Text:

[19] On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." [20] When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. [21] Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent Me, even so I send you." [22] And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. [23] If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

[24] Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. [25] So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in His side, I will not believe."

[26] Eight days later, His disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, "Peace be with you." [27] Then He said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and see My hands; and put out your hand, and place it in My side; do not be faithless, but believing." [28] Thomas answered Him, "My Lord and my God!" [29] Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen Me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."

[30] Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; [31] but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.

Commentary:

19-20. Jesus appears to the Apostles on the evening of the day of which He rose. He presents Himself in their midst without any need for the doors to be opened, by using the qualities of His glorified body; but in order to dispel any impression that He is only a spirit He shows them His hands and His side: there is no longer any doubt about its being Jesus Himself, about His being truly risen from the dead. He greets them twice using the words of greeting customary among the Jews, with the same tenderness as He previously used put into this salutation. These friendly words dispel the fear and shame the Apostles must have been feeling at behaving so disloyally during His passion: He has created the normal atmosphere of intimacy, and now He will endow them with transcendental powers.

21. Pope Leo XIII explained how Christ transferred His own mission to the Apostles: "What did He wish in regard to the Church founded, or about to be founded? This: to transmit to it the same mission and the same mandate which He had received from the Father, that they should be perpetuated. This He clearly resolved to do: this He actually did. 'As the Father hath sent Me, even so I send you' (John 20:21). 'As Thou didst send Me into the world, so I have sent them into the world' (John 17:18). [...] When about to ascend into Heaven, He sends His Apostles in virtue of the same power by which He had been sent from the Father; and He charges them to spread abroad and propagate His teachings (cf. Matthew 28:18), so that those obeying the Apostles might be saved, and those disobeying should perish (cf. Mark 16:16). [...] Hence He commands that the teaching of the Apostles should be religiously accepted and piously kept as if it were His own: 'He who hears you hears Me, and he who rejects you rejects Me' (Luke 10:16). Wherefore the Apostles are ambassadors of Christ as He is the ambassador of the Father" (Leo XIII, "Satis Cognitum"). In this mission the bishops are the successors of the Apostles: "Christ sent the Apostles as He Himself had been sent by the Father, and then through the Apostles made their successors, the bishops, sharers in His consecration and mission. The function of the bishops' ministry was handed over in a subordinate degree to priests so that they might be appointed in the order of the priesthood and be co-workers of the episcopal order for the proper fulfillment of the apostolic mission that had been entrusted to it by Christ" (Vatican II, "Presbyterorum Ordinis", 2).

22-23. The Church has always understood - and has in fact defined - that Jesus Christ here conferred on the Apostles authority to forgive sins, a power which is exercised in the Sacrament of Penance. "The Lord then especially instituted the Sacrament of Penance when, after being risen from the dead, He breathed upon His disciples and said: "Receive the Holy Spirit..." The consensus of all the Fathers has always acknowledged that by this action so sublime and words so clear the power of forgiving and retaining sins was given to the Apostles and their lawful successors for reconciling the faithful who have fallen after Baptism" (Council of Trent, "De Paenitentia", Chapter 1).

The Sacrament of Penance is the most sublime expression of God's love and mercy towards men, described so vividly in Jesus' parable of the prodigal son (cf. Luke 15:11-32). The Lord always awaits us, with His arms wide open, waiting for us to repent - and then He will forgive us and restore us to the dignity of being His sons.

The church fathers have consistently recommended Christians to have regular recourse to this Sacrament: "For a constant and speedy advancement in the path of virtue we highly recommend the pious practice of frequent Confession, introduced by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit; for by this means we grow in a true knowledge of ourselves and in Christian humility, bad habits are uprooted, spiritual negligence and apathy are prevented, the conscience is purified and the will strengthened, salutary spiritual direction is obtained, and grace is increased by the efficacy of the Sacrament itself" (Pius XII, "Mystici Corporis").

24-28. Thomas' doubting moves our Lord to give him special proof that His risen body is quite real. By so doing He bolsters the faith of those who would later on find faith in Him. "Surely you do not think", [Pope] St. Gregory the Great comments, "that is was a pure accident that the chosen disciple was missing; who on his return was told about the appearance and on hearing about it doubted; doubting, so that he might touch and believe by touching? It was not an accident; God arranged that it should happen. His clemency acted in this wonderful way so that through the doubting disciple touching the wounds in His Master's body, our own wounds of incredulity might be healed. [...] And so the disciple, doubting and touching, was changed into a witness of the truth of the Resurrection" ("In Evangelia Homiliae", 26, 7).

Thomas' reply is not simply an exclamation: it is an assertion, an admirable act of faith in the divinity of Christ: "My Lord and my God!" These words are an ejaculatory prayer often used by Christians, especially as an act of faith in the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Eucharist.

29. St. Gregory the Great explains these words of our Lord as follows: "By St. Paul saying 'faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen' (Hebrews 11:1), it becomes clear that faith has to do with things which are not seen, for those which are seen are no longer the object of faith, but rather of experience. Well then, why is Thomas told, when he saw and touched, 'Because you have seen, you have believed?' Because he saw one thing, and believed another. It is certain that mortal man cannot see divinity; therefore, he saw the man and recognized Him as God, saying, 'My Lord and my God.' In conclusion: seeing, he believed, because contemplating that real man he exclaimed that He was God, whom he could not see" ("In Evangelia Homiliae", 27, 8).

Like everyone else Thomas needed the grace of God to believe, but in addition to this grace he was given an exceptional proof; his faith would have had more merit had he accepted the testimony of the other Apostles. Revealed truths are normally transmitted by word, by the testimony of other people who, sent by Christ and aided by the Holy Spirit, preach the deposit of faith (cf. Mark 16:15-16). "So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes from the preaching of Christ" (Romans 10:17). The preaching of the Gospel, therefore, carries with it sufficient guarantees of credibility, and by accepting that preaching man "offers the full submission of his intellect and will to God who reveals, willingly assenting to the revelation given" (Vatican II, "Dei Verbum", 5).

"What follows pleases us greatly: 'Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.' For undoubtedly it is we who are meant, who confess with our soul Him whom we have not seen in the flesh. It refers to us, provided we live in accordance with the faith, for only he truly believes who practices what he believes" ("In Evangelia Homiliae", 26, 9).

30-31. This is a kind of first epilogue or conclusion to the Gospel of St. John. The more common opinion is that he added Chapter 21 later, which covers such important events as the triple confession of St. Peter, confirmation of his primacy and our Lord's prophecy about the death of the beloved disciple. These verses sum up the inspired writer's whole purpose in writing his Gospel - to have men believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ announced by the prophets in the Old Testament, the Son of God, so that by believing this saving truth, which is the core of Revelation, they might already begin to partake of eternal life (cf. John 1:12, 2:23; 3:18; 14:13; 15:16; 16:23-26).

Source: "The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries". Biblical text from the Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.

by Alan Brehm

Gospel: Jn. 20:19-31

Faith is not easy. I think we can all agree that we as people of the 21st century have some challenges with our faith. In the midst of our skeptical world that demands proof for just about everything, faith is something inward, subjective, mystical and mysterious; it is something impossible to get a firm grip on faith.[2] As a result, it can easily seem like the life of faith leaves you feeling like you're hanging in mid-air at the end of a rope and you have no idea what that rope is attached to![3] At the end of the day, how can we be certain about things like God and redemption, the afterlife and ultimate destiny? As the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it, for every proof there is some disproof".[4] Faith is not easy.

And yet it would seem that, like the other Gospels, John's account of the resurrection attempts to do just that. In our lesson for today we are told that the "signs" Jesus did are recorded here "so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name" (Jn. 20:31). Unfortunately, that's just restating our problem, isn't it? For us as people of the 21st century, we are just not moved by the "signs" that moved people in the First century. Miraculous events simply don't command the same kind of faith in us as they did for people of ancient times. But it's not just a modern versus ancient problem. To a great extent, this problem of "verification" is built into our search for faith. If it's faith, we can't prove it, can we? And if we can prove it, where's the need for faith? I guess that's why many of us find our Gospel lesson for today so appealing. I think we tend to resonate with Thomas' doubts. As people of our day, we don't want a faith that consists of "wishful thinking" or "smoke and mirrors."[5]

This problem gets a lot of attention when it comes to Easter and the resurrection. Even St. Paul recognized that "if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain" (1 Cor. 15:14). It would seem that there is a lot riding on whether something actually happened on that first Easter Sunday. Somehow, if Easter was merely a symbol or a vision or some kind of spiritual experience that had no correspondence in this world, then the victory we proclaim over death seems less than real.[6] Without Easter, what is there to distinguish the death of this one Jewish man from the countless other deaths at the hands of cruel oppressors?[7]

While it does seem important that our faith rests on something more than wishful thinking, I'm afraid that all efforts at demonstrating exactly what that "something more" is fall short of being convincing. When it comes to faith, we just cannot present an airtight case that demands a verdict! [8] It's just not the way faith works! [9] At the end of the day, when we approach these matters solely with our intellect and our logic, it would seem that the doors to faith are permanently closed and locked shut.

So how do we find the faith to go out and live in light of the hope that God is working in this world to bring grace and mercy and peace and justice and love and joy and life to every life? Ironically, Easter gives us some help here. Or perhaps we might say that the risen Christ gives us some help. In some way that we simply will never be able to sufficiently explain or concretely prove, we continue to have the experience of the living Christ.[10] The same Jesus who surprised the first disciples huddled behind locked doors out of fear, also surprises us behind locked doors of doubt.[11]

Faith is not easy. The truth is that it never has been easy. In some respects, we only find faith by having faith. It's very much like setting out on a journey without even knowing where you're going, like Abraham and Sarah. But the question we face is how do we who seem to be so full of doubt set out on that journey? I would say that the answer is to pursue our doubts. It seems to me that genuine faith (1 Pet 1:7) always has generous helpings of doubt.[12] I think that if you are honest enough and courageous enough to face your doubts squarely, you will wind up with a faith that works for you. I think we've all seen through the myth that if you want to have faith you have to banish your doubts. Most of us have had the experience that pursuing our doubts proves to be the path to deeper faith. The questions raised by our doubts can provide the guidance and the motivation to set out on our journey of faith, even when we don't understand what we're doing, even when we don't know where it will lead us.

References:

[2] Cf. John Caputo, On Religion, 15 where he says, "To have a religious sense of life is to long with a restless heart for a reality beyond reality."

[3] Cf. Karl Barth, Dogmatics 2.1:159, where he says that the life of faith involves a feeling of as if we are "suspended and hanging without ground under our feet."

[4] See Charles E. Moore, ed., Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, 256.

[5] Cf. Suzanne Guthrie, "Cousin Thomas (John 20:19-31)," The Christian Century (March 22, 2002): 10.

[6] Cf. G. C. Berkouwer, The Work of Christ, 190, 196-97.

[7] Cf. Emil Brunner, Dogmatics II:337: "Apart from the Resurrection Christ's death on the cross is a catastrophe."

[8] Even one so astute and erudite as Karl Barth failed (in my opinion) in his attempt to argue that the resurrection of Jesus was something that "actually happened among men like other events. Even he acknowledged that in this matter we are dealing with "comprehending the incomprehensible." Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.2.143-44.

[9] Ernst Haenchen, John 2, 211: "There is no verifying evidence (miracle!) by which we can be convinced of God's reality with objective certainty."

[10] As Kierkegaard also pointed out, despite all our questions and quandaries, as "Christ enters through locked doors."

[11] Cf. Susan R. Andrews, "Jesus Appears," The Christian Century (March 24-31, 1999): 341 : "The truth of Easter is that all of humanity is blessed with a God who defies the locks of logic and grief and prejudice and fear, a God who blesses us and then sends us, fresh and filled with hope, back into a hopeless world."

[12] Cf. Caputo, On Religion, 33-34: "faith cannot be insulated from unbelief; it is co-constituted by unbelief, which is why faith is faith and not knowledge."

by Jill Carattini

There was a body on the cross. This was the shocking revelation of a 12 year-old seeing a crucifix for the first time. I was not used to seeing Jesus there - or any body for that matter. The many crosses in my world were empty. But here, visiting a friend's church, in a denomination different from my own, was a scene I had never fully considered.

In my own circles I remember hearing the rationale. Holy Week did not end with Jesus on the cross. Good Friday is not the end of the story. Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried. And on the third day, he rose again. The story ends in the victory of Easter. The cross is empty because Christ is risen.

It is true, and as the apostle Paul notes, essential, that Christians worship a risen Christ:

"[For] if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14).

Even walking through the events of Holy Week - the emotion of the Last Supper, the anguish in Gethsemane, the denials of the disciples, the interrogation of Pilate, and the lonely way to Golgotha - we are well aware that though the cross is coming, so is the empty tomb. The dark story of Good Friday will indeed be answered by the light of Easter morning.

And yet, there is scarcely a theologian I can imagine who would set aside the fathomless mystery of the crucifixion in the interest of a doctrine that "over-shadows" it. The resurrection follows the crucifixion; it does not erase it. Though the cross indeed holds the sting of death, and Christ has truly borne our pain, the difficult burden of humanity is that we will follow him into death. Even Christ, who retained the scars of his own crucifixion, told his followers that they, too, would drink the cup from which he drank. The Christian, who considers himself "crucified with Christ," will surely "take up his cross" and follow him; it is no mere metaphor. The incredibly good news is that Christ goes with us, even as he went before us, fully tasting humanity in a body like yours and mine.

Thus, far from being an act that undermines the victory of the resurrection, the remembrance of Jesus' suffering at Golgotha boldly unites us with Christ himself. For it was on the cross that Christ most intimately bound himself to humanity. It was "for this hour" that Christ himself declared that he came. Humanity is, in turn, united to him in his suffering body and is near him in our own bodies. Had there not been an actual body on the cross, such mysteries would not be substantive enough to reach us.

Author and undertaker Thomas Lynch describes a related problem as often well-meaning onlookers at funerals attempt to console the grief-stricken. Lynch describes how often he hears someone tell the weeping mother or father of the child who died of leukemia or a car accident, "It's okay, that's not her, it's just a shell."(1) But the suggestion that a dead body is "just" anything, particularly in the early stages of grief, he finds more than problematic. What if, he imagines, we were to use a similar wording to describe our hope in the resurrection - namely, that Christ raised "just" a body from the dead.

Lynch continues, "What if, rather than crucifixion, he'd opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than 'just a shell,' he'd raised his personality say, or The Idea of Himself? Do you think they'd have changed the calendar for that? […] Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures."(2)

On the cross, we find the one whose self-offering transformed all suffering and in through that darkness we find in the light of Easter the one who forever lifted the finality of death. In the fifty holy days of Easter that follow a dark and Good Friday, we find the very figure of God with us, a body who cried out in a loud voice in the midst of anguish, on the brink of death, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." Precisely because the cross was not empty, the resurrection is so profoundly full.

References:

(1) Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York: Penguin, 1997), 21.
(2) Ibid.

About The Author:

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.