DOUBTS AND FAITH
It is very easy to be a person of faith when all goes well. But with the loss of a loved one or marriage and money problems, many times we enter into a period of anger at God and a time of doubt.
The second Sunday of Easter in recent years has also carried the name "Divine Mercy Sunday." The focus of last week's celebration of Easter was on Jesus' rising from the dead and His gift of new and eternal life. This week focuses on those who receive this gift. This week the Church looks at us.
We begin back in the Upper Room. It was the same place that the disciples ate the Last Supper with Jesus when He said, "This is My Body. This is My Blood which is given up for you."
We meet Thomas, "Doubting Thomas." Thomas would not believe what the other disciples had said about Jesus rising from the dead because he didn't trust them. Like Thomas, they hadn't had the courage to stay with the Lord when He was killed. Now these same disciples claimed that He had risen from the dead. To Thomas, this sounded more like a dream than a reality.
Thomas did not have faith in the other disciples. He also did not have faith in what the Master had said. Jesus had clearly said that He was going to die and then rise again. It was not that Thomas wasn't courageous enough. When Jesus had said earlier that He was going to go to Jerusalem and die, Thomas was the one who had said, "Let's go with Him, and die with Him." The problem was that Thomas found Jesus' prediction of His rising from the dead too difficult to believe.
Thomas was not present in the Upper Room the first time that Jesus appeared to his disciples after He had risen from the dead. So Jesus appeared again to answer Thomas' demands, "Unless I place my hand in the marks of the nails in His hands, and my hand in His side where the spear opened Him up I will not believe." Jesus appears again, not only for Thomas' sake, but for our sake, yours and mine. He looked at Thomas and said, "OK, Thomas, you believe because you have seen," but then Jesus looks at us, at all the people of every age all over the world who were not in the Upper Room, and says, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."
A "blessed saying" is often called a beatitude. There are a lot of beatitudes in the Gospels: the eight that we know, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," "...the pure in heart," and so forth. These beatitudes are addressed to the people who hear the Lord, and then through them, they are addressed to the rest of the world. But there is only one beatitude that is not addressed to the particular people to whom Jesus was speaking. "Blessed are those who have not seen, but believe." God right here blesses us, right now, because we are putting our faith and our trust in Him.
We will never have full knowledge until we see God face to face. Part of us wants to believe, but part of us has questions. The story of a man in the Gospel of Luke put it so well. His son was suffering from epilepsy. He said to Jesus, "Can you help him?" Jesus said, "Can I? I can if you believe." The man responded, "I do believe, help my unbelief." Wow! That speaks volumes.
When we were confirmed, we all received gifts of the Holy Spirit. One of the gifts is the gift of understanding. Through the gift of understanding, the Holy Spirit helps us accept the mysteries of the faith. When doubts come into our lives, we need to call out to the Holy Spirit to strengthen the gift of understanding we received at our confirmation. We need help to believe.
We should also help ourselves. Many times people have doubts in their faith because their knowledge of the faith has not matured. We should be childlike and accepting the Lord, but not childish. We need to gain knowledge in our faith by prayer, retreats, and Scripture reading.
Sometimes we have doubts in our faith because we are seeking answers. This is not bad, this is good. We are reaching out for the truth and questioning that which was given to us by others.
It is very easy to be a person of faith when all goes well. But with the loss of a loved one or marriage and money problems, many times we enter into a period of anger at God and a time of doubt. This does not mean that we have lost our faith. It simply means that we are being called to a deeper faith.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ says, "Blessed are those who have not seen and have yet come to believe." We are all included in that blessing. None of us has seen Christ face-to-face. But John's Gospel includes a book worth of stories of Jesus' miracles and healing, of Jesus' teaching and preaching, of Jesus' passion and death and love for the world that led Him to the cross so that, with Thomas, our doubts would give way to faith. The Divine Mercy revealed in Easter does make the world new. With Thomas, we say to Jesus,
"My Lord and My God."