It was Saturday, the day before Easter, & Joanne Hinch of Woodland Hills, California was sitting at the kitchen table coloring eggs with her three-year-old son Dan and her two-year-old daughter Debbie. She told her kids about the meaning of Easter and taught them the traditional Easter morning greeting and response, "He is risen...He is risen indeed!" The children planned to surprise their Dad, a minister, with that greeting as soon as he awoke the next morning. Easter arrived, little Danny heard his father stirring about in his bedroom, so the boy got up quickly, dashed down the hall and shouted the good news: "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, God's back!"
(eSermons.com/God's Back/Leininger, "Laugh, Thomas, Laugh!")
Do you believe in the physical Resurrection?
We have only the word of these witnesses … no physical evidence.
Do you trust this gospel?
When we have plenty of trust in people, we believe whatever they tell us, no matter how outlandish it may sound. But many of us would not believe that someone has been resurrected, no matter who told us. Often we think of Thomas as a doubter, but I suspect, the majority of us would probably have done the same thing. Death is death & no one returns as if nothing had happened. At best, we would think it was a ghost. For us, as it was for Thomas, it is not easy to believe in resurrection. Furthermore, it’s difficult to believe because it happens to be good news & we are as so accustomed to receiving bad new!
“If he is alive, however, everything changes. It is no longer a matter of our questioning an historical record, but a matter of our being put in question by one who has broken every rule of ordinary human existence. If Jesus lives, then it must be as life-giver. Jesus is not simply a figure of the past in that case, but a person in the present; not merely a memory we can analyze and manipulate, but an agent who can confront & instruct us. What we can learn about him must therefore include what we continue to learn from him.”
(Source: Luke Timothy Johnson)
Belief in the resurrection forces us to change our concept of life.
To believe in the resurrection means to already live the permanent hope, to be thrilled & longing FOR the future.
Belief in the resurrection implies fighting with all our strength to make it a reality from now on, to the extent possible, what we will live in the future. Many consider that the people who believe in all of this, live in an unreal world. When Jesus appeared to Thomas, he makes a confession of faith that goes beyond the recognition of Jesus & confesses the divinity of Christ.
(Adapted; Nuestra Parroquia, March 2012)
Blessed are those who believe with out having seen, Jesus said.
2 Yes, but look how Jesus came back….Jesus tells Thomas… “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”
Jesus tells us to do the same.
Thomas did something we would all like to do. It would be so much easier to believe if we could touch & see the wounds of Christ. Yet, the wounds of Christ are present every day in many different ways. South
African civil rights proponent Alaln Boesak once said that, “at the pearly gates, Jesus won’t ask us about how well we carried out our religious obligations. He’ll only ask us to show our wounds, the wounds that are the outward sign that we’ve spent our lives imitating him.”
(Source: Celebration, 4/14/12)
We can still touch them; perhaps we just fail to see them.
We are all wounded. Some of us carry wounds that are deeper & more intense than others. These wounds can be physical or spiritual, recent or long-standing. An injection or a pill isn’t enough to heal these wounds. Healing is an internal process that puts things right, & to do this we need to face our wounds.
Jesus carries our wounds. In the gospel, Jesus invites Thomas to touch the wounds in his hands & side. In so doing, Jesus is also inviting Thomas to come face to face with his very own wounds, which Jesus is carrying. It is only by facing his own wounds that Thomas can be healed and then say, “My Lord and my God.” (Source:Living With Christ, 4/12)
We, like Thomas, are invited to face our wounds, which Jesus carries for us. Like Thomas, we are invited to heal whatever it is that threatens life within us. And we are invited to go one step farther: Blessed are those who see the wounds of Jesus in the suffering of their brothers & sisters and lend themselves to serve them.
In this Liturgy of Christ Wounds,
may we find the strength to say, “My Lord and my God,”
and may we reach out to touch Christ’s wounds in this world with love today.