draws our attention today to His scars. St Thomas did not just insist on seeing Jesus with his own eyes, to see what the others claimed to have seen. That is not what he requested. He asked for something quite different, something quite specific and odd. He says, “I want to see the wounds of Jesus. I want to touch those wounds.”

It is only in the Gospel of St John, in this particular passage, that we come to realise that Jesus was affixed to the cross by nails and it is only in the Fourth Gospel, do we have the story of the piercing of His side with a lance. The other gospels have not one single word about piercing nails or thrusting spear or even physical and visible wounds on the body of the resurrected Lord.

Clergy E-Notes

Pro-life reflections and intercessions related to the Sunday readings

Divine Mercy: Jesus, I Trust in You!

In this Second Sunday of Easter we continue in the joy of the risen Lord. Particularly, the church invites us to rejoice in the Divine Mercy. God loves us though we sometimes hesitate and doubt his love. No wonder, in the Gospel Jesus visits the disciples in their house prison. He gives them peace and entrusts them with the ministry of mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation.

The Church as the Community of Forgiveness

Three things make up our confession approach:  Contrition – this entails being truly sorry for our sins and offences against God and neighbour. Confession – This involves stating in words, to God, what we know we have done wrong. It is a worthy practice to try and say everything that we can remember which has been sinful, even if not grave. Satisfaction –   this comprises showing our intention to make up, even in some token way, for the effects of our sins. As a result, a penance prescribed by the priest; a prayer or action to be fulfilled after Confession.    At the end of the Jubilee Year of Mercy, the tendency was to feel that there will no longer be much emphasis on mercy.  Pope Francis shows that God’s mercy goes beyond time and space. It has been in the world and will continue to be. On November 20, 2016, Pope Francis, therefore, published an Apostolic Letter “Misericordia Et Misera”, Mercy and Misery,  showing that Mercy has its place in the Church which is a forgiveness community.

Let Go of Your Anger

I am personally convinced there is a strong case for Christ. Thomas of course received powerful proof – an appearance of Jesus and the offer to touch the wounds. Even so, it did require an act of faith.

That’s my main point today: We need evidence, but we need something more – God’s grace, the Divine Mercy. Let me explain.

As we see in today’s Gospel the prerequisite for faith is forgiveness. That’s why the first thing Jesus says to the disciples is “Peace be with you.” Then he breathes the Holy Spirit on them and says, “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them…” This refers to the power Jesus gave the Apostles and their successors to absolve sins in his name.

It also indicates our need for forgiveness. We see this during our pandemic. I’ll speak from the point of view of those ordered to shelter in place. For some it was an opportunity to deepen family bonds, for others not so much. Some used this time for intellectual and spiritual growth. At the same time liquor and marijuana have had huge sales. And traffic for porn sites has soared.

Blessed are Those who Have Not Seen and yet Believe

The apostles must have been suffering from a severe dose of depression since Good Friday. Their teacher and friend, Jesus, whom they believed to be the Messiah, was dead. Jesus had been betrayed to the chief priests by one of their own, Judas, presumably because he thought that by putting Jesus into a corner, Jesus would have to act to drive out the Roman occupiers of Palestine. Then this same Judas took his life. The crowd which welcomed Jesus with palms turned against Jesus on Good Friday morning calling for the release of Barabbas and the death of Jesus. The apostles, now afraid of the crowd, had shut themselves in for their own protection. There were ten of them gathered in this state; Judas was no more, and Thomas was temporarily absent. Gathered in fear we see that the words of Jesus during the Last Supper are fulfilled, “Satan has got his wish to sift you all like wheat.” (Luke 22:31-32)

Divine Mercy Sunday

homas was not a bad man nor was he a mediocre disciple. I believe that sometimes we can read today’s gospel (John 20:19-31) and think to ourselves, “Tsk, tsk if only you didn’t doubt and had more faith Thomas.” But Thomas did have faith and he did have a great love for our Lord. We need to remember that it was Thomas who said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” when Jesus decided to go to his friend Lazarus despite the fact that the authorities were seeking to kill him. These are not the words of a half-hearted disciple. Thomas had great faith, he had great love for our Lord but he also had a broken heart. The crucifixion and all of sin’s “No!” that it contained had broken Thomas’ heart. All of Thomas’ love for the Lord, his hope and faith in the Lord had been broken by the wood of the cross.

When We are Tempted to Doubt God’s Love

There are times in everyone’ʹs life when we are tempted to doubt God’ʹs love or to think that it has come to an end. We find ourselves caught up in economic hardship and feel powerless to do anything about it. Someone in whom we have trusted betrays our trust. We discover that we, or someone we love, have a life-­‐‑threatening disease. Our child has an accident. We have been trying for years to have a child, and just as we think everything is going well, something goes wrong and our hopes are dashed. There is too much pain and too much evil and too much darkness and too little love in our world. How can God be a God of love?

Sometimes our doubts arise from a false notion of God, as though God were some kind of puppeteer, and we think that if God loved us he would pull different strings and set everything right. We have to remind ourselves that the world is not a plaything that God manipulates as he wills. Many terrible things happen in our world because people resist grace and refuse to act according o the loving inspiration of God. If we want God to respect our freedom that is how it has to be. But even when we know this, we can be excused for wondering if perhaps God is not really all-­‐‑powerful or has chosen to leave us to our own devises.

The Trying of Faith

The experience of faith is not the absence of pain or sorrow or loss. It is, rather, the bearing of pain or sorrow in faith. Faith does not take away the wounds; it transforms them. In faith, flaws are not obliterated; they are refined and purified.

Thomas, still hanging around a community of faith, discovers Christ in his unbelief. Although they kept telling Thomas—it went on for a week—that Jesus had risen, he refused to believe. “I’ll not believe” without entering the wounds. How right he was. Faith must be found as much in the wounds of life as in the glories. And from the wounds a faith might most amazingly emerge. “My Lord and my God,” that skeptic is reported to have said.

Finding Peace

In the midst of impeding persecution, Jesus appears before the disciples and says “Peace be with you.” How do we find peace in life? We can take a hint from the witness of St. Thomas and find a way to trust in Jesus. That is the greatest witness I think that St. Faustina gives the Church in her vision of the Risen Christ, something to remember on Divine Mercy Sunday.

Under the portrait of her vision of Jesus are the words, Jesus I trust in you. I may not know where my life is going, but Jesus, I trust in you. I may be wracked with infirmity, but Jesus I trust in you. The cross I am carrying at work or at home may feel unbearable, but Jesus I trust in you. My friends, the Gospel invites us to trust in Jesus.

How do we begin? We begin by seeing Christ in others, especially those who choose to be defiantly joyful despite the crosses they carry, people like the apostles, St. Faustina, St. John XXIII, St. John Paul II, and, of course, Alma and Diane. That is how we find peace