In this weekend’s Gospel (John 20,19-31), we find the disciples locking themselves into a room because they were afraid of the Jewish authorities. Even after an excited Mary Magdalene came to them from the empty tomb announcing that she had seen the Lord, this was not enough to overcome their fear. They chose to hide in a self-imposed confinement. The turning point came, however, when the risen Lord Himself appeared to them behind their closed doors and helped them overcome their fear. He did this by breathing the Holy Spirit into them, filling them new energy and hope, freeing them from fear, and releasing them to share in His mission. Amazing! “As the Father sent me, so am I sending you,” He said.
In the power of the Spirit the disciples came to life and went out from their self-imposed prison, to bear witness to the risen Lord. This is the picture of the disciples that Acts 4,32-35 gives us in the first reading for the Mass. Acts describes a community of believers, the Church, witnessing to the resurrection both in word and by the quality of their living. They had clearly taken to heart the encouragement Jesus offered them in the upper room and (within a short amount of time) they were sharing in the mission entrusted to them.
Among those encouraged by Jesus was St. Thomas. He insisted on certain conditions being met before he made a move, “Unless I see, I can’t believe.” As He had done with the rest of the disciples, the Lord took Thomas on his own terms. He accommodated Himself to Thomas’ conditions and said, “Put your finger here.” The Gospel implies that the Lord meets us wherever we are. He takes us seriously in all our fears and doubts. The Lord is prepared to stand with us on our own ground, whatever that ground is, and from there He will speak to us a word suited to our state of mind and heart. We don’t have to get ourselves to some particular place in order for the Lord to engage with us. He takes Himself to where we are, wherever it is, including to a place of fear or of doubt.
We might pray this Easter season for the openness to receive the Lord’s coming into the concrete circumstances of our own lives, so that we, too, might say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God.” We might also pray that, like the Lord, we would receive others where they are, rather than where we would like them to be.
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Divine Mercy: “God of everlasting mercy, who in the very recurrence of the Easter Feast kindle the faith of the people you have made your own, increase, we pray, the grace you bestow, that all may grasp and rightly understand in what font we have been washed, by whose Spirit we have been reborn, and by whose Blood we have been redeemed. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
