We often unfairly malign Saint Thomas, calling him "doubting" as if we would have immediately believed that Jesus was back from the dead. Yet we are those blessed ones Jesus speaks about, who have not seen and yet believe. Low Sunday's Gospel asks us again to seek out "Reason to believe" - why do we trust the witnesses of the Resurrection, and how are we to witness to it in turn?
I recently came across a video of Rachel Johnson (sister of Britain’s one-time PM Boris) interviewing Richard Dawkins for LBC radio. She was telling a story about how her two-year-old child stumped a priest by asking him:
Do you know Jesus to be true, or do you believe Jesus to be true?
I’m not sure how she’s trained her two-year-old to be asking such questions - at two I’m not sure I’d progressed beyond basic demands for food and attention, but then my memory doesn’t stretch back quite that far, but (assuming the story is true) it is a helpful question: do we know or do we just believe? To which we have to ask ourselves: do I even know anything at all?
To really know something, we have to experience it ourselves, at first hand. I know that the oven is hot because I touched it and it burned me, I know that my eyes are bluey-grey because I can see them in the mirror, I know that I attended university and obtained a Law degree because I lived through it.
But if I haven’t experienced it myself, I have to choose to believe what other people tell me about it. That means, generally, the person telling me what they have experienced needs to be a credible witness (i.e. intelligent, reasonable, without a motive for lying, and generally an honest person). I don’t know there is an armed conflict going on in Ukraine right now, because I am not in Ukraine and I haven’t seen with my own eyes the violence going on there, but various News channels have given me enough credible eyewitness evidence, including videos of the conflict, that I can reasonably believe it to be true.
Most of the time, the things we claim to know are only things we believe based on credible eyewitness evidence of their being true. From current events, to history, to medical science, and theoretical physics, we make judgments about truth based on credible, reasonable, belief.
We very often unfairly malign Saint Thomas as doubting Thomas, based on his response to the other disciples in today’s Gospel: he comes back to find them all raving that they have seen Jesus. What is the rational response? Generally, people who have been beaten, scourged, crucified, and stabbed in the side with a lance don’t spontaneously reappear two or three days later as the picture of good health. Generally, once someone is dead and buried, they stay that way. Sure, he had seen Jesus raise others from the dead, but He couldn’t stop them from killing Him - so clearly there was a limit on His power. Is it fair to call this man doubting Thomas? Perhaps reasonable Thomas, or justifiably sceptical Thomas might be better? Thomas was being asked to believe something unbelievable - and quite reasonably he wanted proof before he took that leap.
And yet, each one of us, who has found our way here this Sunday morning to complete the Octave of Easter, has made a decision Saint Thomas wouldn’t make, without seeing His body, without having to put our fingers in his hands and feet and side, we kneel before Him and call Him “My Lord and my God.”
Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe, says Jesus. We have not seen, we do not know, and yet we trust the witnesses of Christ that what they said was true! Why are these witnesses so credible? Why do we believe them?
St John in our first reading tells us the witnesses to Christ are water, blood, and the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit above all because the Spirit is the truth.
The Holy Spirit, breathed into the Church through the Apostles, inspires a great and powerful witness: that they went out to the whole earth to share the Good News of the resurrection. That (as we’ve read at Mass all week of this Easter Octave) they were given power to heal, and work miracles, and cast out unclean spirits, and speak in languages they never learned. The Holy Spirit made their words stir up the hearts of those who heard them and inspire them to to share the same Good News with others. The Church grew, in a matter of days, from eleven men and a few women huddled together in fear, to three thousand in number, and then it grew even more rapidly across the whole world.
The Holy Spirit, too, inspired them to do this with utter conviction in what they knew to be true and a willingness to follow that conviction through to the end. If we followed a false religion, we would be following half-believed folkloric stories, or a charismatic charlatan who was acting for transparently political purposes, to establish a kingdom or overthrow a government, or just to get rich. There's no shortage of religions like that. But the Apostles of Jesus Christ never established any earthly kingdoms, they made no money from their work, gained no titles, overthrew no occupiers, carried no weapons. Instead they went out as sheep among wolves, they were repeatedly arrested, beaten, tortured, and (in the case of all but St John) were all executed for proclaiming the Gospel.
The coherence of their words, the fact that they all agree, they all write intelligently, they all write in perfect coherence with the Old Testament and in agreement with each other, tells us they weren’t mad. The fact that they acted without any obvious self-interest, indeed with total disregard for their own needs or their own prestige, and the fact that they all suffered for what they believed, tells us they were being honest. They genuinely believed what they were saying: one might lie or undergo hardship in the hope it would bring you power or wealth, but you wouldn’t do any of it for the certainty that it will bring you nothing but suffering and death. You certainly wouldn't persist in such a lie when recanting would see you immediately reprieved.
They were neither mad, nor lying.
The Holy Spirit witnesses then, in the lives and actions of the Apostles, showing us the credibility of their claims. But Jesus says Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe, because our belief in Him can give credibility to the Good News as well. Proclaiming the Good News isn’t reserved to the Apostles, and it isn’t reserved to the priests and bishops either. Proclaiming the Good News, sharing the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and lending credibility to it by our own lives is the fundamental property of every single Christian believer.
The witnesses to us of Christ are water, blood, and the Holy Spirit. In Baptism we are cleansed from sin, and become temples of the Spirit. In the Eucharist and the other sacraments, we gain strength for the journey and help the Spirit to grow in us. By allowing the Spirit of God to grow in us, through prayer and through the Sacraments of the Church (above all the Eucharist and the Sacrament of penance) we allow Him to move others to Christ through us. When we become like Christ, kind, compassionate, merciful, meek, humble, selfless, and (above all) joyful, we become witnesses to the whole world that what we have chosen to believe is true, and good, and beautiful.
We are an Easter people, called by God to abandon the safety of selfishness, and become light for the whole world, so that all people may come to share in what we have been given: new life through the death of Christ.
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