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In the name of the Father, of the Son and of
the Holy Ghost.
‘My Lord and my God!’ After Nathaniel, after
Peter expressing the faith, the knowledge, the experience of the
Church, Thomas repeats these words, ‘My Lord and my God’. He had
now seen and he believed. This is the faith of the Church of
God, the lordship of Christ in the life of each of us. A
lordship that means that we have been bought at a high price,
that God has believed in us before we believed in Him, that He
had loved us before we ever loved Him and that He conquered our
heart, our mind, our will and the totality of our lives.
The lordship of Christ is made manifest in
our personal lives by our recognition and certainty and
knowledge that truly all power is given Him on earth and in
Heavens, that all things are in His hands, that He is the Lord
of History, that He is the Lord of things visible and invisible;
that all things belong to Him and He is the Lord of all things.
And also the confession of the Church that knows Christ through
the Holy Spirit as God, true God, the Son of the Father, the God
of Heaven whom we adore on earth in His Incarnation. He appears
to His disciples on the evening of the Resurrection when
dismayed, terrified, desperate they were hiding for fear. He
appeared to them, and His first words were ‘Peace be with you!’
Because they had lost their peace: Christ had died, the One in
Whom they had believed had seemingly been defeated and
hopelessly overcome. The Father had not sent any miraculous help
and now, Him Who appeared to them as their Lord and their God,
indeed was dead and defeated as a man. Life, hope had gone out
of their hearts and out of the world because if He could be
defeated, there was no hope for holiness, for truth, for love.
There was no place for God on earth, He had been ruled out by
evil, by hatred.
And now He was there, alive, in their midst,
alive in the living body of the Resurrection, in that body which
they had known, which they had lay in the tomb, and which,
inseparable from the Godhead, had remained incorruptible, not
overcome. He stood there, alive, and peace could come back to
them, not the peace which the world gives, a sense of
appeasement, but an alert, powerful, fragrant peace, the peace
of strength that cannot be overcome, of victory already won.
That peace which the world cannot give He now gave them, not
simply in this words of blessing, but in His presence and
victory, in the vision of the Kingdom of God already come with
power, anticipating now what will come later for all. And to
these men who had now received a peace that could not been taken
away from them, because they had come back to life, not to the
ephemeral life of time but to the life of eternity, shared with
the Lord in Whom and with Whom they had died out in despair, to
these men He spoke a second word: ‘As My Father sent Me, ever do
I send you.’ And He breathed on them: and gave them the Holy
Spirit, this Holy Spirit Whom they could hold in their oneness
because they were one with Him and in Him, Who would lead them
into all truth, Who would work the miracles of the Church and
the acts of God, Who would teach them to say ‘Father’ to Him Who
hitherto had been the great God of Heaven. And they had to go
now with this peace that could not be taken away. And in the
power of the Spirit that indwelled their unity, their oneness
they had to go into the world.
The Church was not founded by Christ simply
to be the place where God and man are at one, but the place
where the love and the compassion of God is at work with such
power that men, frail as we are, find the inspiration of the
Holy Ghost in the love divine, courage and readiness to go out
of their security, to go out of the Joy of the Kingdom into an
outer world, inimical, cold, abandoned, in order to bring into
it first of all faith, the news that God believes in each of us,
believes in those who do not believe in themselves, believes in
us even when we do not believe in ourselves so much that He is
prepared to become one of us and die for us, knowing that it is
not in vain, because man, not mankind, but each man, each woman,
each person is worthy of being entrusted with the life and the
death of God. We must bring that into the world: this divine
witness that God believes in us and in all of us, in the
believers as He does in the unbelievers, that He believes in man
and is ready to pay the cost of this belief with His blood, the
witness but not only the words, but the deeds, that will make
people believe in the love of God abode in our hearts, abode in
our lives, not within our Christian community alone, but wide
enough, powerful enough to engulf all men and drown all hatred,
accept and die out of it, but never be defeated not anymore than
Christ was defeated. And we are to go into the world, to bring
this witness, this message, these good tidings, this Gospel in
order that people may again believe in themselves and look up to
God and believe in His belief, in love and discover the God of
Love, that they may begin to live. But as Christ has given us
this faith and this love, this hope and this joy, this peace and
this strength, not only by His incarnation and His life, but by
His suffering and death, we must be prepared to lay down our
live that others may live, and that we must too, day after day,
not wait for the day when our life will be taken away from us by
violence, but lay down our life hour after hour, for every
person whom we meet, for every concern.
And we lay down our lives when discarding
ourselves, ignoring ourselves, turning away from ourselves, we
live for others, for God, for the Kingdom. To love and to die
are the same things because to love means to turn away from
oneself in order to live for God and in Him so that He may live
in us as He died for us. And so shall we also live for people
and in them, through them through this Message of life that God
may live in them and they in Him. If we receive the message of
the Resurrection crowning the mystery of the Cross, not blotting
it out but crowning it with fulfillment, then we will learn all
the depth and all the tragedy, but also the power and the glory
and joy which make one mystery of the Cross and of the empty
tomb and the Risen Christ. Let us then now begin to die to
ourselves, renounce ourselves, take up this Cross which is a
daily dying for God's sake and for the people's sake and follow
Christ because He is the only Path, He is the only Truth, He is
the only Life that can be possessed on earth and in Heaven.
Amen.
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