SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER HOMILY YEAR C
Acts 5:12-16 Rev1:9-13, 17-19 Jn 20:19-31
The Meaning, Wonder, and Result of Faith
How Much Can We Learn From Experience?; Making Real the Power of the Resurrection; The Presence of the Risen Jesus.
1st Reading – Acts 5:12-16
12 Many signs and wonders were done among the people at the hands of the apostles. They were all together in Solomon’s portico.
13 None of the others dared to join them, but the people esteemed them.
14 Yet more than ever, believers in the Lord, great numbers of men and women, were added to them.
15 Thus they even carried the sick out into the streets and laid them on cots and mats so that when Peter came by, at least his shadow might fall on one or another of them.
16 A large number of people from the towns in the vicinity of Jerusalem also gathered, bringing the sick and those disturbed by unclean spirits, and they were all cured.
Responsorial Psalm – Psalms 118:2-4, 13-15, 22-24
R. (1) Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, his love is everlasting.
or:
R. Alleluia.
2 Let the house of Israel say,
“His mercy endures forever.”
3 Let the house of Aaron say,
“His mercy endures forever.”
4 Let those who fear the LORD say,
“His mercy endures forever.”
R. Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, his love is everlasting.
or:
R. Alleluia.
13 I was hard pressed and was falling,
but the LORD helped me.
14 My strength and my courage is the LORD,
and he has been my savior.
15 The joyful shout of victory
in the tents of the just:
R. Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, his love is everlasting.
or:
R. Alleluia.
22 The stone which the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone.
23 By the LORD has this been done;
it is wonderful in our eyes.
24 This is the day the LORD has made;
let us be glad and rejoice in it.
R. Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, his love is everlasting.
or:
R. Alleluia.
2nd Reading – Revelation 1:9-11A, 12-13, 17-19
9 I, John, your brother, who share with you the distress, the kingdom, and the endurance we have in Jesus, found myself on the island called Patmos
because I proclaimed God’s word and gave testimony to Jesus.
10 I was caught up in spirit on the Lord’s day and heard behind me a voice as loud as a trumpet,
11A which said, “Write on a scroll what you see.”
12 Then I turned to see whose voice it was that spoke to me, and when I turned, I saw seven gold lampstands
13 and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, wearing an ankle-length robe, with a gold sash around his chest.
17 When I caught sight of him, I fell down at his feet as though dead. He touched me with his right hand and said, “Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last,
18 the one who lives. Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld.
19 Write down, therefore, what you have seen, and what is happening, and what will happen afterwards.”
Alleluia – John 20:29
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
29 You believe in me, Thomas, because you have seen me, says the Lord;
Blessed are those who have not seen me, but still believe!
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel – John 20:19-31
19 On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
20 When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
22 And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
23 Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”
24 Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came.
25 So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
26 Now a week later his disciples were again inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.”
27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”
28 Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
29 Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”
30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book.
31 But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name.
Homily
Some teachers of creative art say that what an artist needs is experience, despite the fact that the class colours of the school of experience are black and blue. Artists are t live it up, see all of the world they can, and do everything to awaken dormant emotions. All experiences, including participation in evil, are valid and good – with the sole exception of death, which people who hold these positions greatly fear, because death is the one personal experience that no one can have twice. Contrary to many other teachers of acting, Stella Adler didn’t advise the accumulation of experiences to fall back upon – such as recalling the death of your mother when you wanted to look sad. “Don’t use4 your conscious past,” she advised her student-actors. “Use your imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don’t want you to be stuck with your own life. It’s too little.”
St Thomas in today’s Gospel showed his high regard for experience when he refused to believe in the risen Jesus without probing his nail-marks and putting his hand into his side (v. 25). We may “see” mirages which don’t exist; we might “hear” sounds which aren’t there; likewise, all of our other senses can deceive. But when we touch something, we know it’s there. That’s why some call touch the sense of certitude.
Jesus accommodated himself to Thomas’ make-up. The result was the most profound profession of faith in the New Testament: Thomas’, “My Lord and my God”. More than an exclamation, these words are a prayer acknowledging Jesus’ divinity.
The experience of the risen Jesus by the Apostles, especially doubting ones like Thomas, is the basis for the whole of Christianity. But there are dangerous in too high a regard for experience. Jesus reminded Thomas of that in his beatitude, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (v. 29). If we believe that the verification principle of all of life is only what we can experience, the vast majority of us can’t believe in God or anything supernatural.
St John in his Book of Revelation, from which we have today’s Second Reading, received images from experience and then built upon them in this, his dream. Another title of this book, Apocalypse, means an unveiling, a glimpse at hidden things, things yet to come. Apocalypse, a special type of Jewish literature, are more common in the Old Testament. They’re not easy to understand. They often use the images of dreams. They were usually written to give encouragement to groups who were suffering persecution; such victims would easily have groups who were suffering persecution; such victims would easily have decoded the underlying message of comfort. The ultimate consolation is that Jesus will absolutely and irrevocably conquer, and we shall share in his victory if we are faithful to him. This apocalypse of John was just such a message to the young Christian churches, which at that time were beginning to feel the brunt of persecution.
The book’s author, John – who may or may not be the same person who wrote St John’s Gospel – wrote this work from exile on Patmos, a small rock island off the coast of modern Turkey. Rome had sent John there to the loneliness and pain of banishment because he was bearing witness to Jesus. John wrote essentially to console those who were suffering for their faith by reminding them that Jesus would absolutely and decisively conquer.
The hills of Patmos provide beautiful views of the glistening blue sea, and John’s book is full of the broad vistas of the far-stretching water. The word sea occurs in this book no less than twenty-five times. John used other symbolism – in colours, numbers, images, and language – from his intimate knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures as well as from his own experience. Parts of it we understand, others not. It is the most difficult book of the New Testament.
John introduces himself as a brother who shares with all reborn Christians distress and endurance (v. 9). He shares our distress because people won’t listen to someone who speaks of hardship from the comfort of an easy chair. He mentions endurance because he knows that the person who sits with bowed head in passive submission to whatever comes is not real.
For nineteen centuries John’s vision of the end of the world has shaken the imagination of Western humankind. John’s nightmare imagery has infused our art from the medieval representations of the Last Judgement, through the desolate horrors of Hieronymus Bosch, the poetry of William Blake, and the fiction of Herman Melville, to today’s doomsday evangelists and apocalyptic movies.
John tells us he was caught up in ecstasy (v. 10) – beyond space and time. He heard God’s voice, which sounded like a trumpet. Through that comparison, like every other comparison of this world to the heavenly world, is inadequate, both the Old and New Testaments often compare the voice of God to the commanding clarity of the trumpet. Examples are many. The account of God’s giving the Law on Mt. Sinai says that amid peals of thunder and lightning there was a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled (Ex 19:16). when Jesus spoke of his hard-to-imagine Second Coming, he said that God would send out his angels with a trumpet blast to gather His elect from one end of the heavens o the other(Mt 24:31). And St Paul said that at Jesus’ Second Coming the Lord himself with the trumpet of God will come down from heaven (1 The 4:16).
John goes on (v. 12-16) to give a symbolic description of Christ in glory. He is “One like a Son of Man” – an enigmatic First Testament (Dan 7:13) title of Christ. Jewish apocalyptic literature used the title to describe a unique religious personage endowed with extraordinary spiritual power. Jesus used it frequently of himself. It was well adapted to his purpose to both veil and reveal his person and mission. On the one hand, it emphasized the lowliness of the human condition, especially in Jesus’ humiliation and death; on the other hand, it expressed the triumph of Jesus’ resurrection which we celebrate through this Easter season, his return to glory, and his Second Coming as judge of the world.
When John – and the Church in this Easter season – sees most is Jesus’ glory. The combination of awe and fear caused in John the usual reaction of people before God or before a messenger of God – He fell down at his feet (v. 17). When there was such a great catch of fish that Peter the Fisherman finally got a glimpse of who Jesus was, he had fallen at Jesus’ Knees. The disciples had heard Jesus’ calm reassurance against fear on more than one experience – defying and imagination challenging occasion – when he had come to them across the water, for example, and on the Mount of Transfiguration.
Then John heard Jesus give nothing less than God’s description of Himself: “I am the First and the Last, the One who lives” (vv. 17f,; see Is 44:6; 48:12). These awesome titles synthesize the three stages in Jesus’ career – his pre-existence, his life and death on earth, and his exaltation to eternal life. Jesus went on to give John the sublime revelation: “Once I was dead but now I am alive forever and ever” (v. 18). This is the core of the Christian creed. It is the claim of one who has risen from the dead, is alive forever, and has conquered death so that he is death’s master. Because Jesus lives, we too shall live.
Faith in these truths of Jesus’ resurrection bears many fruits, one of which is our common life as described in today’s First Reading. It is the third summary portrait in the Acts of the Apostles, admittedly idealistic, of the Jerusalem community, creating an atmosphere of peace and fulfillment, but also of fear. God gave the early Christians the signs and wonders they needed as saving actions to spread the Good News. Among them were the Twelve’s charismatic power to heal, such that the people carried their sick out into the streets so that when Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on one or another of them (v. 15), and crowds from the towns in the vicinity of Jerusalem also brought their sick, and they were all cured (v. 16). Now that Jesus has returned to the Father after curing a few people, the disciples seem to be doing even greater things than he!
But all of this provided also a note of fear – in those who didn’t dare join the early Christian community in Jerusalem, fear in those within the community who were undergoing persecution for Jesus’ sake, fear in the very first disciples huddled behind locked doors Such fear can be, and is, overcome in the Spirit of Christ.
Fear remains a very real issue in our world – fear of illness, of poetry, of loss of relationships, of humiliation, of loss of employment, of death. If we truly believe in Jesus’ Good News, though, fear is expelled. The essence of the good News, as we recall in the Easter Season, is that Jesus has conquered death. This victory over humankind’s last enemy is a conquest for everyone. What is there to fear from any of the others?
We are among those to whom Jesus says “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” We go beyond experience to be no less moved by this Easter Season than were John the Theologian and Thomas. The encounter, far from being tame, confronts us to the core of our being. We pray for deeper awareness of the blessings of Christ’s resurrection and our consequent new birth in God’s Spirit.