April 23 2006 At Saint Mark Church, Norman, OK No Audio is available for this Sunday
Acts 4:32-25 + 1 John 5:1-6 + John 20:19-31
This Gospel has been proclaimed on the Sunday after Easter for my whole life and beyond. All of us have heard it over and over again. It was the Gospel proclaimed at my first Mass in 1968. Consequently, each time I hear it, I am filled with memories and gratitude. Each time I have preached and reflected on this text, I am drawn deeper and deeper into John’s Gospel, and part of that is because each time I preach it, more and more people have departed from my life through death leaving me less interested in Thomas and the other Apostles, and more interested in the transformation of their relationship with Christ. That is really what this is all about: a transformation of relationship from being with someone to being in someone.
What is this manifestation of Jesus and how does he get in that room? A shallow reading of these texts would leave us with the impression that there is some kind of resuscitated corpse popping up now and then like something in a movie with all kinds of technical special effects.
John never intended to suggest that their eyes saw something. This experience is not a “sighting”! What is happening here is that they were able to read the signs of his wounded and open body. This was their recognition that through those wounds there is now access to the divine life which is being poured out for us. They understood as we must that the opening of the side of Jesus recalled the birth of Eve from the side of Adam. These wounds are channels that make life with God available. Here is the truth of this death that leads to Joy. God loves us enough to die for us.
For those faithful disciples who came together and stayed together, the coming of Christ was a regular event, but Thomas was not there, and so he missed it and remained stuck at a physical level of faith wanting to probe wounds of the flesh. His invitation is not to touch, but to go beyond the physical level and open himself up to a communion with divine life. John never tells that he touched something. What we understand is that his relationship to Jesus was transformed. As part of the community, he finally experiences the risen Lord. This does not happen when he is absent. There in communion with the others, he is invited into the wounds. The breakthrough of this moment, the shift Thomas makes from the Jesus of his past to the Resurrected Christ whose presence is now within him is nothing short of being born again – being born in the Spirit. The world which sees with physical eyes only what is physical can no longer see Jesus after his death. But those whom he loves will see him because they have spiritual eyes but that cannot happen until He dies.
What all this eventually can awaken in us is the truth and realization that we are spiritual in nature, not just a physical presence on this earth which passes away. There is something about us that does and will last forever. The first stirrings of that truth call into question all of our pre occupation with our looks, with our earthly possessions, the values of our lives, what we do day in and day out, and why we do it. Then, it calls to question our mission, our purpose, and relationships. As physical beings, we know what it means to be with someone. As spiritual beings, we know what it means to be in someone as Jesus said more than once in John’s Gospel (Jn 14:10; 15:4 & 17:21). “I am in the Father, you in me, and I in you.”
Appreciating, living in, nurturing our spiritual selves and the spiritual communion we have with God and all creation is the breakthrough of faith which gives us our unique understanding of death This Easter Sunday is our day to celebrate the re-creation of life, but this time not the life and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but our own. There is a new form of presence. It is not waiting for us beyond the locked doors of death it is already in our midst.