2nd. Sunday of Easter (B)
(Acts of the Apostles 4:32-35;
1st. Letter of John 5:1-6; John
20:19-31)
Jesus said to
Thomas, "Have you come to believe because you have seen Me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have
believed." Now Jesus did many other
signs in the presence of His disciples that are not written in this
book.
What precisely is John’s intention
in that passage from today’s Gospel reading?
For among the evangelists John is unique in designating certain miracles
of Jesus as ‘signs’ because he considers them as being most important and
eminently conducive to faith (cf. v. 31!); they are by no means ‘ordinary’, they
are in fact, John thinks, quite special.
John picks out four of those
miracles which he calls signs of Jesus, explicitly designating the wedding feast
at Cana as being the occasion for the first of them:
Jesus did this
as the beginning of his signs in Cana in Galilee and so revealed His glory, and
his disciples began to believe in Him. (John
2:11)
He then goes on (John 4:54) to
explicitly call another of Jesus’ miracles (the healing of the son of a royal
official) as being the second of those signs he wishes to bring to our special
attention:
Now this was
the second sign Jesus did when he came to Galilee from Judea.
How then can he at the beginning of
his Gospel account start to pick out for special notice certain miracles which
he regards as worthy to be called ‘signs’, and then, at the end of his Gospel,
tell us that has decided to omit ‘many’ of such signs that reveal His glory?
Could it be because of those words
of the Risen Lord to Thomas, ‘Blessed are
those who have not seen and have believed’?
But, after Jesus’ Resurrection, could ‘many’ signs somehow be no
longer necessary for faith, or perhaps even somewhat detrimental to
it?
The fact is that Jesus performed all
those many signs:
In the presence of His disciples, and His disciples
began to believe in Him.
Those disciples, apostles, who were
to be sent out to the whole world were starting with no background awareness of
death being followed by ‘Resurrection’ (whatever that might be) other than
Jesus’ words of warning concerning His own destiny. The many signs had been judged necessary by
Jesus in order to fully prepare and ultimately convince those who, in His Name,
would proclaim His Gospel to the world. And
yet, even then:
Later, as the
Eleven were at table, He (Jesus) appeared to them and rebuked them for their
unbelief because they had not believed those who saw Him after He had been
raised.
Nevertheless, knowing the depths of
their minds and hearts and the grace of His guiding and sustaining Holy Spirit,
and looking to the future:
He said to
them, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.”
(16:14-15)
Now, it is that new vision of the Good News
being proclaimed to the whole world by Holy Mother Church -- in His Name and
with the persuasive power and saving grace of His Spirit – that is the key for
our understanding of those most comforting words of Our Lord for all future
disciples:
Blessed are
those who have not seen and have believed.
John could omit certain signs of
Jesus from his public Gospel because, henceforth, they would be made up for,
subsumed, by Jesus’ greatest sign before the nations: Holy Mother Church -- the Body of which
He is the head, and the Temple of His Most Holy Spirit – proclaiming in His Name
and witnessing to His Gospel, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit for the
salvation of all men.
Moreover, as you have just heard, in
his letter John also says:
Who indeed is
the victor over the world, but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of
God?
There he is again taking up his
Gospel teaching, and saying that whosoever believes the Church’s proclamation of
Jesus as the Son of God and Saviour of mankind, that is, whosoever is thus to be
praised for believing without ‘seeing’, such a one has overcome the world, and
his victory over the world is proved by the fact that he is spiritually alive
and strong in Jesus without worldly proof other than the witness
and the proclamation of Mother Church.
Indeed, need for worldly
proof could only prove an insuperable obstacle for the spiritual life of any
aspiring Christian.
Now, why does John praise such a
response to Mother Church’s proclamation of Jesus? Not, ultimately, to praise any human being
for his or her own individual spiritual perspicacity or strength, but to show
just how sublime and divinely spiritual is Catholic Christian faith, since,
ultimately, only God the Father Himself can introduce us to such faith, as John
tells us in his Gospel:
Jesus said to
the Jews, "Do not murmur among yourselves.
No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will
raise him up at the last day. It is
written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God.' Therefore
everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me. (John 6:43-45)
Acceptance of the Gospel message on
the basis of worldly evidence would be no true substitute for faith given in
response to God’s inspiring of our heart, enlightening of our mind. It is not that John is against us using our
natural intelligence in response to the Gospel of Jesus, after all, he expressly
tells us why he wrote his Gospel:
These (signs)
are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and
that believing you may have life in His name.
Rather is it that, for St. John, the
supreme function of the Gospel message is to promote our awareness of, our
contact with, and our response to, God Himself; and that contact, that response
-- though based on the Gospel message -- is not to be limited to or constrained
by the written words of the Gospel. The
truth about Jesus, and indeed about God, is broader, wider, goes deeper and
extends higher, than the stark words of the Gospel; that is why we Catholics
accept the Tradition of Mother Church and acknowledge true development in the
doctrine of Faith; all, however, on the basis of, and never against, the
original Gospel proclamation.
Here we have an essential
characteristic of our Catholic and Christian resurrection-faith. It is not simply a faith to be learned, it is
not even just a faith to be loved; it is a faith to be experienced and lived:
not simply in the sense of obeying its commands and fighting for its rights, but
as communion with the Father, in Jesus,
by the Spirit. The Catholic and
Christian Church, as the Body of Christ living today, is not limited to
receiving its faith from a book written in the past, nor can it be restricted to
the use of merely human reasoning in its appreciation of such book-based
teaching; the Church, which is the Body of Christ living by the Spirit of
Christ, is endowed and enabled, through her vital communion with God, to receive
ever greater fullness of His grace and guidance that she might yet more deeply
appreciate and appropriately understand the Good News of Jesus’ Gospel. Mother Church today is still called to
prepare and allow herself to be inspired by God: not, indeed, to write or
proclaim a new revelation, but to understand ever more fully and to appreciate
ever more deeply and intimately the revelation originally and finally given to
her by God through the Apostles.
This is why the Catholic Church can
never be or become a university Church in which the teaching of God is
established by and subject to merely rational justification and argument, a
Church in which only teaching intellectually sifted and boasting a majority vote
of accepted scholarly approval, could be considered as provisional
doctrine. Mother Church, though august in her
dignity and truly admirable for many of her achievements while presiding over
centuries of human growth and social development is, essentially, a mystical Church wherein
human learning and practical expertise, though so deeply appreciated, are also
necessarily subject to the transcendent authority of a divine commission for and
spiritual awareness of, the true and
ultimate human good, only to be gleaned -- under the guidance of the Spirit --
from communion with, and in response to, the transcendent God.
All this is contained in those words
of our Creed which say: ‘I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic
Church’; for those words do not simply state that we believe the Catholic Church
to have been uniquely founded, established, by Jesus Christ and to be guided and
preserved by His Spirit; they also mean that it is only in the Catholic Church -- only in her
atmosphere, so to speak -- that we are fully able to breath as Christians,
empowered to recognize and appreciate the fullness of truth about God and His
will for the salvation of mankind.
Whoever is
begotten by God conquers the world. And
the victory that conquers the world is our faith. (1 John
5:4)
The Spirit is the one that testifies, and the Spirit is
truth. (1 John 5:6)
Oh you believing Catholics,
appreciate and be grateful for what you have been given! For your faith has been given to you by the
heavenly Father Himself Who has Personally called and introduced you to Jesus;
and that faith is being continually nourished and purified -- even to this very
day, and at this very hour – in the womb of Mother Church, in view of your
ever-fuller sharing, as a member of the Body of Christ and by the Spirit of
Christ, in the life of Christ before the Father.
