“My Lord and my God.”
Homily for the Second Sunday of Easter –7 April 2024
When I was a child preparing for First Holy Communion, my catechism teacher, Sr John, a Dominican sister, taught us to pray quietly in our hearts, every time we genuflected, “My Lord and my God.” Still today, 50 years later, every time I genuflect, I pray the prayer of St Thomas, “My Lord and my God.” Perhaps you like me also feel a great affinity with St Thomas in both his doubt and his expression of faith.
The Gospel this Sunday might find us in different places. Perhaps some of us are still trying to get to grips with the Easter message which we started to enter into last Sunday? Perhaps the week with all its busyness has intervened and we haven’t had much opportunity to explore the implication of the resurrection of Jesus, and now we are facing this reality again, wondering what it means and what it has to do with us?
In the Gospel for today, the apostles were gripped by fear. They were behind locked doors, in case they might be next, after the execution of Jesus. There is also reason to believe that part of their fear on seeing Jesus, was fear that he would be out for revenge, given that they had all deserted him.
Perhaps, like the disciples in today’s Gospel some of us are locked in fear and confusion. Perhaps some are daring to believe and there is joy in that, but there are nagging doubts? If either of these scenarios describe us, then we are in good company with the disciples as they are shown to us in the Gospel for today. The point is that there is a tendency for us to live “behind locked doors”. Fear is a common experience for us. Fear of what is to come. Fear flowing from the sins and failures of our past. Fear and anxiety can so easily overwhelm us, but like with the disciples in today’s Gospel, our locked doors are no barrier to the risen Christ.
As the risen Jesus came and stood among the disciples, he can come and appear behind the locked doors of fear in our lives. As we pray here at Mass this Sunday, the Risen Jesus is with us. As he said to the disciples, so he says to us, “Peace be with you.” Whatever fears are in the background of our lives, fears that affect our well-being and joy, whatever wounds we carrying, this Easter, the Shalom, the ‘Peace be with you’ of Jesus is offered to us.
Easter is something that must be done to us, transforming us from the inside out. This process of Easter, the action of Easter, is so powerfully expressed in the line from the poem of Gerald Manley Hopkins: “Let Jesus easter in us.” And so, this Sunday we enter more deeply into the experience of the disciples and how the resurrection transformed their lives. The point is that the same transformation must happen in us.
The first reading from the Acts of the Apostles gives us an image of the early Church in those days following the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus. The reading says that they were of one heart and soul; they shared whatever they had and no one was in need. It is such an inspiring, positive image of what it means to be a Christian community. And we must note that the agent of change, the inspiration for them, was the Resurrection of Jesus. The reading says that with great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.
Remember that from being terrified and locked away in a room for fear that they too would be executed, the apostles went out and spread the message of the risen Christ all over the known world. Read the Acts of the Apostles for yourselves and see that the resurrection of Jesus was the core message of the preaching of the apostles. They were obsessed with it. More than that, it is significant that all except one of the apostles suffered a cruel death for believing in and preaching Jesus risen from the dead. The other, St John, was imprisoned for life on the island of Patmos.
We long to have something of this drive and inspiration of the apostles. We need to be resurrection people like these apostles. The message of the resurrection should permeate our lives and dreams. As St John Paul said, “We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song.”
But let’s face it; it is hard for all of us to enter into the truth of the resurrection and really understand it. There was something mysterious and other-worldly about Jesus’ risen body. It was a glorified body, not just an ordinary body brought back to life and which would have to die again. Nonetheless, there was a physicality about this body: The tomb was empty; Jesus could be touched and seen; and he could eat in front of this disciples.
Thomas doubted the resurrection of Jesus; in fact he said that he refused to believe. He is singled out but he was probably representative of the others. And in their encounter with the risen Christ, their fear and unbelief is met by Jesus’ gift of peace and the Holy Spirit. And he commissions them to be missionaries of Easter.
This Gospel event is a good description of our own human experience and engagement with the Resurrection. We might be fearful of giving ourselves over to this truth; we experience weakness in the living the Resurrection truth; we experience scepticism and doubt. And like the disciples, we have the potential to move to an experience of faith in the Resurrection and being empowered by the Holy Spirit to be witnesses.
We should thank God for the honesty of Thomas and his doubt. In a sense we are all like him at different times of our lives. Thomas’ doubt became the occasion of Jesus showing the truth about himself more clearly. Our doubt can lead to a search and openness to the truth about the resurrection of Jesus, and not just the resurrection, but the whole life of faith. St Augustine said, “St Thomas touched the man and recognised his God”. In this moment St Thomas makes the most profound confession of faith in the Bible. He says, “My Lord and my God.” We too can make this confession of faith.
Don’t you think it is extraordinarily beautiful to consider that the marks of the Passion, the marks of the nails and spear, remain on Jesus’ body even after the Resurrection? Not only do these wounds show continuity with the Jesus of Nazareth, whom those first disciples had accompanied, but they are the marks of the mercy of God, the wounds of love, extended to us. They reveal that Jesus is forever fixed in the act of love in which he died.
So, what significance - what meaning - does the resurrection of Jesus hold for us? Well, the resurrection of Jesus can be seen as the starting point. We could, in a sense, start reading the four Gospels backwards, starting with the resurrection. We should read the Gospels in the light of the resurrection. The resurrection is the confirmation of all Jesus’s preaching and actions. It affirms that he is who he said he was. It is the confirmation of his message.
What then could we say is the core message of Jesus’ preaching? The message of Jesus, and in fact the person of Jesus, can be summed up by the title of the feast that we celebrate this Sunday – Jesus is the Divine Mercy. Jesus is God’s mercy to us human beings. The message and mission of Jesus was to make known the mercy of God and to effect it.
The Good News is that God’s mercy has provided the remedy for our woundedness and sinfulness. The resurrection of Jesus makes possible our reconciliation with God and the healing of the wounds that our sins have caused. The message of Divine Mercy is the heart of the Gospel.
As Jesus stands before the disciples in the Upper Room, and as he is with us this Sunday as we pray, we see that he is God’s mercy to us. He is the Divine Mercy. We kneel before him, and with Thomas, say, “My Lord and my God.”