“…I will not reject anyone who comes to me.”
Jesus asks us to believe in Him, to love Him, to open our hearts to Him and rest the entire foundation of our lives upon Him. We may be wary to do so, afraid at what that might cost us, afraid that He might reject us. Fear no longer! Look: He tells us that He will not reject any who come to Him. Why? Because He loves us. Because, as He says elsewhere, we are the Father’s gift to His Son (John 17:24), and Jesus will not reject anything the Father gives Him. If this is true, then why are we so slow to believe? If He already loves us, why are we so slow to love Him in return? “…although you have seen me, you do not believe.”
For many of us, that’s precisely the problem: we have not seen Him, and so we do not believe, at least not to the level such that we can profess, truly, to love Him. And so He tries to draw us in with gentle words and extraordinary promises, swearing never to reject us should we come to Him, offering eternal life if we would but believe in Him and yet we refuse Him. We settle for the false promises of Satan that we reject at our Baptism, and the half-promises of the world. We settle for a half-faith, giving Jesus His hour on Sunday morning and then it is back to our own lives without Him. We make the most we can of our life here and now, building upon the sands of this passing world instead of the Rock that will remain when, on the last day, “…heaven and earth will pass away” and all that will remain is His Word (Matthew 24:35).
But will we dare to believe in Him though we do not see? “For we walk by faith, not by sight,” (2 Corinthians 5:7) and those who believe without seeing are far more blessed than even the Apostles who believed because they saw Jesus (John 20:29). Why is it that believing without seeing opens one to the greater blessing?
Because to take Jesus at His Word, to believe in Him, to love Him without the benefit of seeing Him requires of us greater trust and therefore greater love. The people in today’s Gospel wanted proof first; they wanted a sign. Their love of God came with conditions and terms, yet the love Jesus was trying to show them came with no such limitations: is it so much to ask that we love Him in kind? For if we can love Him without seeing Him, trust Him without hearing Him, then we may yet come to see that last day of which no one, not even Jesus (Matthew 24:36), knows, when what we once believed in—who we once loved—without seeing will be fully revealed, and we will not be struck with terror but rather consoled, for we will see Him Whom we have already loved, and we will be seen in kind.