2nd Sunday of Easter 2021
Acts 4:32-35; 1 John 5:1-6; John 20: 19-31
Has it ever struck you that Easter Sunday morning’s Gospel is truncated, cut short? The Beloved Disciple enters the tomb, “he saw, and he believed”, and that is more or less it, apart from a comment about previous lack of belief. We are left with a cliff hanger: you can imagine “to be continued” appearing across the TV screen.
Why should this be? Why was it decided to leave the Gospel at that point when, only a few verses later, we have the encounter between the Magdalene and the risen Christ?
It was to emphasise the emptiness of the tomb; to focus our attention on the absence of Our Lord’s body. This in its turn was done to underline the physical reality of the resurrection. What the women and, subsequently, the apostles, met was not a wraith or a phantom; it was truly Jesus the Christ, body, blood, soul, and divinity, to borrow a phrase from another context.
This physicality is stressed in today’s Gospel. The risen Christ is able to pass through closed and locked doors: nevertheless, His body is substantial, as He demonstrates when He shows the frightened disciples the wounds of His hands and side.
As a matter of interest, why were they frightened? They had been told by the women that Jesus was risen and that they had met Him. Among them was John who, we were told last week, had seen the empty tomb and the grave clothes, “and believed”. Furthermore, they had been told over and over again by Jesus that He would rise from the dead: so why were they still cowering in fear?
It comes down to human nature, doesn’t it? Despite all the talk about “glass half full” and “glass half empty” people, we are by birth, upbringing, and experience, natural pessimists. The promise of resurrection, and even the women’s testimony to the resurrection, was simply too good to be true.
Has it ever struck you that we never say “It’s too bad to be true”? We are always willing to believe the worst: to believe the best is so much more difficult. Partly, this is the result of experience: many people seem to undergo more bad times than good. Partly, though, it is also an attitude of mind: we are innately suspicious of good news.
Yet the risen Jesus stands among the ten—as they were at that moment, with Judas gone and Thomas absent—to prove that Good News, which we can write with capital letters, is true, is real: in fact, is the only enduring reality. It is bad news which, ultimately, is the myth. Or perhaps we should say, not the myth—for the wounds of Christ are real enough and are not removed by the resurrection—but ephemeral, passing, temporary. It is the Good News which is lasting, substantial, permanent.
And if that Easter Sunday evening appearance isn’t enough to convince us of this, there is more. Along comes Thomas, whom we can identify with Everyman (or Everyone, as we should probably say) the man on the Clapham omnibus, so beloved of early twentieth century writers; the woman on the No. 51 into Carnforth. He speaks for today’s society when he says “Prove it”. Scepticism rules the roost today: unless we have been there and brought back the T-shirt, we refuse to believe in anything.
Thomas demands physical evidence, so Jesus returns and says “Right! Give me your finger. There! I have put it into the nail hole. Give me your hand. Can you feel that gaping wound? Is that physical enough for you?”
It is. Thomas accepts the reality which he can see and feel, and then has the courage and the wisdom to go further; to accept the reality which he cannot see and feel, but can now infer, namely that the Risen Lord is God. Thus we have the first affirmation of the divinity of Christ, as Thomas declares “My Lord and my God”.
What about us? as a popular song asked a few years ago. Like me, you may have been brought up to pray Thomas’ words “My Lord and my God” silently at the elevation of Our Lord’s Body and Blood during the Mass. Like Thomas, we can see a physical reality: do we still, like Thomas, have the faith to go further and to proclaim our faith in the divinity and its present reality? Why would we not, as we learn that there is nothing which God gives us which is too good to be true?
