SLU Liturgy Resources

So what was the trouble with Thomas?

His doubts have echoed through history. We often assume that he was just a tough guy who had trouble trusting. But it would help you and me in our own doubts if we could understand more about this man who wouldn’t believe the resurrection.

Doubting Thomas.

First, who was he? The Aramaic name Te'oma (Thomas) meant twin, and he was also called Didymus, which meant the same thing in Greek, twin. So he probably was an actual twin.

What else?

Well, he might have been a bit glum. For instance, he gave a practical but gloomy response when Jesus’ wanted to go back to Judea after Lazarus died. None of the disciples wanted to return because they knew the Jewish leaders had tried to stone Jesus there (John 10:24-30). Jesus gave them some high-minded talk about what the disciples might learn by going, but Thomas ignored these reasons and said to the others, “Alright, let us also go die with him.” A dour and cynical statement (John 11:16).*

Here Thomas reminds me a bit of Joe Btfsplk, the famous Al Capp cartoon character who walked around with a perpetually dark rain cloud over his head!

Just before the passion Jesus had said, “Where I am going you know the way.” This was a spiritual statement about going to the Father, but Thomas took it literally. “Master, we do not [even] know where you are going; how can we know the way?” (John 14:3-6). Again, a very matter-of-fact question, but with an emotional backdrop. “You haven’t even told us anything! Are you going to leave us like this?”

Thomas loved Jesus doggedly but moped about the dangerous situations Jesus was always walking right into. Thomas' practical nature looked frankly at these and drew out the pessimistic conclusion. He had twin emotions, as his name implies. Love and loss.

Is it any wonder, then, that in this Sunday’s Gospel Thomas laid down his requirements for believing in the resurrection? His worst misgivings had come true on the cross: Jesus actually was killed. To deal with his sorrow Thomas resolved to accept the death stolidly, no matter what it felt like. He would never slip and talk about his departed friend in the present tense, as people sometimes do when a beloved friend has died. Thomas the pragmatic knew that beloved Jesus was dead and gone.

Suddenly the apostles reversed the field.

  “Didymus, Jesus is alive! When the doors were locked, suddenly he stood there among us!

He talked to us!"

NO. NO. Thomas’ heart could not accept it. Too much was at stake.

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.
This is exactly in character for Thomas/Didymus. The tough words are really a protection for a heart that would break in half if given still another false hope. “The only way I would believe such nonsense is if you give me very practical proof.”

Jesus gave it. Fingers in nail marks. Hand into side.

In spite of his cynicism, Thomas had always belonged to Jesus. When he got the practical proof he needed, he sank to the ground.

  “My Lord and my God.”

What a great story for Eastertide.

Why does God stay hidden? Why doesn’t God reveal himself so concretely and physically that no one could doubt his existence?

I like Karl Rahner’s perspective on this. God isn’t hidden, he says, we just don’t have the eyes to see God because our eyes aren’t attuned to that kind of reality: “We are just discovering today that one cannot picture God to oneself in an image that has been carved out of the wood of the world. This experience is not the genesis of atheism, but the discovery that the world is not God.”

We struggle with doubt because we can’t picture God’s existence, imagine God’s reality, or feel God’s presence in our normal ways. At a certain point, our minds, imaginations, and hearts simply run out of gas, out of room, out of feeling, and leave us dry, unable to nail down the reality of God the way we’re used to nailing down most everything else. The reality of God is elusive to our conscious minds and hearts because we can’t picture, imagine, or feel God in the usual way we do these things.

Why is that? Rahner’s insight provides a clue: we struggle with faith because the world is not God and we can’t walk around the landscape of spirit in the same way as we stroll around in this world. Why not? Precisely because God and the other world are spirit and we are being invited into a reality whose hugeness is beyond conception, whose silence is beyond language, and whose reality is beyond the physical and all that we can see, touch, taste, smell, and feel in the normal way. God is life, light, love, energy, vastness, and simplicity beyond our categories. God has a different metaphysics.

Thus, it’s easy to have doubts about God’s existence, and not just if we are young and still over-enthralled by the reality of this world, its stunning beauty, the promises it dangles before us, and its overpowering physical character. In a world where the physical defines everything, it can be difficult to believe in anything else.

But that struggle, ironically, also afflicts those who are mature in faith, in a more painful way, in fact. It was Jesus, after all, not some wayward youth who cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” and who cautioned us to pray daily so as “not to be put to the test.” It was this test exactly that Jesus had in mind. What is “the test”?

The classical mystics speak of two “dark nights of the soul,” two painful, purifying periods of life we must all undergo. The first of these it calls “the night of the senses.” This darkness, they tell us, refers to a period of painful trial which helps purify our motivation so as to make us less selfish. But these same mystics assure us that, during this first dark night, we are given consolation in our faith. God feels near. The feeling is like that of taking a bitter-tasting medicine that we know will make us better.

The second night, “the night of the spirit,” is much more “the test” to which the Lord’s Prayer refers. What happens here is that God seemingly disappears. All our old securities in faith dissolve and all efforts to reground ourselves through former faith-practices come up dry. God seems unreal to our heads and hearts, even as, in the depth of our being, something else is happening which belies what’s happening on the surface, namely, even as our thoughts and feelings about God seem empty, we are, in our more important decisions and values, riveting ourselves ever more firmly to God and the other world. Such are the dynamics of faith. Sometimes what feels like doubt and atheism is the beginning of real belief.

Nicholas Lash, professor of divinity at Cambridge, once made this comment about our struggle:

… We need do no more than notice that most of our contemporaries still find it “obvious” that atheism is not only possible, but widespread and that, both intellectually and ethically, it has much to commend it. This view might be plausible if being an atheist were a matter of not believing that there exists “a person without a body” who is “eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything” and is “the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe.” If, however, by “God” we mean the mystery, announced in Christ, breathing all things out of nothing into peace, then all things have to do with God in every move and fragment of their being, whether they notice this and suppose it to be so or not. Atheism, if it means deciding not to have anything to do with God, is thus self-contradictory and, if successful, self-destructive.

Lash isn’t saying that a personal God doesn’t exist, but that God’s person and being are of a different order, beyond the wood of this world, and that over-powering light can feel like darkness.

Jesus had been abandoned by his disciples at the time of his death. One of them had turned him over to the authorities. Another had denied he even knew Jesus. The others ran away, apparently in fear and horror.

That same fear still gripped the disciples as they stayed behind locked doors. The risen Jesus suddenly appears among them, and there is not a word about their betrayal, denial, and abandonment.

“Peace be with you,” he says, as though nothing had ever happened. They look at his wounds, and he repeats his remarkable greeting: “Peace be with you.”

If only we could follow in the footsteps of Christ and wish peace to everyone! If only we could forgive as he forgave! Where would be the wars? the discrimination? the hatred? the death penalty? They would go the way of death itself, conquered by the resurrection.

Jesus assures us that we have received the Holy Spirit. We have the power to release others of their wrongs against us, just as we have the power to keep them and ourselves bound. Our Easter faith that we have “become a new creation” should strengthen our resolve to forgive as Christ forgave.

We urge our brothers and sisters in Christ to remember the teaching of Jesus, who called us to be reconciled with those who have injured us and to pray for forgiveness for our sins “as we forgive those who have sinned against us.”

We call on you to contemplate the crucified Christ, who set us the supreme example of forgiveness and of the triumph of compassionate love.

U.S. Bishops, Statement on Capital Punishment, 1980:23.

As you know, just about everything these days comes with a disclaimer of some sort. So you click on something on the web, and you're told that this website uses cookies, or you see an ad for some medication, and you're told all of the horrible things that can happen if you take it. So, the reason I'm saying this is this homily comes with a warning. To explain the warning, I have to tell you a secret, so please, can I count on you not to tell anybody about this? This is very confidential. It's a very embarrassing part of my life. So… The first time I preached on a second Sunday after Easter and this Gospel was in 1979. And I had been ordained in 1978, so this was my first Easter and the first time I had preached on it. And the setting was, I was still studying theology at our theology school in Berkeley, Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. And back then, they had a big Sunday Mass. And so, almost all of the students the faculty came, and this was Berkeley, so just about anybody that wandered by came in, too. Now… So, I preached on this gospel. So, a few days later, I learned… I had gotten into trouble. And the trouble was that The professor who taught John, who's taught the Gospel of John and the readings of John, used my homily as an example books in class of how not to preach on the gospel of John. So, you're probably sitting there thinking, so we're going to get this awful homily from 1979, it's going to be very stale, and is it going to be all about Jimmy Carter and inflation? No. To be honest, I don't really remember what I said back then, but it must have been pretty bad. I hope I've improved in the 44 years since. But today's gospel has many things going, and there's no way that I can cover all of them and get us out sometime before tomorrow. So, I'm just going to narrow the focus, if you don't mind.

So … you know, Jesus comes in, and for the first time, and gives the Holy Spirit to all of the disciples but Thomas, and then Thomas comes in. If you remember a few chapters earlier in John, when Jesus says to the disciples on the … on learning of the death of Lazarus, let us go up to Jerusalem, Thomas' remark is, yes, let us go and die with them. So … People interpret this differently, perhaps, but to me, it sounds like he may not be terribly optimistic just by temperament. And, so here he is now, and he's not going to be easily convinced.

I think there are two problems, and this is not just me, these are commentators on the gospel, with Thomas' attitudes. The first is by insisting that he actually put his hands in the wounds, he's focusing on the physical resurrection of Jesus. And the whole point by Jesus giving the Spirit is, “That's not the point. I'm not gonna be here physically. I'm going to be here through the Spirit.” It's going to be a different kind of presence. More about that in a minute.

But the other problem is, he doesn't believe his brother disciples, apostles. He doesn't take their word. Now, all of us come to faith because of other people, don't we? Whether it's our parents who had us baptized, or some example. But we stay in the faith because of what we see. It's not just the spoken word, it's the living word that draws us on. And by living word, I mean the way we see people act. And I think the church very brilliantly gives us a clue on what this means in that first reading, where we see the idealized community of disciples, of Christians, in Acts. Now, we know that's an ideal picture, and we know from the rest of Acts, there were a lot of problems in the community, but the bottom line is, it was the way they dealt with each other and with everyone else that drew people to them.

And I think this is very important to us, because I think the really important line in this Gospel is one that comes to us directly. Now, we've all seen movies or plays where one of the characters will speak directly to the audience, or read a book where the author says, and now, dear reader, and makes a point.

And we see that in today's Gospel, but we are spoken to not by an author, but by Jesus himself. When he says, Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed. That's us. That's you. That's me. And … What are the implications of this? Well, just as he set forth the disciples. We too, we have that same spirit. We are sent forth. We today are the presence of Jesus. Whether we like it or not. Whether we feel we're up to it or not, it's real.

I think the way that we act is something very simple, and something we can control. You know, people will say, well, you tell me that, but I have all of these bad thoughts, I get angry and upset. Well, remember. It's the decisions you make and the actions you do that you are accountable for. So you can have all kinds of bad thoughts, but what do you decide to do? How do you decide to treat people? How do you decide to treat yourself?

For many years, I worked in the formation of Jesuits, and I'm still called upon every now and then to give a little bit of advice, and I pass on the advice I got when I first started teaching. A wise person said to me, you know. These students will remember very little of what you tell them and teach them. They will never forget how you treat them. And I think that is sort of at the crux of how we show Jesus to the world.

Today is a Sunday that also celebrates the mercy of God through Jesus. And so, I think it's important that in treating others, we not forget to be merciful to ourselves as well. That we need not get discouraged. It's important not to get discouraged. We feel like we try and try again, but we can't get discouraged because God never gets discouraged in forgiving us. That mercy is always there, waiting for us, begging for us. The hard thing for us to believe is God really wants to be with us. It's not something we have to make happen. We don't go up to God. God has come down to us and is with us.

So, as we go forth today, Let us remember that true Jesus does not have hands and feet in the world today.

But we do.

And that's our goal.

Focusing the Gospel

Key words and phrases:

• Jesus came
• Receive the Holy Spirit
• Unless I see ... I will not believe
• Jesus came
• have not seen and have believed

To the point: The basic issue in this gospel story is coming to believe that Jesus is risen and alive. What is made clear is that believing is not dependent on physical contact with Jesus (Thomas makes his profession of faith without touching Jesus), but coming to believe does depend on personal encounter. Authentic encounter between persons only happens through mutual self-giving: Jesus’ self-giving is shown through his gift of the Holy Spirit to us; our self-giving is shown when we open ourselves to receive that Spirit. Coming to believe more deeply that Jesus is risen and alive is the work of the Spirit within and among us. What a Gift!

Connecting the Gospel …

…to First Reading: In the Gospel Jesus extols those who come to believe that he has risen even though they have not seen him. In the first reading Peter also extols those who have not seen, yet still love and believe in Jesus. Belief in Jesus’ risen Life elicits “indescribable and glorious joy.” So who would not want to believe?

… to experience: We don’t come to belief through proofs; we come to belief through the attestation of others whom we trust. The same is true of our belief in the risen Jesus. We have not seen him, but we do encounter him and come to believe in him through the words and actions of others.

 

Copyright 2014 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota.
All rights reserved.
Used by permission from Liturgical Press, St. Johns Abbey, P.O. Box 7500 Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500

The Trying of Faith

“More precious than passing splendor.” (Pt 1:7)

The early Easter church of faith worked wonders. These believers performed signs, prayed, shared everything, heaped generosity, worked hard every day, praised God, and won new recruits. They even got along with each other, judging from the accounts of the early parts of Acts. Later chapters, however, prove that the long labor of faith was only beginning. It was not all sweetness and light.

No doubt it is those rosy pictures of the first Christians that dominate our minds when we think that, if we were really a people of faith, everything would be hunky-dory. We “People of God” would behave and perform far better than we seem to be doing. We would also be more impressive, “winning the approval of all” as the early church did. Well, we are not getting much approval—neither from the world around us nor from each other.

The same gap between expectation and performance appears in our individual personal lives. One would think that we’d be doing marvels if we really had faith. There would not be so much confusion in our lives. We would not be contentious. We would pray more and hurt less. We would not be so haunted by doubts. We would be happy. We’d be nicer. Life would not be so daunting.

We presume that faith, like love, should make things easy, even effortless. We imagine that if we really believed in and loved God, we would, in the words of the First Letter of Peter, “rejoice with inexpressible joy” (1 Pt 1:8). Love is supposed to feel good, at least so say the songs. And you’d think that faith would make things a little less arduous and more fulfilling.

I have now begun to think otherwise. The philosopher Immanuel Kant helped change my mind. His view of life is not very fashionable today, but that may be because we are in such a mess. We think something is drastically wrong if we feel unhappy or unfulfilled. Kant, on the other hand, thought that feeling good or being fulfilled had little or nothing to do with ethics and moral goodness.

What counted for Kant was whether we were doing what we knew was right. Ease and inclination had nothing to do with it. After all, what really tests and shows the moral character of a person? Telling the truth when it is fulfilling and easy, or when it is difficult and daring? Where is the greater moral worth to be found? In a faithful spouse who enjoys being faithful, or in a faithful spouse who finds it difficult?

I don’t mean to imply, even if Kant may have, that a thing is good only if it is painful. But there is a wisdom in seeing that there is more to goodness, love, and faith than the feeling of success or fulfillment that may accompany them.

Perhaps a parent’s greatest love for a child appears more in the hard times than the happy times. Perhaps a friend’s trust in me is more deeply felt when inclination is otherwise than when it seems effortless.

What I am getting at is this: admittedly, the delight, the “inexpressible joy,” is part of Easter faith. But our faith in the risen Lord is revealed in sad and troubling moments as well.

The Twelve, remember, were locked in. They were in fear; there was a lack of peace; perhaps there was confusion, pain, and division. It is into that unsettled disquiet that Jesus came. Even then the Apostles were not able to experience fully the joy of his presence without entering the mystery of his wounds. Once they saw his hands and side, the remnants of pain and sorrow, they could rejoice.

The experience of faith is not the absence of pain or sorrow or loss. It is, rather, the bearing of pain or sorrow in faith. Faith does not take away the wounds; it transforms them. In faith, flaws are not obliterated; they are refined and purified.

Thomas, still hanging around a community of faith, discovers Christ in his unbelief. Although they kept telling Thomas— it went on for a week — that Jesus had risen, he refused to believe. “I’ll not believe” without entering the wounds. How right he was. Faith must be found as much in the wounds of life as in the glories. And from the wounds a faith might most amazingly emerge. “My Lord and my God,” that skeptic is reported to have said.

There is a subtext to Jesus’ comment that while Thomas became a believer in the seeing, those who do not have the joy of seeing offer something far more splendid in their act of sightless faith. We are told that Jesus did other signs. The ones scripture records are meant to help us believe that Jesus is the Messiah. That belief, that faith, is finally felt and expressed not in sheer joy alone, but in arduous trial, in the plague of worry or doubt, in the grip of fear. These lacks, these wounds, these trials make faith shine all the more and the hearts that hold such faith more precious than gold.

  “Through your faith, God’s power will guard you. ... This is a cause for great joy, even though you may for a short time have to bear being plagued by all sorts of trials; so that, when Jesus is revealed, your faith will have been tested and proved like gold—only it is more precious than gold, which is corruptible even though it bears testing by fire.”

 

Copyright © 1997 by John F. Kavanaugh. All rights reserved. Used by permission from Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 10545-0308

The Word Embodied: Meditations on the Sunday Scriptures
Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York (1998), pp. 48-51.

Commission

A common literary form appears throughout the Bible to describe the divine vocation of a great patriarch or prophet who is called to be the leader of God’s people. It can be found in the vocation stories of Moses (Ex 3:4-4:9); Gideon (Jg 6:11-36); Jeremiah (Jer 1:1-10); and Jesus’ disciples (Mt 28:16-20; Lk 24:33-53; Jn 20:19-27; Jn 21:1-19).

The complete form has five elements which can be identified in today’s passage as follows.

Introduction

The setting for Jesus’ appearance to commission the disciples is a house with locked doors in which the Eleven are gathered.

In Jesus’ nosey Mediterranean society, people suspect that those who gather behind locked doors are up to no good. Unlocked doors allow the children, the official “spies” or “snoops” in the village, to wander in and out of homes at will, keeping everyone on the up and up.

For this reason, John notes that the Eleven were hiding nothing but were rather protecting themselves against attacks from Judeans who did not believe in Jesus.

This observation is truer of John’s time (especially after 90 CE) than of Jesus’ time. The locked doors have no relationship to Jesus’ ability to penetrate them without opening them.

Confrontation, Reaction, Reassurance

The sudden appearance of the risen Jesus (confrontation) startles the disciples (reaction), requiring that Jesus set them at ease: “Peace be with you!” (reassurance).

Commission

Three points characterize this commissioning ceremony: (1) the commission is formal (“As the Father has sent me, so I send you” Jn 20:21); (2) they are to preach repentance and forgive sins (Jn 20:22-23); and (3) the commission is confirmed by Jesus’ sending of the Holy Spirit (Jn 20:22).

Objection

It falls to Thomas rather than the newly commissioned apostles to raise an objection. He implies that the apostles may have suffered hallucination, an alternative state of consciousness.

He expresses strong doubt about the reality of the risen Jesus. His demand to stick his fingers into the wounds of Jesus in the story created about him by John is well known.

Reassurance, Sign

Ordinarily, deities would be miffed by such objections, but in the heavenly commissions reported in the Bible the divine response is very different.

In this story, Jesus returns once again to the disciples chiefly to reassure Thomas, and through him all followers who experience difficulty believing without seeing.

The sign is the invitation to Thomas to stick his fingers in the wounds as he wished (Jn 20:27). Jesus’ gesture works; Thomas is convinced.

Modern Western believers have become rather familiar with “literary forms” in the Bible over the past twenty-five years. Parable stories, healing stories, the letters of Paul—all these and more are reported in the Bible in stock, stereotypical (i.e., unchanging) forms.

After learning about these many forms and their structure, believers (and often even preachers) say: “So what? What does this mean in the real world?”

Today’s Gospel describes how Jesus commissioned his followers to bring new members into God’s covenant community. He had done this earlier in the farewell discourse (Jn 13:20; Jn 17:18).

Careful study of the literary form and its structure convinces scholars that the commission is addressed to all disciples and is not limited just to the Eleven. All believers are commissioned to bring new members into the community.

How does each one of us respond to this commission?

 

John J. Pilch was a biblical scholar and facilitator of parish renewals.
Liturgical Press has published 14 books by Pilch exploring the cultural world of the Bible.
Go to Liturgical Press to find out more.

Copyright © 1995 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, MN. All rights reserved. Used by permission from The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321

The complete text of the above article can be found in:
The Cultural World of Jesus, Sunday by Sunday, Cycle A

John J. Pilch. The Liturgical Press. 1995. pp. 70-74.

After eight days Jesus came in and stood among them.

By his miraculous entry through closed doors Christ proved to his disciples that by nature he was God and also that he was none other than their former companion.

By showing them his side and the marks of the nails, he convinced them beyond a doubt that he had raised the temple of his body, the very body that had hung upon the cross.

He had destroyed death’s power over the flesh, for as God, he was life itself.

Because of the importance he attached to making his disciples believe in the resurrection of the body, and in order to prevent them from thinking that the body he now possessed was different from that in which he had suffered death upon the cross, he willed to appear to them as he had been before, even though the time had now come for his body to be clothed in a supernatural glory such as no words could possibly describe.

The peace of Christ, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds. We have only to recall Christ’s transfiguration on the mountain in the presence of his holy disciples, to realize that mortal eyes could not have endured the glory of his sacred body had he chosen to reveal it before ascending to the Father.

Saint Matthew describes how Jesus went up the mountain with Peter, James, and John, and how he was transfigured before them. His face shone like lightning and his clothes became white as snow. But they were unable to endure the sight and fell prostrate on the ground.

And so, before allowing the glory that belonged to it by every right to transfigure the temple of his body, our Lord Jesus Christ in his wisdom appeared to his disciples in the form that they had known. He wished them to believe that he had risen from the dead in the very body that he had received from the blessed Virgin, and in which he had suffered crucifixion and death, as the Scriptures had foretold. Death’s power was over the body alone, and it was from the body that it was banished.

If it was not Christ’s dead body that rose again, how was death conquered, how was the power of corruption destroyed?

It could not have been destroyed by the death of a created spirit, of a soul, of an angel, or even of the Word of God himself. Since death held sway only over what was corruptible by nature, it was in this corruptible nature that the power of the resurrection had to show itself in order to end death’s tyranny.

When Christ greeted his holy disciples with the words: peace be with you, by peace he meant himself, for Christ’s presence always brings tranquility of soul.

This is the grace Saint Paul desired for believers when he wrote: the peace of Christ, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds.

The peace of Christ, which passes all understanding, is in fact the Spirit of Christ, who fills those who share in him with every blessing. 
 

Commentary on Saint John’s Gospel 12: p. 74, 704-705

 

Cyril of Alexandria (d.444) succeeded his uncle Theophilus as patriarch in 412. Until 428 the pen of this brilliant theologian was employed in exegesis and polemics against the Arians; after that date it was devoted almost entirely to refuting the Nestorian heresy.

The teaching of Nestorius was condemned in 431 by the Council of Ephesus at which Cyril presided, and Mary’s title, Mother of God, was solemnly recognized.

The incarnation is central to Cyril’s theology. Only if Christ is consubstantial with the Father and with us can he save us, for the meeting ground between God and ourselves is the flesh of Christ. Through our kinship with Christ, the Word made flesh, we become children of God, and share in the filial relation of the Son with the Father.

 

Edith Barnecut, OSB, a consultant for the International Committee for English in the Liturgy, was responsible for the final version of many of the readings in the Liturgy of the Hours.

Copyright © 1992, New City Press.
All Rights Reserved.

Journey with the Fathers
Commentaries on the Sunday Gospels - Year A, pp. 44-45.
To purchase or learn more about
this published work and its companion volumes,
go to New City Press

Being Saved

Faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is much more than simply believing in an amazing fact. Each of this Sunday's readings reminds us that belief in Jesus' resurrection is to accept and participate in a relationship that can enliven every part of our lives—now and forever.

John's Gospel may speak of Jesus appearing simply to “the disciples,” unnumbered and unnamed, to help us later readers include ourselves in the picture. To enable those disciples to be sent as Jesus was sent, Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the holy Spirit.” When we recall that this remarkable action is occurring near the end of a book that began with the words, “In the beginning,” it is not hard to see in this breathing an allusion to the creation of Adam.

Easter enables a new creation. A frightened people are empowered to live out Jesus' mission of sharing the life of God with others through their own self-giving, in imitation of Jesus. If the beatitude, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed,” is not clear enough for us, the author's own statement of purpose is crystal clear: “These [signs] are written that you may [come to] believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name” (Gospel).

If we want a concrete illustration of what “life in his name” entails, we need look no further than the cameo picture that Luke provides in today's first reading from Acts. Although vowed religious communities have, through the centuries, taken this summary as a model for their community life, the context of this passage in Acts suggests that Luke intends this to be a portrait of Christian community generally.

The details are worth pondering.

They devoted themselves to the teaching [didache] of the apostles, to the communal life [koinonia], to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers. We recognize here the perennial ingredients of Church life. The apostolic “teaching” would, no doubt, include the sayings of Jesus and the interpretations of his life by way of texts from the Hebrew Scriptures. The “communal life” includes the generous sharing of possessions mentioned later in this description. The “breaking of the bread” seems to be, as in the Emmaus account in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 24), the celebration of the Lord's Supper. And “the prayers” likely include continued engagement in the Temple liturgy.

Awe [phobos] came upon everyone. Some translations interpret this as a description of outsiders’ response to the apostolic “wonders and signs,” but the statement can just as easily be taken as a description of the community itself. If so, it likely refers to that fear of God which the Hebrew Scriptures name as the beginning of wisdom. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Spirit (First Reading) have revived in these pious Jews an awe for the presence and power of the Creator.

And many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. “Wonders and signs” (with its peculiar reversal of the usual order “signs and wonders”) echoes the wonders and signs mentioned in the quotation from Joel, applied to Jesus' healing actions in Peter's Pentecost speech (1Pet 2:19, 22). By using the same phrase here, Luke underscores the fact that the apostles continue the divinely empowered ministry of Jesus (soon to be illustrated by the healing of the lame man through Peter and John [Acts 3:1]).

All were together who believed and had all things in common; they would sell their property and possessions and divide them among all according to each one's need. This spells out part of what is meant by the earlier mention of communal life. The very phrasing suggests that such sharing of goods is a spontaneous expression of the Easter faith. When one takes the Creator personally, one uses creatures differently and more generously.

Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple area and to breaking bread in their homes. This puts us in touch with the realities that the Jerusalem Christian community still saw themselves as Jews very much in contact with their Israelite tradition and community, and that their own homes served as the place for the Christian breaking of the bread. Strikingly, Luke can use the descriptive word sozomenoi—“those who were being saved”—to describe new Christians.

Fr. Hamm was professor of the New Testament at Creighton University in Omaha. He published articles in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, The Journal Of Biblical Literature, Biblica, The Journal for the Study of the New Testament, America, Church; and a number of encyclopedia entries, as well as the book, The Beatitudes in Context (Glazier, 1989), and three other books.

Copyright © 2001, Dennis Hamm, SJ All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce for personal or parish use.

Reading I: Acts 2:42-47

Readings from the Acts of the Apostles take the place of readings from the Old Testament during the Easter season in series A, B, and C. Such readings are appropriate because they show the continuing work of the risen Christ in his Church.

Luke, by defining his first volume as a record of all that Jesus began to do and to teach (Acts 1:1), implies that his second volume covers what Jesus continued to do and teach.

Verse 42 is a succinct characterization of the life of the apostolic church. Here we see the necessary signs of the presence of the church. Where these signs are, there the church is.

(1) The Apostles’ Teaching. The sharp distinction between didache (teaching) and kerygma (preaching) was probably overdrawn.

Certainly the gospel has to be proclaimed in a different way to outsiders (see the kerygmatic speeches of Acts) from the way it is proclaimed in the ongoing life of the church. But the teaching here must include the continued preaching of the Gospel to the already existing church, a function that is necessary to keep the church in being as a church.

In the interest of such teaching, the sayings of Jesus and incidents from his life would have to be remembered and be given shape, and so the gospel tradition would gradually have evolved.

(2) Fellowship. The Greek word used in verse 42 is koinonia, which means common life, a shared life.

In the Christian community this is based on the sharing of the risen Christ’s life with his people—what Paul in 2 Cor 13:14 calls the koinonia of the Spirit, and what the Johannine writer means when he speaks of his readers as having fellowship “with us,” that is, with those who have seen the risen Christ.

But this vertical dimension of koinonia produces a horizontal dimension. The early Christians, we are told, “had all things in common,” the so-called early Christian communism described in the ensuing verses.

Of course, such communism was not based on any economic doctrine but was a spontaneous expression of Christian agape, necessitated in any case by the removal of the Galilean fisherfolk to the capital.

Nor can it have been so general as Luke suggests in his idealized picture (“all who believed”), for when he speaks of Barnabas in Acts 4:36-37, he seems to imply that there was something exceptional in what he did. 

This shows that the so-called communism was not meant as law for the church for all time.

In Paul’s churches it took the form of the collection for the Jerusalem church. Nonetheless, there must be some concrete expression of the horizontal dimension of koinonia as an essential mark of the church.

(3) The Breaking of the Bread. Scholars have debated whether this is a reference to the Eucharist or not.

If we mean the Eucharist as it later developed (by the time of Paul, for example, when the backward- and forward-looking elements combined), it would be an anachronism to call it such.

But Acts 2:46 expands on the brief summary of Acts 2:42 to show that this daily meal had a distinctly sacral character. There we read that they took their food “with glad and generous hearts.”

The Greek word (agalliasis) represented by the English adjective “glad” is a noun meaning exuberant joy at the coming of the Messiah (so Bultmann).

This shows that the daily meal was an anticipation of the messianic banquet, a partial fulfillment of the Lord’s promise at the Last Supper that he would eat and drink with his disciples in the consummated kingdom of God.

(4) The Prayers. This rather unspecific term probably refers to participation in the hours of prayer of Jewish devotion. It is curious to find the earliest Christians participating in the prayers of the Jewish Temple.

Stephen would later have something to say about that, and then the breach between Christianity and Judaism would be widened.

The observance of daily hours of prayer, originally a devout practice of individuals, was eventually developed into the monastic office. A private prayer life is clearly one of the marks of the Christian community.
One more comment. This summary does not mention baptism as one of the signs of the church’s presence. There is an oblique reference to it in the final sentence of our reading: “And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”

Baptism was the means by which this “addition” was effected. The phraseology tells us much about early christian thinking on baptism.

Baptism is an act through which God works (note the “divine” passive), bringing the convert into an already existing community of those who are on the way to final salvation. One does not become a member of the church as a result of individual decisions to get together after an individual experience of salvation.

 
Responsorial Psalm: 118:2-4, 13-15, 22-24

(This is a slightly different selection of verses from the same psalm that was used on Easter Sunday.)

Psalm 118, with its reference to the stone rejected and made the headstone of the comer, was perhaps the earliest psalm that the primitive community applied to the death and resurrection of Christ. It was the basic Old Testament text for the “no-yes” interpretation of the earliest kerygma.

 
Reading II: 1 Peter 1:3-9

It is widely believed among contemporary New Testament scholars that 1 Peter is based on an Easter baptismal homily. Some even think that it is a baptismal liturgy, but that is probably going a little too far.

Through their baptismal identification with Christ’s death and resurrection, Christians have experienced a new birth. But the author warns his readers that this new life is not yet completely realized.

They are being guarded for a salvation to be revealed in the last time, and meanwhile they may have to face various trials and have their faith tested in the fire of persecution.

Speaking with apostolic authority, that is, as one whose faith is grounded on his having “seen” the risen Lord, the author distinguishes himself from his hearers, who depend for their faith on the eyewitness of others because they have “not seen.” This adumbrates a theme that is to be developed in the story of Thomas in the gospel that follows.

 
Gospel: John 20:19-31

This is the traditional Gospel of “Low” Sunday. The author is here wrestling with what became a real problem in the post-apostolic church: How could one believe in the risen Lord without the benefit of a resurrection appearance? The answer is that even seeing, as in the case of Thomas, is no guarantee of faith. 

For Thomas, faith came by hearing the word of the risen one addressing him personally. For those who come after, faith comes through hearing the Word of God, through hearing the risen one speak through his apostolic messengers.

 

Copyright © 1984 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. Used by permission from The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321

These ideas are designed to be starting points for the prayers of a particular community of faith.

 

For the church: that we may learn to listen together to the promptings of the Spirit so that we may offer a convincing witness to all who are seeking a direction in life

For youth: that as we worship, study, and serve the needs of others, young people may witness the new life that Easter offers and encounter Christ, who is life for them

For a spirit of reverence: that as we break the bread and share the cup, we may recognize more fully the risen Llrd in our midst

For all Christians: that we, who have received the Spirit, may continue the mission of healing and forgiveness which Christ entrusted to the church

For freedom: that the spirit will free us from the selfishness promoted by society and help us to promote the common good for the good of all the human family

For Christian unity: that by devoting ourselves to listening to the scriptures and growing in prayer, we may promote greater unity and cooperation in the body of Christ

For all who struggle with faith: that the word of God may liberate their hearts, open them to a relationship with God, and enlighten their path to a fuller life

For the grace to forgive: that having experienced God’s forgiveness, we may forgive those who have misjudged or wronged us

For all confessors: that God will give them the wisdom to encourage penitents in a new direction and help penitents to experience God’s love and mercy through them

For all who are bound by sinfulness: that God may break their bonds and open a new path of life that reveals love, kindness, and mercy to them

For all who are ill: that the risen Lord will bring newness of life to them and give them hope, strength, and healing

For all who are frightened: that they may find Christ present with them in their fear and darkness

For a greater appreciation of creation: that as we experience the creator of all that exists, we may treat all of creation with greater reverence as God's gift to us

For an end to violence: that the risen Lord will teach us how to protect the innocent from gun violence, end domestic violence, and deal with our anger in positive ways 

For peace: that Christ's gift of peace may settle in the hearts of all the human family and guide us away from violence and revenge

When preparing music for your assembly do you consider:

• the time of day
• the make up and size of the assembly at this particular Mass
• any recent happenings in the parish, community, city, state or nation which might be reflected in the prayer of the assembly (a parishioner dying of cancer, a flood, civil war, elections, etc.)
• the unique resonance of your worship space
• your music ministers and their
  • unique abilities
  • instrumentation (one instrument, two or more)
  • vocalists (cantor, small group and/or choir)
  • presentation (cantor with organ is different from cantor with piano which is different from cantor with keyboard which is different from cantor with guitar, etc.)
  • where they are located in your worship space
• the readings (including Responsorial Psalm)
• the planned homily, presider input
• Liturgy Committee recommendations
• reflections by other ministers (Eucharistic ministers, readers, greeters, ushers, dancers, servers, any other minister involved with this liiturgy)

Beginning Prayer

Lord, I am humbly in your presence. Open my heart and my mind. Let me dwell in your Spirit in the midst of your assembly.

First Reflection

I think of the place where I will worship on Sunday. I recall its many aromas…
I feel myself within it …

I listen …
I look …

If I am a singer,
I see the breath support and resonance of my body
my voice projecting from a place deep inside me

If I play an instrument,
I imagine how it feels in my hands
the manuals, pedals and drawknobs of the organ
the strings and frets of the guitar
the keys of the piano
drum, flute, trumpet, violin

my voice or my instrument resonates, first on its own, then blending with all the others

As I join the song, I feel the Holy Spirit deep within me voicing my deepest longing and desire

Second Reflection

I see the assembly
looking into their faces,
I see Christ

every person raising her voice in song,
singing his praise to God

All of us together, before our God

Third Reflection

I bring to mind a song we will sing
perhaps we pray to God
or encourage one another

singing the words of the psalmist,
the prophets,
or God’s disciples, ancient or new

stirring feelings deep within

Final Prayer

Loving God,
I come before you to offer my gift of music.
Help me play and sing our prayer.
Help me lead your assembly in prayer;
for the song is not mine, but ours.
Let us all resound with your praise. Through us, create the world anew in your image.
Fill us with your Holy Spirit once again,
Rouse your power within us.
Amen