Abbey 2013                                                                                            First Sunday of Lent – C

Deuteronomy 26:4–10
Romans 10:8–13
Luke 4:1–13

 In each of the readings today, we hear a profession of faith. We hear someone professing their belief in God or the Lord Jesus. On the First Sunday of Lent this year it is a creed, a profession of faith that is put before our gathering.

 In the book of Deuteronomy we find ourselves at a liturgy. Someone has come with the first fruits from the land. They are offering it to the Lord God. But as they present their offering to the priest, they must also recite the creed. But the creed is really a recounting of events. It is the story of how God guided and protected their people. How God did not abandon them in Egypt. This creed goes on to professes a faith in a God who heard their cry, who actively listened to his people. That listening led to a response, a bringing out of his people from slavery and oppression into a land that he himself gave them. It is from the gift of this land that these first fruits have come.

 What is the center of this profession of faith? What is at the heart of this story? It is God first being attentive to the cry of his own and then using his power and strength to save, to bring his people out of slavery. The heart of the story is Exodus—bringing people, his people, from misery and carrying them, as it were, to a new land of milk and honey.

 This Exodus story, this passing out of Egypt was the wonderful thing God did for the Israelites. This was what they remembered when they brought grains for an offering of thanks. It is not enough to offer first fruits, to fill the basket and then leave it in front of the altar. You must confess your faith in the God who made it possible for you to bring this gift of offering to him. You may bring your offering, but with it you must remember that once you were in slavery and now you are enjoying a freedom that you did not have before. There has been a change in your situation. You must confess that change and whose power brought it about when you come to worship and bring an offering. Worshipping God, bringing an offering, being grateful, professing your faith in God who fought for you: all this goes hand in hand.

 What is this Lenten season we are beginning? A going back to the beginning of things. It is getting back to the basics. That is just what the Israelite did. When he came with his offering, he went back to telling, to professing the basics of his faith. And the content of his faith is nothing less than the moments God pulled him forward and set him on a new journey just as God had done with his ancestors. The confessing Israelite found himself in the same line as his ancestors. He understood that their God was his God. He is the recipient of God’s plan to save, to redeem, and to make new. Each time the Israelite came to worship and bow down before God, he or she put themselves in the same line as those who first felt God’s call and mighty power. He or she declares themselves an heir to the first recipients of the gift of freedom and land.

 Paul also speaks of confessing and believing. The confession of faith is simple: confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and that God has raised him from the dead. For us Christians that says it all. It looks and sounds simple and it is. The heart of our confession of faith is another exodus, the passing of Jesus through death into the new life of resurrection. The Christian creed is very simple. Jesus has become Lord and defeated every power that would oppress and strike down humanity, death being our greatest enemy. Jesus has become the mighty arm the God of Exodus once wielded at the Red Sea. In Jesus God shattered humanity’s last chain called sin and death.

 To be a Christian means that the heart has been taken over of the risen and victorious Lord. It also means that this good news of God’s victory in Jesus is not a secret. It must be spoken about. There is a connection between heart and mouth, heart and word. What you say, says who you are. A Christian has his or her words shaped by a heart that holds firm to the new and imperishable life Jesus holds out to us. It is a double confession as it were: Our God has acted on behalf of life and he has acted in his Son. It is that simple creed that governs all our actions and choices.

 All of this, of course, is the Easter story: Christ’s victory over sin, evil and death. Each Sunday of Lent that good news is told to us even before we come to the great feast of Easter. Lent is the time to remember what is basic to our faith. Lent is the time to prepare the heart to be able to speak again what has happened in its recesses. Ultimately our faith, our creed, is a matter of the heart. It is a matter of our heart having experienced the mighty power of God that set life over death.

 The Lenten journey is a journey of being able to put into words what has happened to our hearts. Like the Israelite of old Lent is the remembering time, remembering the mighty act of God that made us one of his very own. Remembering, too, each mighty act of God in our lives when we were tested and tempted to let go of the strong hand of God and make it on our own. But God held on and pulled us through. Lent is the time for remembering the gift of Christ’s death and resurrection.

 Ritually Lent is a time for us to prepare to speak our heart again at the Paschal Vigil. There we will once more stand at the water, the water of the Red Sea, the water of Baptism, and we will have to say in whom we believe, in whom we trust, who it is our heart follows, who it is who has brought us back to life from our slaveries, our lostness, our hopelessness.

 When we come to the Eucharist Sunday after Sunday, what is in the basket of our lives? What first fruit are we bringing to offer? Do we realize that our lives, the basket is a gift? Do we know what precious gift we are bringing to the Lord? And with what words do we come each Sunday with our offering? Words that express our faith, our trust? Words that acknowledge that we are loved? Words that can accompany our love in return?

 This is the season for preparing the first fruits of our life, getting the basket ready to be brought to the Paschal Feast. Lent is the time for the heart to find those words that will come with our basket. And when we come with our life basket, we will be met by God’s gracious and powerful hand as he reaches out to take our lives and bring them through the final exodus to the land flowing with milk and honey.

Abbey 2012

Isaiah 52:7–10
Hebrews 1:1–6
John 1:1–18

Christmas Day is known for its singing. Perhaps more than another Christian feast, Christmas has generated an abundance of music from Gregorian chants to hymns and carols. Joyful singing is the mark of the day. Christmas concerts are a staple of the season. The prophet Isaiah today rightfully initiates this joyful sound. And the music begins with the sound of running feet,  with a messenger running with glad tidings. The messenger carries a word, a word of peace, a word of salvation; finally a word that says, “Your God is King!”  Simply put, your God has won the victory. It is as though out there somewhere something desperate has been going on and now we hear of resolution and victory. For the prophet it is the ruined city of Jerusalem that hears the sound of the feet of the messengers and her watchmen are the first to hear the news and raise the shout of joy. Then suddenly we realize that the good news is not just about something happening out there. The good news, the news of peace, is about a city in ruins. It’s restoration is at hand. The city is to be redeemed from its past. The city is the subject of God’s victory. And the victory: pure presence, the Lord is come, has come! The community in Zion is the one being told to stand up and sing because your King is coming. For the Jerusalem of the prophet it means that the exile is over and God is leading the people back. Mother and children are to be reunited. And the messenger’s word is that God is making this homecoming possible. God is calling Jerusalem to sing for this unexpected and wonderful meeting that is about to take place. God is acting on Jerusalem’s behalf, he is showing his power for her sake. So break out together in song the messenger says. This is not a victory happening out there, it is happening in front of your very eyes. Restoration, redemption, comfort, salvation, peace. This is the cause of the joy; this is what leads to singing and caroling. We need only listen to the message and open our eyes.

 The prophet has been telling us all through Advent, Zion, your God is coming! And so today we  remember this God who comes and who has made his dwelling among us. The image in John’s gospel behind this simple statement of God coming and dwelling among us is clearer if we read it as “And the Word of God pitched his tent among us.” Long before God dwelt in a temple in Jerusalem, he dwelt in a tent as his people wandered around the desert and began to take root in the Promised Land. But today we remember that dwelling in a desert tent or in the Jerusalem temple was not the final dwelling of God. Today our sole task of remembering is to say again the Word of God became flesh and in the flesh he pitched his tent among us. Today we remember that God began a new and unheard of kind of dwelling place, God in human flesh, God in a body just like yours and mine.

 Today the messenger about the God who has come is the evangelist John. The prologue to his gospel that we have heard has a distinctive name for this God who has come. He calls him the Word. And John traces his history for us. This Word of God is there before creation. He is with God the creator; creation happens through this Word. Then this Word God utters takes on the human flesh with the frailty we know so well. But there is a clear purpose for the coming of this Word into world. His visiting, his setting up tent has a purpose. It is so that those who hear this Word and say yes to it can become children of the same God with whom the Word lives. God’s Word comes into the world but it also experiences rejection, suffering and death. But he has effected a change. We have been restored and renewed; we have become children of the living God. And now the Word has returned to “the Father’s side” as John put’s it. A lovely  description of heaven: the Father’s side. The Word of God comes, speaks, establishes a relationship between us in the world and himself and then the Word brings his human flesh back home to be with the Father and with his flesh he brings u s into that same intimacy.

 John begins his Gospel with the phrase, “In the beginning was the word.” Creation began through a word, an utterance. Now a new beginning a new creation is offered as the Word takes up dwelling with us in human flesh. The coming of the Word is the coming of new life. As the gospel puts it, with the coming of God’s word true light has entered the world. Like the first word of creation that challenged darkness and night, so the Word that comes bares his arm in the face of the world’s darkness, throws light into it and makes sure it stays. John the Baptist is the first witness that God has sent this light and it is not about to be dispersed.

 The Word comes as on the first day of creation and brings light into the world. That is the victory won that the messenger in Isaiah is carrying to us. Darkness is over. Darkness among us humans is over. There is a flesh among us now, a body, that is filled with light—the Son of the Father, the refulgence of the Father’s glory, as the Letter to the Hebrews expresses it today. God’s light from the first day is back in our midst in a new and vibrant way and the gospel says, it is not going out. And let us not think that it is not going out because I am going to make sure it stays on. No, this light is a gift from the Father’s side. It will always remain a gift. Our choice is to accept it and live in it and with it—to enter into it.

 This Mass of Christmas Day with its proclamation of John’s Gospel on the Word coming into the world is traditionally heard in the full light of day. And it should be. It takes us far beyond any romanticized view of midnight births, children in crib and parents in a lowly stable and angels singing. Instead it draws us into the cosmic dimensions of the Word made flesh. It pulls us into the larger picture of creation itself, into the cosmos for which our Christ is also the originating Word. The flesh our Christ embraced was already being shaped by him at the beginning. The psalm we sang as our response to Isaiah’s call to break into song spoke of all the ends of the earth seeing God’s power. The flesh of the Christ born cannot be kept in his mother’s arms. It is a new flesh for the life of the whole world. The coming of the Word of God in human flesh is a beginning of a new chapter for humanity and the world it inhabits.

 Christmas means singing because the most profound intimacy there is, the intimacy in the heart of God, is now open to me, to us. The intimacy of the Father and the Son is spoken into the world in the Word made flesh. And that word of the Father had as his mission to bring us into that same intimacy; we are to abide in Jesus and the Father. The mystery of Christmas is that the Father’s Son leaves the Father’s side, his heart to become our flesh, so that in turn we in our flesh can abide with the Son in the Father’s heart.

 Our world may look like it is caught in darkness. The tragedy of Newtown, CT, the ruins of the relationships of those living in the Holy Land, the dark cloud that hangs over most of the Middle East, the violence that rings out in our own streets, the acrimony of our human words tossed to one another, the consumerism that imbalances the order of justice, the abuse of religion into fundamentalism….all this darkness may very well be overwhelming. But it is precisely in the midst of all this that we say there is light, there is healing and restoration because our God has come. To think and worse believe that all darkness is the real order of the day, is to say there is no Christmas, there is no light. The model for Christmas day is the same as for Advent, John the Baptist. I know that I am not the light, but I will tell you till my dying day the light has come. For those who walk in this light the unspeakable hope of living forever in the heart of God with his Son his been fulfilled. O Happy Day—humanity has been embraced, held close and kissed by the Father of life and love.

Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time-B

Isaiah35:4–7a
James 2:1–5
Mark 7:31–37

There is a lot of geography at the beginning of today’s gospel, place names like Tyre, Sidon, Sea of Galilee and the Decapolis. Jesus is understood to be making a tour of the area until he arrives at his destination east of the Sea of Galilee. What Mark gives us would not follow the logic of any tour. He travels north to go south and east. But does the geography really matter? Other than a few familiar place names in the Gospel, we probably pass over any geographical references.

 Mark is not a map-maker but a Gospel-maker. And for him Gospel geography matters. There is gospel in the geography. There is gospel in Jesus’ strange tour. In the Gospel Jesus has just healed the daughter of a Syro-Phoenician woman in the district of Tyre. His itinerary keeps him in Gentile territory. The dumb man who cannot speak plainly is also in the Gentile territory of the Decapolis (Greek for ten cities). Mark has Jesus heal in foreign territory.

 It is clearly Mark’s intention that Jesus mission to the Gentile world, the non-Jewish world, did not begin after his return to the Father. It was not something that came solely as a good idea from his disciples. Jesus has God’s breadth of vision. His redemptive activity is not limited to the people of Palestine, in other words his own! Jesus steps across the border and does not just take a quick look around and hurry back. No, the little tour Mark outlines for us makes us aware that Jesus invests in people other than his own kind. And it is a major investment.

 When Jesus heals a man in Gentile territory who cannot hear and cannot speak clearly, it is a sign that God is opening the ears of the Gentiles to hear God’s word. If they were deaf to God’s word up till now, then the time has come for them also to be able to hear God speaking to them. Now they can acknowledge what God is doing for them in Jesus. And as the gospel clearly says, the man can now speak clearly, presumably about Jesus. And those around him acknowledge that Jesus is restoring humanity by opening ears and loosening tongues.

 It is the prophet Isaiah who provides the background and the deeper meaning of what is happening in the Gospel. The prophets had a clear vision of what God was doing. They could somehow envision God working in broader strokes than their contemporaries. And so Isaiah sees God coming to vindicate and make right a broken humanity. The prophet sees a humanity transformed. “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared; then will the lame leap like a stag, then the tongue of the mute will sing…” The prophet sees God working in the very places where we humans feel most helpless, when we cannot see; when we are deaf and hear no word, no music, no sound, only silence; when we are paralyzed and cannot walk, cannot move a leg or arm or back, when muscles are atrophied. When we are powerless, the prophet hears God saying “Be strong and fear not!”

 Surely the prophet’s words gave a community of faithful hope. It gave the community the hope to pick up and move on. The broken world they knew and experienced was not the final word about humanity. Humanity is meant for wholeness, for sight, for hearing, for speaking. The prophet Isaiah’s context was the hope and promise of a return from exile. And the prophet remind the community it will happen, God will restore his people and his creation.

When Jesus reaches out to touch the deaf man’s ears, when puts his own spittle on his tongue and speaks the words “Ephphata” “Be opened,” he is bringing out God’s vision for humanity. Hope is real, God is faithful. When Jesus touches the man’s ailments, his ears, his tongue, Mark says that immediately his hearing was opened and he spoke clearly and plainly. What has happened really? What has happened is that the man is made whole again. He is complete. From being cut off from humanity because of his deafness, he is now restored whole.  With hearing and speech restored he can enter into human relationships; he is no longer silent, misunderstood, standing outside, alone.

 There is a clear hint here of a creative act. The people’s acclamation to what they see is “He has done all things well” It is a clear hint at the creation story where after every creative event, the story teller says, “And God saw that it was good.” And when he had made us human beings, “God saw that it was very good.” The people see what Jesus is doing and they take up the refrain in their day in their pagan country side and say: “He has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” They clearly recognize who is at work and acknowledge that what the prophet Isaiah had spoken of as coming, has truly come, “the deaf hear, the dumb speak.”

 Jesus speaks a word, “be opened,” and it happens; hearing opens up for the Gentile man. Is it too much to say that when Jesus says, “Ephphata” “Be opened,” in our gathering this morning, he is opening up our ears to hear his word. Is there not some sense in which our hearing has become dull; maybe even blocked? Ask ourselves, do we want to hear the truth? Do we want to hear what our brother, our sister, our spouse, our confrere is really saying? Have we turned them off, as w say?

 Jesus command “be opened” goes a long way. At its deepest level it is meant to be a healing of our hearing so that we can hear God’s word and work to understand it. The fact is we all live by a word. We need a word in order to find our way through life’s complexities. We need a word in order to know in the heart that we are loved, that we are cherished, that we are bonded into humanity.

The Gospel story today is preserved in the tradition for several reasons. (It is the only gospel story in the gospels which specifically and graphically and dramatically speaks of Jesus healing a deaf person). For sure it is about healing our ability to hear and thus it is about healing our ability to understand. It applies to our human relationships. But here in the Gospel it is also about healing our ability to hear God speaking in our lives; it is about opening ourselves up to hear God’s voice in his Son Jesus. It is also hinting that God’s word may very well be entering into the hearts of others whom we have written off as deaf as beyond hearing his word. It maybe the people over there on the other side who are receiving and understanding God’s powerful word of hope and love.

 The story is preserved in the tradition to alert us to the fact that unless we hear and hear well, we cannot speak. Unless we listen closely, then our speech may be garbled as was the man in the Decapolis. His hears were opened, then Jesus anointed his tongue and he spoke. If we hear well, then and only then can we proclaim what God is doing.  When we listen well, then our words become a proclamation of the goodness of God. The goal of a disciple of Jesus is to listen well so that we can proclaim who he is and the good he is bringing about.

 Jesus’ gestures of putting his ears into the man’s ears and anointing his tongue with his own spittle left such an impression on those who heard the story, that the actions of Jesus even found their way into the rite of baptism. After a child has been baptized, anointed, given the new clothing, and after the candle has been lit, the celebrant cannot leave the newly baptized merely to see the light of Christ, he must also lean over and open his ears and mouth; sight and hearing together. May these simple words from the baptismal rite remind us again today of what the gift of hearing and speaking is all about:

 “The Lord Jesus made the deaf hear and the dumb speak. May he soon touch your ears to receive his word and your mouth to proclaim his faith to the praise and glory of God the Father Amen.”

Abbey                                                                                                    13^th Sunday in Ordinary Time – B

Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24
2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15
Mark 5:21-43

 When growing up we often hear parents and teachers telling us to speak in complete sentences. Or finish one thought before starting another. We learn the same when being taught how to write a sentence a paragraph. At first sight it looks like our evangelist Mark violates this rule in his gospel today. He starts a story about Jairus, a synagogue official who makes a dramatic entrance and request of Jesus for his young daughter. Then suddenly out of nowhere Mark introduces a nameless woman suffering from menstrual type bleeding. We can hear ourselves saying, finish one story first then tell us the next. But no. We hear one story start and this is interrupted with a seemingly unrelated second story and when that is finished, we return to the first story. When we finish the whole story, we find two scenes that seem very different, but maybe underneath it all there is just one thread. Maybe there is only one sentence with two stories..true it is a long sentence.

 And just what is the thread that holds the long sentence together. It is simple and most common: death. Death joins Jesus to Jairus, his young daughter, and to the hemorrhaging woman, and death joins the two women to one another. Jairus only approaches Jesus because his daughter is at the point of death. It is a desperate situation for the father. He is begging for life. The women with the blood flow is already dead on one level and it is threatened with it on another level. The woman is considered unclean because of her blood flow. This uncleanness separates her from her relatives, from any relationships with people and makes it impossible for her to worship in temple or synagogue. She is an outcast and belongs to no one—socially and even religiously she is dead. After 12 years of hemorrhaging she is also physically at the point of death, like the young daughter of Jairus. You can only sustain loss of blood for so long and survive. She too is desperate, but her asking for help is not with words but with touch-she only wants to touch Jesus’ clothes and thus have a share in Jesus power to give life.

 After the adult woman is healed, saved and restored to community life, we hear the news that death has come to the young girl. Jesus ignores the idea that he should change his plans and not bother to respond to her father’s plea and instead he goes to stretch out his hands toward her. He challenges the crowd’s view of what death is and takes the child by the hand and raises her up. A resurrection? I think so. Now the young girl is restored to her family and the full meaning of her 12^th year is opened for her: she is now able to complete her womanhood with marriage and childbearing. Truly a resurrection for this girl. She is able to life her live to the full and her family, by having her back alive, is also restored to life.

 The two women are in parallel to each other. One bleeding woman acts on her own initiative, her own faith. She has heard about Jesus and she acts on what she has heard, she reaches out for his power to save and give life. She touches Jesus. The dying and then dead young girl has a voice in her father. But Jesus responds to the cry of the helpless. Here Jesus takes the initiative-he stretches out his hand, grasps hers and raises her up—one hand grasping another hand and his power to save, heal and give life has an effect. Jesus is life and Jesus offers life. Jesus is the Father’s hand stretched out to restore fragile humanity to the fullness of its worth and dignity….The hemorrhaging women has been afflicted for 12 years; she has been living in shame and sorrow; walking in a no-man’s land for 12 years and making everything and everyone she touches unclean along the way. Walking contagion-walking death. She has been losing her life in her blood for 12 years-a long, slow death. All she has left is what she has heard about Jesus; her life is draining away but her faith has been growing; her courage and perseverance are strong. This life Jesus in his turn recognizes and commends her for: you may think, it is power from me that has cured you, but what has saved you, you have been carrying all along, your faith. In your faith you have placed your hand on what has power to heal, you are now made whole.

 Both women are daughters…but because of their deaths that has been taken away. The woman has been treated as one without family, without heritage, without a community of faith. And Jesus has restored her dignity her place in the community. She was held in contempt for 12 years, but now she has been given more than a cure, she has been given an intimacy of relationship beyond imagining: “Daughter, faith has saved you-go healed” Daughter of Abraham, daughter of Jesus in his new family, daughter to the one Father in whose image she was created from the beginning….The father-daughter relationship is what has gotten our story sentence started in the first place. A father about to lose his daughter at age 12, just when she is about to become a woman and enter society as an adult. And now she dies. The father is about to give up hope for his daughter….and Jesus says, you came to me in faith, hold on to your faith and do not fear. Death is not the end for you or for your daughter. The father held on to his faith and Jesus raises his daughter and gives her back to her parents….the loving relationship is healed and her potential is restored.

 Two women touched by death; two women surrounded by faith; two women who are linked to the number 12—the number of Israel’s tribes, the number of Jesus founding community, the age of maturity; two women who are or are about to be lost to their communities. Yes, what looks like 2 stories has at least three threads making it one: women, death and faith. But in the middle is Jesus. In the center of the story stands Jesus offering his risen life to the women of the community; offering the women of his community a wholeness of body and spirit and heart—in biblical terms saving them. Here is Jesus sharing freely and generously his life, his energy, his power to restore and make whole, all the while not counting the cost. Because for him to be touched by an unclean woman is for him to become contaminated. For him to touch a dead body is for him to become unclean….and yet his had remains outstretched.

 On this hot summer Sunday we gather to meet the Risen one reaching out for a hand, and lifting up.  We meet the risen one allowing himself to be touched by the unclean, the ostracized, the nameless. We meet the Risen one stopping to treat each of us as persons worthy to be heard and touched; we meet the Risen Lord saying to us, “Daughter” “Son,” “Get up and live your life to the full in the image of the one who made you.”

 God has only one story with one sentence and that is–I am the God of the living and what is dead I bring to life.

Doubting Thomas

On the evening of the first Easter Sunday, which we celebrated last Sunday, the disciples of Jesus huddled together in the locked upper room.  To a man they were in utter despair: they had left everything to follow Jesus, but now he was dead and his body was stolen.  They were frightened that the same people who had killed their Master would surely come looking for them.  They were confused where would they go now?  What would they do?  Into that despairing, frightened, confused company steps Jesus.  The grave couldn’t hold him in  and the locked door of their meeting room couldn’t keep him out.   There he was standing right in front of them.  They had been trembling with fear, but he says, “Peace be with you.”   They look to each other thinking, surely this can’t be him.  He extends his hands and points to his side.  They felt lonely and afraid, but he breathes on them and says. “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  Their fear and trepidation had held them in hiding and now he sends them out to a needy world, saying,  “As the Father sent me, so I sent you.”

Thomas, for some reason, had been missing from that memorable encounter.  the others kept telling him.  “Thomas, we have seen the Lord.”  But Thomas was having none of it.  “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”  But before long he would be utterly transformed worshiping Christ while exclaiming, “My Lord and my God.”

We need to ask ourselves just what was it that ruined Thomas from a doubter into a believer?  And what is it that canallay our doubts, and bring us to joyful faith in Jesus Christ?  Let’s look in turn at Thomas the doubter and Thomas the believer..

The infamous Thomas the doubter we had previously met earlier in St. John’s Gospel,  In the story of Jesus and Lazarus.  Lazarus was critically ill.  Jesus announced his intention to go to him.  But the disciples realized that this would take Jesus straight back to the very people who were plotting to kill him.  So Thomas gloomily says to the others, “Yah let’s go so that we can die with him.”  Later in that same Gospel Jesus had been explaining that he must go to his Father’s house, and that he would come back and take his disciples  with him. “  He said, ”You know the way to the place where I am going.  Thomas argues “We don’t know where you’re  going so how can we know the way?”

We readers of the Gospel of John,  begin to think of Thomas as a bit of a pessimist – someone whose cup was always half empty rather than half full, a man whose football team was never destined for a championship game,    but only tobe drooping in the record books.  He was a man who’s light at the end of a dark  tunnel wasn’t a sign of hope  but an out-of-control-freight train, roaring down the track at him..

Thomas wasn’t the first person to have doubts  and he certainly wasn’t the last.  Over the years doubt has often been elevated to the status of a virtue.

Here we are in the 20^th century celebrating the scientific method of research where doubt is the only assurance of ascertaining absolute truth.

Let’s be clear that doubt itself is neither a good nor a bad thing.  Doubt can sometimes he highly desirable or really misleading.  If we believed every story we’ve heard about tooth fairies, Santa Clause and boogie men, we would soon lose out sanity.  If we were taken in by every advertising commercial or by politicians or religious leaders we would lose all our money, we’d be hard-put and unwilling to lend credence to any proffered statement we hear.

But, on the other hand it is neither sensible, nor necessary  nor healthy to doubt everything.  I need to know if a can trust my monthly bank statement when it comes in.  I need to know if the witness of the Bible to Jesus Christ is believable or whether it is just a piece of pious fiction.

There is a place for confident knowledge.  There is a place for Christian  dogma.  In those matters which are clearly revealed in Scripture, Christians should not be doubtful or apologetic.  The corridors of the New Testament echo with dogmatic affirmations begging.  “We know.  We are sure. We are confident. If you question this, try reading  the First Epistle of St. John in which with its reiterating  “knowing, “ the verb to know occurs about forty times in that book.  They strike a note of joyful assurance  which is sadly missing from many parts of the church today and which needs to be recaptured.

Doubt then is a very widespread phenomenon.  Many of our doubts are normal and proper.  But we should resist the temptation to doubt anything and everything.  And there is good news for doubting Thomases.  Thomas had an encounter with the living Christ, and he would never be the same again.  Having looked at Thomas the doubter let’s now consider Thomas the believer.

One week later, after their first meeting,, that would be today.  The disciples were assembled again and Thomas was there this second time.  Although the doors were locked again the same Jesus stands among them again, large as life.  And he speaks directly to Thomas.

Thomas had said, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands…”  Jesus said, “See my hands.”

Thomas said, ”and put my finger where the nails were…”  Jesus stretched out  his hand and said, reply, “Put your finger here”

Thomas said, ”and put my hand into his side”  –  “Reach out your hand and put it into my side

Thomas I will not believe it”   Jesus ,”Stop doubting and believe”

That’s enough for Thomas.  His astonished reaction  is “My Lord and my God”  As soon as he saw he believed and as soon as he believed he worshiped.

Jesus’ response was, “Thomas, Because you have seen me you have believed, blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”  Jesus has presented a blessing on any and all who have come to believe even though they haven’t seen.

Christians do not require a blind faith.

Faith is not merely agreement. Faith is not superstition. Faith is not credulity. Faith is rather knowing and believing the truth about Jesus Christ and committing oneself to Him.

Jesus is commanding faith without evidence  He is commanding Faith without sight.

If everyone demanded touching and feeling Jesus before believing and having faith there wouldn’t be any Christians alive today and yet we know that in fact there are millions of Christians who have never seen his hands or touched the wounded side of the Lord Jesus the Lord Jesus but they all come to believe by faith.

St Peter in His first letter said, “Though you have not seen him, you love Him, and even though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.

Do any of us here ever have a doubt.  When this happens call to mind the short prayer, Jesus, I believe, in you, help my unbelief.

Even in this day and age, we are given exercises to strengthen our gifts of faith.

At the beginning of Mass, Fr. Augustine mentioned that this is the annual commemoration of Divine Mercy.  This feast reminds us of the great faith of the Polish Sister, Maria Faustenia, it reminds us of the great faith of  His Holiness  Pope John Paul the second, and it reminds us of the great faith of Catholics across the World and their tireless novenas of the divine mercy.

Today we should ask ourselves just how strong is our faith.