The Second Sunday of Easter, April 7, 2024

John 20, 19–31

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”   Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “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.”  Now a week later his disciples were again inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.” Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “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. But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name.

“On the evening of that first day of the week.”  According to St. John, the Lord had appeared to Mary Magdalene in the morning of the first day of the week.  Two of the Apostles had looked for him in the tomb but only saw his carefully wrapped and rolled burial cloths there.  They did not see the Lord until that evening, which would have marked the beginning of the next day.  We might wonder that the Lord made his Apostles wait all those hours.  It must have been agony for them.  On the one hand, they were hiding in the house for fear that the leaders of the Jews would come for them next, and on the other, they had the report of Mary Magdalene that he was alive and that she had touched him, and the report of John and Peter that the tomb was strangely empty.  But if the Apostles had possessed greater faith, they would have stayed at the tomb, keeping vigil for a Resurrection the Lord had promised them more than once, and they would have seen the stone roll back from it and the Lord emerge.  Their faith and hope would have been rewarded with certainty, and they would have shared at once in the Lord’s victory.  Locking themselves in the house, turning over in their minds what they feared and the Lord’s message to them through Mary Magdalene: “I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God” (John 20, 17), they truly suffered his loss.

The long hours ticked by.  They spent the time praying and reflecting.  They had not gone to the Cross, they had not waited at the tomb.  Now they hid in a house that did not belong to them.  They did not see him because they had not remained close to him.  They had not persevered in their faith but had let their fears overcome them.  Self-preservation, a very natural motivation, had taken over, but at the risk of losing the Lord.  His words must have sounded clearly in their memories: “For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it.  For what does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?” (Matthew 16, 25-26).  So they had perhaps gained a few more hours or days or years of life, but had jeopardized their eternal salvation.

And then, as the sun went down and the earth darkened and lamps needed to be lit and their yearning for their Lord could hardly be borne any longer, “Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ ”  John tells us that “the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”  He came to them with the blessing of peace, and while he would later scold them for the smallness of their faith, as he had done before, he had come back to them, and was involving them in his enduring mission to the people of the world: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  After all that had happened, he still regarded them as his Apostles, and they rejoiced both in his Resurrection and in his love for them.  Thomas had gone from them but would return.  He would wait in uncertainty a further week when the Lord relieved his doubts and gave him cause for exclaiming, “My Lord and my God!”

We are near our Lord through our faith, and experience his nearness to us through prayer especially before the Blessed Sacrament, the reading of the Gospels, meditation on his Life, Death, and Resurrection, and through the good works we do for his sake.  If we stay near to him, we shall surely see him when he comes.