19 April 2020
Second Sunday of Easter (or Sunday of Divine Mercy)
In John 20:19-31, we first hear about how Jesus, at the end of that first Easter day, appeared to the disciples who had gathered without Thomas and shared with them his peace and then breathed the Holy Spirit into them after showing them his wounds. We then learn that these same disciples, filled with the Holy Spirit, share the good news that Jesus is risen with Thomas, who does not believe them. It is striking that Thomas focuses on a single point: Jesus’s wounds. The other disciples told Thomas that the risen Jesus was wounded, and that, and precisely that, is what Thomas says that he must see if he is to believe their testimony. If Jesus could rise from the dead, why could not his wounds have been removed? Is it good news to bear gaping wounds after rising from the dead?
Have we truly recognized that good news for what it is: the true revelation of God and the life that God offers us in and through Jesus Christ? Or, to put it more bluntly: have I ever really accepted as good news the reality that God reveals his life through the woundedness that Jesus continues to bear in his resurrection, a woundedness that bears witness to the reality of what we have done to God, but even more of the greater love of this God who willingly chooses to bear that woundedness? If we think that it would be better for Jesus to be without wounds, maybe we don’t believe in his resurrection, but in the “resurrection” of some other reality we call “Jesus.” But today, let us instead ask, with Thomas, to see Jesus’s wounds so as to learn what the good news really entails: not a disappearing of wounds, but the grace to love and show mercy through our wounds, transformed by the wounds of the Lamb who remains slain for us as he rises from the dead to share with us the true life that will be ours forever.