2nd Sunday of Easter C - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2013

Thomas didn’t accept the word of the other disciples.  He didn’t believe their story that Jesus had risen from the dead.  I wonder why he didn’t believe… My hunch is that he did not want to believe.  And perhaps he did not want to believe because he had always, quite reasonably, taken it for granted that death is death – death is the end.  And that mindset coloured his attitudes to everything else.

To believe that Jesus’ death was not the end of Jesus changed everything, everything he had taken for granted and that more or less made sense.  It asked for a radically new way of evaluating life – a new way of approaching life and living accordingly.  It called for radical conversion.  It is hard to move beyond the familiar, even beyond an unpleasant familiar.  It can seem too destabilizing.

Jesus’ death was devastating.  But resurrection was more; it was frightening.  Thomas was not open to that possibility.  The Gospel calls Thomas the Twin.  [This is John’s Gospel, and in John’s Gospel things like that often signify something deeper.  We weren’t just being informed of his nickname.]  What then?  The Gospel doesn’t say.  It leaves us thinking … Perhaps, it may mean that Thomas somehow is playing a dual role in the narrative.  There is Thomas, the historical disciple, and then there is the symbolical Thomas – perhaps someone we are invited to identify with.  Can Thomas’s wrestling with faith symbolise our wrestling with faith?

Why do you believe? We can probably all give a reasonable enough answer to that – just as the atheist can give a reasonable enough answer for not believing.  But, with the question of faith, do the rational reasons come before or after we believe? Do I believe ultimately because I want to believe – whether that wanting be conscious or unconscious?  Do atheists not believe because ultimately, consciously or unconsciously, they don’t want to?

I think the deeper issue for people is what kind of God they believe in or refuse to believe in.  Across my life, the kind of God I believe in has changed a lot.  It seems to me that growth in faith is a question of losing faith in one understanding of God and then finding a more satisfying, nuanced, truer sense of God.  That process of losing and finding can be difficult and frightening.  It means cutting loose from the customary and safe mindset, to open up to one that is not yet familiar but that seems to make better sense of the complexity of life and of personal growth.

I remember a young woman in a parish where I had once been.  Her father was a really good man, and conscientious to the point of heroism; but he struggled with depression and mental illness.  He committed suicide.  The following Sunday the daughter was not at Mass.  The mother told me that her daughter could not understand how God would have let that happen after all that her father had been and done.

Her experience could not ‘gel’ with what she had believed about God.  Perhaps her sense of God was a child’s sense of God – the all-powerful God who rewards and punishes.  She grew up with that view.  She was used to it and comfortable with it, until life challenged it and destabilized her.  She lost her faith in that God – and perhaps needed to.  Her challenge was: Could she let go of the familiar and comfortable, and search for a more adult, more delicate, perhaps, even, more hesitant sense of God than the one she had known? While she was grieving and still so angry, she was in no state to search.  But, later on, would her supporting family and friends, along with her own deeper longing for meaning and for love, open her to search for the God she would want to meet in love, to believe in and to surrender to?

Perhaps we all face the challenge faced by Thomas – to let life raise its questions, to call us beyond the familiar, to grow up, and to keep on growing.  Come to think of it, I wonder if something similar needs to happen in every love relationship.