John 20:19-31, Divine Mercy Sunday

“Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed. (Jn 20:29)”

If I told you that I have seen the Lord, would you believe me?  Thomas wouldn’t. The doubters would say, fake news, hallucination, cultural conditioning, psychological projection, superstition, creative imagination. Like Thomas, they would say, unless we touch the evidence, unless we see him in the flesh, face to face, we will not believe.

For the Thomases of our world, seeing is believing. For them, material or tangible reality is all there is to reality.

Show me the fact first, then I will believe. Which is a bit strange because one does not believe in irrefutable facts. Once something is undeniable, there is no room for doubt. And thus no space for faith. You do not “believe” that the earth is round; you know it is round. There are satellite pictures to prove it. You have no choice but to accept. The evidence, we say, is compelling. No more excuse to doubt. And so, no more need to believe.

In the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Judas sings these lines to Jesus:

Every time I look at you I don’t understand

Why you let the things you did get so out of hand

You’d have managed better if you’d had it all planned

Why’d you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?

If you’d come today you would have reached a whole nation

Israel 4 BC had no mass communication

Indeed in this time of tiktok, fb, discord, and other media, the “fact” of the resurrection would have gone viral. It would have been irrefutable. But the question remains, would we therefore now believe if the evidence were brought at last to our very eyes? Would our lives change if the Lord’s resurrection were indisputable fact?

If Pope Francis were to tell you, as he has told us countless times: God is real, God is mercy, God loves you. God understands and forgives you. Would you believe him?

On the human side, the nature of faith is such that we do not need to see first in order to believe. We only need each other to believe. And that’s what we’ve been doing all this time. We’ve been anchoring our faith on the testimony of men and women who have followed Jesus Christ and who allege that he is risen. Their witness is all we have to go by.

Their testimony is not even airtight. It is refutable and ambivalent and inconsistent. The counter to their testimony is simple: they are lying through their teeth; Jesus never really rose from the dead; and they just stole his body in the dead of night to make it look like he is risen.

Each of these two interpretations, that he is risen or not, gives room for doubt. These also open us to the possibility of faith. The evidence of the empty tomb invites us to make a choice of who and what to believe.

There is no compelling proof for our Easter conviction that Christ is indeed risen. Perhaps the only thing we can hold on to is the “fact” that in a matter of days and weeks after Calvary, these men who ran away from the cross, these cowardly men who hid themselves in a locked room for fear of being hunted down to death, these men were now no longer afraid.

For the doubting Thomases of the world, to see is to believe. Seeing is believing.

But for those who choose to bear faith, to believe is to see. Believing is seeing. St Anselm said it pithily, credo ut intelligam. I believe so that I may understand.

Shall we wait then to fully understand the mystery before ever coming to believe? Shall we wait for clarity to make us believe? Amid the uncertainty and shadows, let us choose to believe. Then and only then shall we be able to see.