Easter 2

Readings: Acts 5:12-16; Revelation 1:9-11a, 12-13, 17-19; John 20:19-31

We call him “doubting Thomas.”

Our English word “doubt” is from the Latin word dubio,

which itself is a combination of two Latin words:

duo, meaning two,

and habeo, meaning “I have.”
When I am in doubt, I have two possibilities before me,

between which I cannot yet decide

as I consider first one and then the other.

You find a similar thing in other languages;

for example, in German the word for doubt is zweifel:

literally, the state of being “two-ful.”

Try to imagine the state of mind of this “two-ful Thomas.”

He has heard the story of Mary Magdalene and Peter and John,

who claimed that they found the tomb of Jesus empty.

Then the other disciples tell Thomas

that they have seen and spoke with the risen Lord.

How could such a thing be?

How could two-ful Thomas not 

consider alternative explanations?

Is the tomb really empty – 

or is it a hoax?

Have the others really seen Jesus alive – 

or were they hallucinating?

On the one had, perhaps the tomb was empty, as they said.

On the other hand, perhaps the tomb was not empty;

perhaps the stone was not rolled away.

But if so, why would Mary and Peter and John 

have said that it was?

What would they have to gain from making up this story?

There is no obvious benefit to be had from such a lie.

Indeed, for them to claim that Jesus still lived

would be to put themselves at considerable risk

from those who had crucified him in the first place.

So two-ful Thomas continues to ponder:  

maybe the tomb was empty.

Does this mean that he was in fact raised,

or is it possible that someone stole the body?

But why would someone do that?

A supporter of Jesus would not have much to gain from doing so;

it would be safer simply to head back to Galilee

and try to forget about the hope that seemed to have failed.

An opponent of Jesus would have even less reason to do so,

since they too were anxious to put this whole Jesus thing to rest.

And what about the claim of the other disciples

that Jesus had appeared to them in the upper room?

Did he really appear to them alive,

or was this some sort of dream or hallucination?

How could someone escape the grip of death,

which seems so firm and unbreakable?

At the same time, is it really possible

that ten people would have collectively hallucinated

Jesus’ appearing before them and speaking to them?

So two-ful Thomas considers the alternatives.

Which is more convincing: 

that Jesus has been raised from death

or that there is some sort of hoax or hallucination involved?

Thomas has reason to doubt that Jesus still lives,

but he also doubt his doubts,

because the possibilities they present 

seem implausible as well.

Our Gospel tells us that Thomas only resolves his doubts

when he encounters the risen Jesus himself,

who invites him to touch his wounds 

and to see that it is really he.

Two-ful Thomas, having doubted so long,

lets the risen Jesus open in his heart 

the floodgates of faith,

and makes one of the boldest professions of faith

in the entire New Testament,

saying to the risen Jesus, “My Lord and my God.”

He not only believes that the man Jesus has risen,

but that this man is God in human flesh,

the one who holds the keys to death and the netherworld.

Gregory the Great once said in a sermon,

“Mary Magdalene, who was quick to believe,

has helped me less than Thomas,

who remained so long in doubt” (Homily 29).

Perhaps only one who had doubted so long 

could believe so deeply.

Two-ful Thomas stands as witness to the idea

that doubts are not thoughts to be repressed,

but rather questions to be worked through;

faith is not a matter of ignoring our doubts,

but of committing ourselves in trust

to a possibility that we have deeply considered;

through God’s grace, our doubts become

ways of preparing our hearts for an even deeper faith.

Two-ful Thomas becomes single-minded in his faith

when he encounters the risen Jesus.

Overcoming doubt is not so much 

like finding an answer to a problem

as it is like meeting someone with whom you fall in love,

someone for whom you will forsake all others,

someone who becomes your first and your last.

Let us pray that this Easter season will become a time

for us to meet Jesus anew,

to make him our first and our last,

to fall in love with him

and the new life that he so freely shares with us.

Holy Thursday

Readings: Exodus 12:1-8, 11-15; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-15

“It is the Passover of the Lord.”

With these words, 

God institutes the sacred meal and celebration

in which the Israelites

would commemorate God’s salvation of them

when they were slaves in Egypt.

It is called in Hebrew pesach, 

which we translate as “Passover,”

in part because it celebrates God’s “passing over”

the homes of the Israelites,

which had been marked with the lamb’s blood,

sparing them from the final and most terrible plague:

the destruction of the first born.

But it is also a celebration of the Israelites “passing over”

from slavery into freedom,

from bondage in Egypt 

into the land of God’s promise,

from oppression and death 

into new life as God’s covenant people.

It was therefore appropriate that Jesus

would adapt the Passover tradition

in instituting his own sacred meal,

the meal in which his followers would commemorate

Jesus’ passing over from death to life,

and their own passing over 

from the captivity to sin and death

into the freedom of God’s grace 

and the life of eternal glory.

As St. Augustine said, 

“all the mysteries of the Old Testament

were fully consummated

when Christ handed over to his disciples

the bread that was his body

and the wine that was his blood” 

(Sermo Mai 143).

Over the course of the next three days,

we will be celebrating Jesus’ passing over

as well as our own passing over:

our passage from bondage into freedom,

from death into life.

But what does that mean concretely?

What does it look like to undertake this journey,

this passage, into freedom and into life?

Pope Benedict wrote, 

“Love is the very process of passing over,

of transformation, of stepping outside 

the limitations of fallen humanity –

in which we are all separated from one another

and ultimately impenetrable to one another –

into an infinite otherness” 

(Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 2, 54-55).

To pass over is to step out of ourselves

and into the infinite mystery of divine love,

the gift of love that makes possible 

true love for one another.

This passing over from self-centeredness

to God-centeredness and to neighbor-centeredness

was echoed by our new Pope, Francis,

just yesterday in his first Wednesday audience:

“to live Holy Week following Jesus

means learning to come out of ourselves. . .

to reach out to others, to go to the outskirts of existence,

ourselves taking the first step towards our brothers and sisters,

especially those farthest away,

those who are forgotten,

those most in need 

of understanding, 

consolation,

help.”

We live the mystery of the Passover of the Lord

by passing over from self-centeredness to find the other

at the outskirts of existence,

by coming out of ourselves into the mystery of love

in an exodus from bondage to our own needs and desires,

through the mystery of divine love,

and into the promised land of freedom.

The final end of our passing over will only arrive

when we live fully in God’s presence in eternal glory,

but we already begin to live it now

in the hearing of God’s word, in prayer, in the sacraments,

and in loving service to our neighbor.

In a few moments we will obey Jesus’ command

to wash one another’s feet,

as a sign of the passing over from self to other

that lies at the heart of our Holy Week celebration.

But we do not simply wash the feet of others;

we also let our own feet be washed,

because Jesus says that it is only if he washes our feet

that we can share in his inheritance.

The word pesach, which we translate “Passover,”

can also mean “to stumble” or “to trip.”

And we all know, if we are honest with ourselves,

that in our passing over from love of self 

to love of God and neighbor

we often stumble,

we almost always trip over ourselves 

in one way or another.

So tonight we let Jesus, 

in the person of our fellow Christian,

wash our feet with the pure water of his love.

Tonight we who have stumbled let Jesus pick us up

and join our passing over to his own,

so that through him and with him and in him

we can continue our exodus

into the mystery of divine love.

Lent 3

Readings: Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15; 1 Corinthians 10: 1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9

It has been an interesting week to be a Catholic.

Of course everybody who has access to any form of media

knows that Pope Benedict’s resignation from the papacy 

took effect on Thursday

and that the Church has entered a period of sedes vacans,

or the empty chair of Peter,

as we await the election of a new Pope by the college of Cardinals.

In my mind, this event is framed 

by two other events from this week:

on Monday the Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned

amidst accusations of sexual misconduct with several priests,

and on Friday the Archdiocese of Baltimore issued a statement

that one of my brother deacons had been suspended from ministry

after his arrest for possession of child pornography.

Sad to say, for all too many people 

such news has ceased to be shocking,

because it has come to seem like business as usual 

from the Catholic Church.

And I find myself praying that God will seize this opportunity

to send us a leader who can make the Church into the kind of place

where at least such things regain their capacity to shock.

So what does the Word of God offer us today?

We hear in the Gospel the parable of the fig tree,

which for three years produces no fruit,

after which the owner of the orchard, 

justly and understandably frustrated,

tells the gardener to cut it down 

so that it will no longer deplete the soil.

But the gardener pleads with the owner 

to give the tree one more year,

during which he will tend it and fertilize it.

Early Christian interpreters such as St. Augustine

saw the parable as a warning to Christians that,

while we have been granted another season of grace

in which to bear the fruit of good works,

a day of judgment and reckoning is coming

for those whose lives remain barren.

But perhaps this parable 

is not just about us as individuals,

but also about us as a Church.

Events not just this week but over the past ten years

have led me often to wonder whether our Church

has become like the fig tree,

exhausting the soil around it

while producing no fruit but scandal upon scandal,

sucking life from the world

and offering nothing in return but one more excuse

for the cynicism that so pervades modern life.

Is time running out for our Church to bear good fruit?

Could the day arrive when God decides 

that the time has come to cut it down?

Christ said that the gates of hell 

would not prevail against his Church,

but we must also remember the words of St. Paul:

“whoever thinks he is standing secure 

should take care not to fall.”

These are dark thoughts to have on the eve of a papal election.

And they bring with them the temptation to think

that what is needed to fix the Church

is a Pope who fits with my particular agenda:

whether that is a Pope who will ordain women to the priesthood

or impose the Latin Mass on all parishes,

or change the Church’s teaching on contraception

or excommunicate all the bad Catholics.

These might be good ideas or bad ideas,

but a solution more radical than any of these is called for,
a solution that fits neither a “conservative” agenda nor a “liberal” one, 

a solution that is hinted at in the parable of the fig tree.

The gardener in the parable says

that he will cultivate the ground around the tree and fertilize it.

What our translation rather primly translates as “fertilizer”

is the Greek word kopria, which really means “excrement.”

A Pope from many centuries ago, Gregory the Great,

said, in reference to this parable, that the fertilizer that can make

the unfruitful tree of our souls fruitful once again

is the remembrance of the dung of our past sins;

the frank acknowledgement of the stench of our own misdeeds 

can pierce our hearts

and move us to begin bearing 

the fruit of good and godly deeds (Homily 31).

And what is true of us as individuals 

is just as true of us as a Church.

The Church must clear away all of the weeds that are choking it:

the desire to protect careers and images at all costs,

the denial that the world’s evils are found in the Church as well,

the denigration of any who would dare to call us to account.

The Church must be fertilized by facing up to the foulness of her failings,

and let her heart be pierced by the stench of her own sins,

so that we can in due season bear fruit

that will feed a world that is spiritually starving.

Perhaps our next Pope can help us to do this.

But the Church stands 

on the promise of Christ to remain with us,

not on the dream of a Pope 

who will fix everything that is wrong with us.

Still, we should pray in this time of sede vacans 

for God to send us a leader

who, like the gardener in the parable,

will cultivate and fertilize the Church with honest repentance.

And we should not only pray, but pray with confidence,

because we know that while our past is ours, and we must own it,

our future belongs to the God 

whose grace can make a barren fig tree fruitful

and make a desert bush burn with the fire of God’s presence,

the God whose Spirit, 

despite our best efforts to quench it,

still burns as a refiner’s fire within the Church, 

the living body of Christ. 

4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19; 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30

In today’s Gospel, the people who,

at the beginning of the story, “all spoke highly” of Jesus

and “were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,”

have become by the end of the passage a mob “filled with fury,”

who try to throw Jesus over a cliff.

This change in attitude seems to occur

when Jesus recalls for them two stories in which

the prophets Elijah and Elisha came to the aid of Gentiles –

the starving widow of Zarephath and the leper Naaman the Syrian –

rather than helping their fellow Israelites.

Presumably what fills them with fury is the implication

that Jesus has come not only for them,

to fulfill God’s promises to Israel,

but also for others,

to extend God’s saving covenant to the Gentiles.

Their fury is, I think, rooted in fear:

the fear that God’s favor

is a limited commodity,

so that the more God loves others

the less he loves them;

the fear that there is only so much room

within God’s covenantal love,

so that the inclusion of others in that love

might mean their exclusion.

As is so often the case with the Gospels,

the figures we read about invite us to reflect on our own lives.

Do we treat God’s love as if it were a limited commodity?

Do we react with envy when others benefit?

Do we find ourselves filled with fury

because we fear that another’s gain is our loss?

And if we find such fear and fury in ourselves,

do we ask ourselves, is this who I really want to be?

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov

a character recounts a Russian folktale that paints for us

a picture of such fury and fear:

Once upon a time there was a peasant woman
and a very wicked woman she was.
And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind.
The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire.
So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers
he could remember to tell to God;
‘She once pulled up an onion in her garden,’ said he,
‘and gave it to a beggar woman.’
And God answered: ‘You take that onion then,
hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out.
And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise,
but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.’
The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her.
‘Come,’ said he, ‘catch hold and I’ll pull you out.’
He began cautiously pulling her out.
He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake,
seeing how she was being drawn out,
began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her.
But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them.
‘I’m to be pulled out, not you. It’s my onion, not yours.’
As soon as she said that, the onion broke.
And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day.
So the angel wept and went away.

Because she was convinced

that her single good deed belonged to her alone,

that God’s salvation was a limited commodity

that she had to grab for herself,

that those with her in the lake of fire were her rivals

rather than her fellow sufferers,

she found herself left in that lake for eternity

drowned in the fire of her own fear and fury.

But this is not who we are condemned to be.

In our second reading,

Paul speaks of a different kind of living,

what he calls “a still more excellent way,”

the way that prizes love above all else.

This love, Paul says, is not jealous, not pompous, not puffed-up, not rude,

“it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered,

it does not brood over injury.”

It is not filled with fear of being deprived of a blessing,

or fury at the good fortune of others,

but “bears all things, believes all things,

hopes all things, endures all things.”

If we want to be Christians,

if we want to live this still more excellent way,

we should pray that God fill us with this greatest of gifts,

the love that seeks not its own good

but rejoices in the good of others,

the love that led Jesus to endure the cross for all,

the love that conquers fear and fury.