2nd Sunday of Easter C

See Commentary on John1 20:19-31 in John 20:19-23 & John 20:24-31


Homily 1 - 2007

It looks as though for Thomas, “seeing is believing”. Yet that is not quite true: seeing is seeing. But after seeing, and occasioned by the seeing, Thomas went on to say: My Lord and my God. That was not seeing – that was believing... believing a reality beyond the power of eyes to see, an insight possible only through faith.

Thomas’ insight was more, though, than an insight – It was a relationship. It was trust. It was self-gift in trust. He exclaimed after all:  My Lord and my God! Jesus said to Thomas: You believe because you have seen: that is, we are interacting; we are experiencing a mutual encounter.

Then Jesus went on to say: Blessed are those who do not see and yet believe. But when you no longer see me, and continue to interact in trust and to experience a mutual encounter in love, that will be the fruit of faith.

We are capable of that – through faith to encounter, to relate, to engage and to grow in love with Jesus.

We don’t understand resurrection, but at least we know now that he is risen; and because he is risen, I can encounter him in love. You can encounter him in love. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can encounter him in love – and we can be totally present to each other.

Thomas’ faith was more than believing the fact that Jesus had risen or the divine reality of Jesus.  His faith opened him to relationship. His faith had become the sort of faith that John hoped his readers would find: These are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, believing this, you may have life through his name. For faith to become life (as John hoped), it needs to be encounter, relationship and engagement in love.

Encountering Jesus in love is praying. But the word praying also covers a whole range of activities, some of which don’t take us far; and some of which open us up to ever deeper encounter.

For example, you can spend time every day talking to your neighbours without ever getting to know them better and certainly without ever growing in love. That can even happen between two spouses!

But you can also spend time every day talking to your spouse and come to an ever richer knowledge and an ever deepening love –  and, I would suspect, unless you communicate regularly with your spouse, that knowledge won’t grow richer or the love grow deeper. It all takes effort, and sometimes you may even need help.

Likewise with God; likewise with Jesus: Saying more prayers may not draw us more closely to each other - but without regular prayer, not much is likely to happen.

We can be helped to pray. The Church has a wonderful tradition of praying, a real bank of wisdom on how to pray – but for a variety of reasons, most Catholics, I find, are not aware of, or in touch with, that wisdom.

You will notice on the bulletin an invitation to take part is what is called "A Retreat in Daily Life." It is an invitation to three weeks of concentrated effort, a sort of training course in prayer. You are invited, in fact, to spend about 20 to 30 minutes each day in prayer alone. As with everything, you learn by doing - But experience, unreflected on, is usually useless.

In the Retreat in Daily Life, you will be given the opportunity to reflect on your prayer with an experienced director – whom you see for a personal discussion twice each week for the three weeks the Retreat lasts.

We have been fortunate to have the services of Fr Michal Gutkowski, a Jesuit priest from Poland, (who studied in both England and the United States, and so speaks English quite well) – and also of Sr Patsy Bourke, a Mercy sister, who at present lives in Edenhope. It is a wonderful opportunity to let down the sails, and to put out into the deep. I heartily recommend it.


Homily 2 - 2010

I find today’s Gospel passage fascinating.

Jesus said to that group of disciples: As the Father sent me, so I send you. We were informed earlier in the Gospel: God sent his Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. So, Jesus sends us into the world, not to condemn the world,’ but so that through us the world might be saved.

We might well ask: “How on earth are we to do that? … to save the world from itself?”

Well, he did clarify it a bit.. He went on to say: For those whose sins you forgive are forgiven. For those whose sins you retain, they are retained. So, at least he says that people need not be locked in to their sin, to their violence, to their betrayals and compromises, their cowardice, their lies and cover-ups, their injustices – or to however else the messiness of the world, the sinfulness of the world, takes practical shape.

We’re not locked in to sin. But the question remains: How do we get out of it? How do we unlock the power of the world’s sin?

What was Jesus’ way? It is important that we reflect on that, because he sends us to do the same thing – whatever it is.

We have just remembered Jesus’ death in our Holy Week ceremonies. His death showed us two things: Firstly, it showed up the reality and the power of the sin of the world. Sin blinds people. Sin releases the violence of self-interest that lurks in every human heart.

Good, responsible people condemned Jesus. And they all had good reasons to do it. The soldiers obeyed orders. Pilate reasserted the power of Rome, and saved his own skin in the process. The religious establishment thought it blindingly clear and eminently preferable, as Caiaphas had stated, that one man die for the people than that the whole nation be destroyed. And his disciples chose not to be there.

The power of the sin of the world.

What else does Jesus’ death show clearly? What was he up to in all this? Jesus wasn’t a helpless, powerless victim – particularly in John’s Gospel. Had he kept quiet, no one would have taken any more notice of him or done anything to him. But he deliberately refused to back down on what he knew to be true. He would not compromise his own integrity. He kept insisting that the God whom he revealed was a God who loves simply because God is love.

God loves people, not because of what people were like, but because of what God was like. God loved … everyone, anyone – saints and sinners, and all shades in-between – real people in this real world – in this blind world, in this violent world, in this world drowning in its own self-interest and cowardice.

That sort of love in that sort of world is vulnerable, and, perhaps ineffectual; but that is how God loves.

Today’s story went on: Jesus came and stood among them – that bunch of cowards, that group of men who had so far managed to save their own skins but who were crowding together behind locked doors, paralysed by fear.

And Jesus said to them: Peace be with you! He said it a second time: Peace be with you. No recrimination – just forgiveness. No need to be locked in to their sin. But to break free was up to them – and proved initially to be too much for the absent Thomas to believe.

Such love in such a violent world was inevitably vulnerable, and potentially ineffectual. He showed them his crucified hands and the side that had been pierced by a Roman spear. Jesus’ way of saving the world from itself was to reveal its violence and its blindness and to show that they are totally unable to quench the possibility and the power of love.

The catch is: He sends us to continue the mission – yet we’re little different from everyone else: we are all caught up in the same self-interest, the same violence and the same blindness. What have we got that might enable us to break free – a bit – from all that weight of sin?

Jesus breathed on them, and said: Receive the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the power of God’s love at work in the world from within. The Spirit is what makes the difference, provided we are open to receive it. And we receive the Spirit as we entrust ourselves in profound faith to Jesus and to the way of Jesus. As the Gospel’s author put it: believing this, you may have life through his name.


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.


 Homily 4 - 2016

It is easy to domesticate the crucifixion, and the resurrection. For the disciples, Jesus’ crucifixion had taken them completely by surprise. They had abandoned Jesus when he was arrested, and had locked themselves up somewhere, terrified out of their minds, totally confused, bereft of faith. Not one of them was interested enough, or game enough, to accompany the women who went to the tomb on the Sunday morning to anoint the dead body. As for resurrection, no one even dreamt of it. And when Mary Magdalen returned from the tomb and claimed to have seen and talked to the Lord, they would not hear it.

Then, Sunday night, he stood in their midst. His first words to them were “Peace be with you!” Given their behaviour, that is remarkable! Next, he “showed them his hands and side”. Why did he do that? More surprisingly, he then commissioned these bewildered men to continue the mission his Father had given him to forgive people’s sins and draw them into community.

We think of Easter in terms of triumph, of vindication. Preach forgiveness! Was that a response of victory? or of capitulation? Of triumph? or of surrender? And the forgiveness he had extended to them with his “Peace be with you!” was forgiveness that prescinded even from repentance, forgiveness with no conditions at all. Forgiveness is tricky. I am not sure that most of us get it. Either we highlight sin, and are coy about forgiveness; or we highlight forgiveness and minimise sin. We struggle to hold both in focus and to give due weight to each.

But look again at the Gospel. The world’s sin had callously conspired to brutalisingly murder an innocent victim, a victim, no less, than the Son of God. Jesus “showed them his hands and his side”. Jesus firmly confronted them with the stark evidence of sin’s reality – no soft-pedalling. Yet, in the next breath, he repeated his message of peace for his spineless friends, and gave them the mission to bring forgiveness to the world that killed him. He denied neither sin nor forgiveness, and squarely faced both.

Genuine, life-giving forgiveness expresses the capacity to face the destructive reality of sin without any minimising, and, at the same time, the deliberate decision to accept and respect the inherent human dignity of the perpetrator. To hold opposites in tension without denying or avoiding either does not come automatically, but is a factor of human maturity. “Either/or” thinking is the way of children and adolescents. Most adults get stuck there as well, and mature no further.  Genuine forgiveness is beyond them. “Both/and” thinking, if it comes, comes later and is the hallmark of wisdom. It is born, I think, in the context sometimes of suffering, often of love – love received and love given. 

The Church’s purpose, is to tell the world of God’s unconditional forgiveness. It is our mission as disciples. Yet, in the present climate even to suggest forgiveness can seem like the betrayal of the victim – and perhaps, when not understood properly, would be just that. It can sound like special pleading, a veiled avoidance of responsibility. 

What then? We need, at least, to live forgiveness – as best we can. And to do that most of us need to learn it, even to understand it, before we can practise it. Forgiveness brings us into the realm of gratuitousness, of sheer gift – offered and received. It moves beyond justice to mercy, beyond debt and its cancellation to love, relationship and truly shared intimacy. Our learning can take practical shape in accepting and respecting the human dignity of those with whom we disagree or who don’t like us. We can discipline ourselves to listen, and to listen compassionately, suspecting that the voice of criticism, the shout of anger, is often the cry of pain. As members of a pilgrim Church, we need to find the humility to say, and to mean, “We hurt you. We were wrong. We are sorry.” Like the crucified Jesus, we must be open to carry the world’s pain in ourselves.


 Homily 5 - 2019 

We gather today against the backdrop of a couple of weeks of tragedy and suffering - in New Zealand first and then in Sri Lanka. On Thursday the nation remembered the too many deaths caused by war over the past century. Our focus has been primarily on the numbers of those killed and injured, but less often on those injured survivors left to cope with on-going wounds and destructive psychological trauma. More rarely do we think of those still more numerous ones left to carry on - wives, husbands, parents and children - whose suffering in many cases will be longer-lasting and more intense than of those killed.

How do we respond to all this in ways that are life-giving for others and for ourselves? How do we make sense of it all?

We pray for those who died recently, Christian and Muslim, encouraged that both groups died while in the act of community worship, presumably engaging with the God they trusted in and loved – alert to this world at one moment, consciously pursuing their eternal journey into the infinite heart of God at the next.

The choices facing survivors and anguished family and friends, deprived in an instant of those they loved and on whom they perhaps sorely depended, remain what they have always been – to live each day as before, but to do so now with a wound they would never have anticipated, and facing a question they may never have faced before. Will they use their suffering to turn in on themselves and sadly walk away from God? or will they entrust themselves to the Mystery of Love? Experience shows that suffering can lead in either direction. These perhaps are the ones who most need our prayer.

Today's Gospel reading from St John’s Gospel seemed to emphasise quietly the physically wounded hands, feet and side of the risen Jesus. Despite his physical pain, might not his mental anguish have caused him still greater suffering and distress? All this has had me wondering.

Are we surprised that the Gospel should make so much of the wounds of the risen Christ? We shouldn’t be. If you were present at Good Friday’s Liturgy, you might remember the second Reading of the day, from the Letter to the Hebrews where the author said of Jesus, “He learnt to obey through suffering, and was made perfect."

First of all, I think it is important that we understand what the author meant by “obey”. Normally we think of obeying in an infantile or teen-age way – the somewhat reluctant bowing to the rules or expectations of others in authority. That was not what Jesus was doing. For those who allow themselves to mature, “obeying” refers to the free and love-inspired effort to attune their values and behaviour to those whom they have learnt to love. Jesus became “perfect” by allowing intense suffering to open him completely to the heart and the will of his Father.

"He became for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation". Like Christ, we move towards perfection to the extent that we allow life, with its inevitable suffering, sometimes physical but more often mental and emotional, to reveal to us what we truly value, what we truly seek, and to move us, despite the cost, to find the strength to choose what we see fits best with our sense of human dignity and mutual respect. Confused and bewildered though we often are in the face of deep suffering, we can still reach out in hope and trust to the “sweet [sometimes bitter] Mystery of life” that we call God. Our suffering can serve to make us who we most truly are.

No wonder the risen Jesus carried his wounds with him into eternity! Having served as the visible price of his deepest love, having been the context through which be became perfect, effectively they made him become who he truly was.

Our suffering, whatever it be, can do the same.


Homily 6 - 2022

“Unless I see the holes that the nails made in his hands and and put my finger into the holes they made, and unless I can put my hand into his side, I refuse to believe”. We call him “Doubting Thomas”; but I am not sure we have got it right. He certainly did more than doubt the other apostles — he disbelieved them. Did he also disbelieve that Jesus could have risen? If Thomas doubted the possibility of Jesus’ resurrection, or challenged Jesus to prove him wrong, Jesus was not put off. On the contrary, Jesus cared for him enough, respected him enough, that he accepted Thomas’s challenge and was prepared to appear to him, to reveal his wounds and even to invite Thomas to probe them.

For several years, people of all ages and backgrounds have been steadily withdrawing from the Church. It started well before the sexual abuse crisis, perhaps accelerated then, and we do not know yet the final effect of the current pandemic. All of those people, no doubt, have their own unique reasons for stepping away, just as all of us here have our own unique reasons for being here this weekend.

One of the things that impressed me in today’s Gospel was the way that Thomas spoke to Jesus. He called him, “My Lord and my God!” — the first time that Jesus was addressed that way by anyone. Thomas had stepped into a beautifully personal connection with the risen Jesus. The address was formal; but the newness for Thomas was the change of Jesus to his now-risen state, to the one-to-one relationship on Thomas' part.

What I think led to Thomas’s response was his recognition of Jesus’ personal interest, respect and love for him. I wonder if most of those who have withdrawn from the Church over the years had ever come to a deep, personal relationship with Jesus, close enough to be convinced of his love. Has their choice been more a step away from the visible Church than a step away from the risen Jesus with whom they had never really personally connected?

What I would love to know now is how to interest those who have disengaged to connect once more, but in a quite different way. I understand to some extent their loss of interest in the Church they knew: the visible Church that teaches and proclaims and criticises and condemns, administered by its clergy and professionals, yet that is hardly less sinful than any other institution and is always in need of reform.

There is, however, another far more basic dimension to the Church. All the bishops of the Church at the Second Vatican Council arrived at a further description that included the whole People of God, laity and clergy. They wrote of it as a living, loving and believing community, the Body of Christ, that faces outward to engage with their world, doing what they can to improve it according to the values and vision of Christ. Through this living community Christ wants to makes our world a wonderful place for everyone to be alive.

Vatican II finished fifty-six years ago. I apologise that we priests have done too little to keep reminding people of this crucial feature of the Church. But it is a powerfully attractive vision, I believe. Many of those who no longer engage with the Church have not abandoned this feature of it; they simply have not heard enough about it nor seen it in action. We may have lost any chance of interesting them now; but as we look to the future with hope, it is the closeness to Christ and insight into Church that we who remain would do well to make our own.