Regina caeli, laetare, alleluia;
Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia,
Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia:
Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia.
Queen of heaven, rejoice, alleluia.
The Son you merited to bear, alleluia,
Has risen as he said, alleluia.
Pray to God for us, alleluia •
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Anonymous author, The Doubt of Saint Thomas,
Altarpiece of the Cathedral of Valencia (Spain)
We all know from our own experience that liturgical time doesn’t always correspond to where we are on our own life’s journey. In the words of today’s second reading, we can find ourselves being plagued by all sorts of trials in the season of Easter as much as in any other season. The circumstances right now can make it very difficult for us to sing the Easter Alleluia with any conviction. There is often some tension between the Easter cry, ‘Christ is risen! Life has triumphed over death!’, and our own present experience. Even though we are an Easter people, we never stop being a Good Friday people also, at least on this side of eternity. We can sometimes find it difficult to believe in the ultimate triumph of life over death, of joy over sadness, especially during these recent weeks. Perhaps, therefore, we will find it easy to identify with Thomas in today’s gospel reading. When the other disciples approached him with the good news of Easter, ‘We have seen the Lord’, their message did not resonate with him in any way. The darkness of Good Friday was still too real for him and prevented him from being moved by their Easter proclamation. His own reasoning did not allow him to believe that life had triumphed over death, that the crucified Jesus was now the risen Lord. Thomas stood in the light of Easter, yet that light did not dispel his darkness. If his fellow disciples were full of Easter faith, he was full of doubt. They claimed to have seen the risen Lord; Thomas declared that he would not believe until he not only saw the Lord but touched his wounds. In his doubting, Thomas may be like many other disciples today. Many believers can be troubled by their sense that the light of Easter does not seem to have penetrated their lives sufficiently. We can be distressed at the degree of doubt that we experience within ourselves, troubled that such doubts may even become more pronounced as we get older. Like Thomas, we can struggle to identify fully with those faith seems so much more assured than ours. The prayer of one of the more minor gospel characters, ‘Lord, I believe, help my unbelief’, may find a ready place our heart. Today’s gospel reading assures us that the Lord understands a doubting, questioning, faith. When the Lord appeared to Thomas, he did not rebuke him. His first words to him were, ‘Peace be with you’. He invited Thomas to touch his wounds as he had requested, and then called on him to ‘doubt no longer but believe’. The gospel reading does not state that Thomas actually touched the wounds of Jesus. Seeing the risen Lord was enough to dispel his doubt. Then, out of the mouth of the great sceptic came one of the most complete professions of faith in the four gospels, ‘My Lord and my God’. We are being reminded that serious doubt and great faith can reside in one and the same person. Thomas, like the other disciples, saw and believed. However, the Lord recognizes that only a small group of disciples will see and believe, and, so, he speaks a beatitude over the many future disciples who believe without seeing. That beatitude embraces all of us gathered here this morning. As Peter puts it in today’s second reading, ‘You did not see him, yet you love him’. The church is the community of those who believe in and love the Lord, without having seen the Lord in the way Thomas and the other eyewitnesses did. We look forward to that eternal day when we will see the Lord, face to face. Because we do not yet see him face to face, our faith is always a faith that hopes. To believe is always to wait in joyful hope. The risen Lord’s face to face meeting with Thomas dispelled all Thomas’s doubts. Because we only live in hope of such a meeting, there will always be some element of doubt in our own faith. As Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, ‘now we see as in a mirror, dimly’. The questions and doubts of our reason are an inevitable part of seeing dimly. Such questions and doubts are not an enemy of faith. They can lead, rather, to a deepening of our faith. If we face our doubts and our questions honestly, as Thomas did, and bring them to each other and to the Lord, we too can reach a point where we can make Thomas’ confession our own, ‘My Lord and my God’. In one of his encyclicals, Faith and Reason,the late Pope John Paul II stated that ‘the church remains profoundly convinced that faith and reason mutually support each other… they offer each other a purifying critique and a stimulus to pursue the search for a deeper understanding’. We can all learn to seek the Lord with humility, sincerity and honesty, just as Thomas did. The Lord considers anyone who is a seeker and who wishes to believe as a believer already. If we remain true to our spiritual search, the Lord has his own way to meet each one of us and to invite us, as he invited Thomas, ‘Doubt no longer but believe’ • AE
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M. Preti, La incredulidad de Tomás (1670), óleo sobre tela,
Museo de Historia del Arte de Viena.
Tomás era uno de los Doce. Como ellos fue testigo de cuanto Jesús hizo y dijo. Lo había seguido a todas partes, hasta Jerusalén. Cenó con Jesús antes de la pasión y, posiblemente, lo vio morir colgado de la cruz. Tomás quería a Jesús pero, por lo que podemos leer éste domingo, no esperaba que Jesús resucitase. Así que cuando aquel domingo por la tarde, se incorporó al grupo y éstos le contaron alborozados la gran noticia de que habían visto a Jesús, resucitado, Tomás creyó que alucinaban. Nuestra situación, como creyentes, se parece mucho a la de Tomás. Sus temores y dudas tienen mucho que ver con nuestras dudas y temores. ¿Estamos convencidos de la resurrección de Jesús? ¿Creemos en la vida eterna? Lo sabemos de memoria, que lo repetimos maquinalmente al recitar el credo, pero la realidad es que quizá se nos hace muy cuesta arriba creer en la resurrección, sobre todo cuando nos acercamos a ella, porque nos acercamos inexorablemente a la muerte. Sabemos que estamos en lista de espera, ¡y sin esperanza! La esperanza en la vida eterna no deja huella en nuestra vida. No se nos nota demasiado. No hay alegría, ni ilusión, ni estímulo en nuestra vida rutinaria, pues vivimos como si no tuviéramos esperanza. Jesús disipó los temores de Tomás, apareciéndosele, haciéndose presente e invitándole a meter la mano en la llaga del costado. Y en presencia de Jesús, los temores desaparecieron. No fue necesario cumplir sus exigencias. Tampoco hizo falta, pues su corazón lo convenció: “Señor mío y Dios mío”. La fe no es un puro saber, sino un saber experiencial. Lo sucedido entre Jesús y Tomás, la aparición, se parece a lo que ocurre entre amigos. No podemos ver al amigo, como amigo, mientras no creamos que es amigo, o sea, mientras no lo queramos como amigo. Es el amor, la amistad, lo que nos hace descubrir al amigo. Por eso la fe no es una respuesta calculada y calculadora, sino una apuesta. No hay ninguna seguridad para creer o antes de creer, como no la hay en las apuestas. Lo que sí hay es certeza en la fe. Los evangelistas nos relatan los encuentros de Jesús con sus discípulos, como apariciones de Jesús. De modo que Jesús es quien toma la iniciativa. El es quien decide la ocasión y elige los medios, los signos. Los discípulos, los creyentes, vemos a Jesús, porque se nos aparece, porque se nos da a conocer, porque quiere, porque nos ama. Y así también acontece en nuestros días, hoy. Jesús se nos aparece sí, en la Eucaristía, pero también en el otro, en el prójimo, en el pobre, en el que nos necesita. Otra cosa es que queramos reconocerlo. Y sólo podremos reconocerlo si lo amamos, si amamos al prójimo, si practicamos el mandamiento del amor. Porque el amor es el fundamento de nuestra fe cristiana. El que no ama, decía san Juan, está muerto • AE
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La bella flor que en el suelo
plantada se vio marchita
ya torna, ya resucita,
ya su olor inunda el cielo.
De tierra estuvo cubierta,
pero no fructificó
del todo, hasta que quedó
en un árbol seco injerta.
Y, aunque a los ojos del suelo
se puso después marchita,
ya torna, ya resucita,
ya su olor inunda el cielo.
Toda es de flores la fiesta,
flores de finos olores,
mas no se irá todo en flores,
porque flor de fruto es ésta.
Y, mientras su Iglesia grita
mendigando algún consuelo,
ya torna, ya resucita,
ya su olor inunda el cielo.
Que nadie se sienta muerto
cuando resucita Dios,
que, si el barco llega al puerto,
llegamos junto con vos.
Hoy la Cristiandad se quita
sus vestiduras de duelo.
Ya torna, ya resucita,
ya su olor inunda el cielo. Amén •
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