Fr. JC Maximilian

[”Doubting Thomas” by Caravaggio] 

This past week I was on retreat with a group of priests involved in the Church Movement called, Communion and Liberation.  Our retreats are somewhat atypical of what one might think a retreat is like.  In the morning we do keep silent, with a conference and Mass.  However, one of the beliefs of Communion and Liberation is the importance of friends, or companions, as we follow Christ, so we also spend time socializing with each other; sharing how we encounter the presence of Christ Jesus in our different ministries.  Another aspect of Communion and Liberation is the full embracing of our humanity through contact with reality.  Since the Word of God became flesh, we too, need to experience the reality of God in the flesh, so we embrace expressions of beauty and culture.  On this retreat we attended a concert of classical music, and went to one of the Catholic Missions established by Blessed Junipero Serra; in fact the Mission where he is buried.

While on retreat I did have my copy of Magnificat, so I was able to pray over this weekend’s readings, but I did not the various commentaries that I look at in preparing my homilies.  Of course today’s Gospel is one that we are all familiar with; the story of “Doubting Thomas.”  As I prayed over this Gospel reading a question came to my mind, was St. Thomas’ doubt, his wanting to “see the mark of the nails in his hands” and put his hand into Jesus’ side before he would believe in the Resurrection really all that outrageous?  I think the answer to that question is by “yes” and “no”.

Let’s look first at the “no,” that it was not outrageous for St. Thomas to want some proof of Jesus’ Resurrection.  As I mentioned earlier, one of the themes frequently discussed in Communion and Liberation is the carnal, in the flesh, reality of Jesus.  St. John’s Gospel begins with the beautiful song of how the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us.  Throughout His preaching mission Jesus is frequently eating and drinking with people; in fact some of the scribes and Pharisees used that as a critique of Him, saying that Jesus was a glutton and drunkard.  Jesus often physically touched people in healing them.  In several of the post-Resurrection accounts Jesus reveals Himself, and that He was not a ghost, by eating with His disciples.  In today’s Gospel reading, when He first appeared to the Apostles and said, “Peace be with you,” Jesus then showed them His hands and His side, and it was only then that “the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”

St. Thomas was not at that first appearance of the Risen Christ to the Apostles, so it seems quite normal for him to want some tangible proof of Jesus’ Resurrection.  And Jesus is not bothered by this doubt of Thomas; when He next appears to the Apostles and says, “Peace be with you,” Jesus right away turns to Thomas and tells him to touch Him for Jesus is eager for Thomas to have believe in Him; “do not be unbelieving, but believe.”  Jesus knows the importance of Faith in order to share the new life He came to bring to all people.  How often during His public ministry did Jesus say, “your faith has healed you,” or “your faith has been your salvation.”

Yet, there is something a bit outrageous in St. Thomas’ doubt, but I think Jesus uses that to help us so that we will “not be unbelieving, but believe.”  St. Thomas’ doubt seems to fit right in with our modern world.  We have seemed to so embrace science and technology, that most people want to only believe what they can see, touch, hear, taste or smell.  They say that they want “proof” and by proof they mean something tangible.  They seem to relegate faith as being just sentimentality and not connected with reality.

However, there are two general methods of knowledge; both direct and indirect.  Science relies on direct knowledge; we know something because we observe it, we experience it ourselves.  This is a powerful method for knowing something, indeed, but it is actually not the most common method for knowing something.  Most of the things that we know, we know indirectly.  Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic work, Democracy in America, made this wonderful observation:

“If man were forced to demonstrate for himself all the truths of which he makes
daily use, his task would never end. He would exhaust his strength in preparatory
demonstrations without ever advancing beyond them. As, from the shortness of his life,
he has not the time, nor, from the limits of his intelligence, the capacity, to act in this way,
he is reduced to take on trust a host of facts and opinions which he has not had either the
time or the power to verify for himself, but which men of greater ability have found out,
or which the crowd adopts. On this groundwork he raises for himself the structure of his
own thoughts; he is not led to proceed in this manner by choice, but is constrained by the
inflexible law of his condition. There is no philosopher in the world so great but that he
believes a million things on the faith of other people and accepts a great many more truths than he demonstrates.”

So most of the truths that we know come through this indirect method.  This indirect method of knowledge is called “Faith,” and we can define Faith as knowledge that we get through the testimony of a witness.  While it is obvious how this applies to religious matters, just think about your own life; how do we know what is in that soda can we are about to open and drink?  By faith in the testimony of a witness, a label, we know that it is soda and not poison.  Of course we need to evaluate the credibility of the witness in order to determine if we should believe what they say, but most of the truths we know in life is through this method.

And this is how St. Thomas’ doubts is a kind of failure, but one that Jesus uses for our benefit.  St. Thomas should have believed the testimony of the other Apostles.  He had lived with them, as they lived with Jesus, for three years.  Theirs was an intimate community of companions.  He should have known that their testimony was credible, and to not accept the testimony of credible witnesses is unreasonable.  However, his failure to believe through the testimony of the other Apostles, and needing direct knowledge, is for our benefit for it demonstrates to us, who did not live with original Apostles the credibility of their testimony.  So when they went out and preached the Good News it was reasonable for their listeners to have faith in their testimony, to come to know Jesus through their testimony.  It has been through this method of knowledge that we have come to know Jesus — by faith, that gives us “a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

Something else struck me by this Gospel passage; namely the context of the encounter with the Risen Christ.  Both appearance occurred on Sunday.  The Lord welcomes them by saying, “Peace be with you,” a phrase we hear during Mass.  Jesus speaks to them, as He does to us through the Scriptures, and He shows the Apostles His body, as He shows us His body and blood in the Eucharist.  Our communal celebration of Mass on Sunday is a participation in this experience of the Resurrection of the Lord.  It is a direct experience of Jesus’ presence that requires Faith, and builds up the Faith.

This experience of Jesus places a demand on us.  Pope Benedict XVI recently commented that Faith is both instructive and performative.  By instructive, the Holy Father means that by Faith we learn about Jesus and His teachings so that we may have life to the full, so we even learn more about ourselves.  However, this knowledge must bear fruit in our lives.  This is what he means when he says that Faith is performative; our Christian faith should change the way we live life, for we have been given new life.  We should give what we have received, so as we have received the gift of Faith through the testimony of witnesses, we are called to be witnesses of Christ’s resurrection.  The resurrection of Jesus should touch our lives, so that we live differently.  Even when we are tested by suffering through various trials, our Faith in Jesus should cause us to “rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy,” as St. Peter says in today’s second reading.  Be witnesses to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

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[”The Women at the Tomb” by Fra Angelico]

Have you ever wondered where the phrase, “black balled,” came from?  I believe it started in the monasteries; when the solemnly professed monks gathered for a meeting to make a decision, each would have a white ball and a black ball, and they would cast their vote by dropping one of the balls into a basket — a white ball for “Yes” and a black ball for “No.”  So when a proposal was defeated, it had been “black balled,” it had received more black balls than white balls when the vote was taken.

I heard a story once that when Pope John XXIII meet with his closest advisors about planning the Second Vatican Council, many of the cardinals were opposed to the idea of having an Ecumenical council of the Church.  At the very least they would need more time to plan it.  When the Holy Father called for them to vote on the issue, they started to pass a bowl so that the cardinal-advisors could drop in either a white ball or a black one.  When bowl finally came to the the Holy Father, it clearly had more black balls in it than white balls.  Then the Holy Father took off his white skull cap, placed it on top of the bowl, and said, “See, they are all white!”

While this amusing story reminds us that the Church on earth is not a democracy, I think it can remind us of an even more important truth, an Easter truth.  When human beings say “No,” God says “Yes.”  Isn’t that the real meaning of Easter?  On Good Friday we human beings said “No.”  We said no to the love and freedom and redemption that Jesus offers all of us.  On Easter, God overruled this “no” with His triumphant “YES” of the Resurrection.

We only need to watch the news on television or read the newspapers to see all the evil and suffering in the world, to see all the injustice.  Faced with all that bad news, many want to say that there is no hope, that there is no meaning to life.  These are the prophets and witnesses of despair — of doom and gloom.  They tell us that there is no point to holding on to ideals, in trying to live for the best and the highest we know.  They ridicule the idea of self-sacrifice, saying that it will always be defeated.  They are the voices that continuously say, “No, No, No” and continually nail Jesus to the Cross.

But that is OK, because God has shown that the defeat of Jesus Christ on Good Friday is just an illusion.  God says that there IS a hope.  He triumphantly declares that He is the hope, that He is stronger that suffering and evil.  On Easter morning the empty tomb proclaims that there IS a future for us, and God Himself is that future.  Pope Benedict XVI recently said, “Faith in the resurrection of Jesus says that there is a future for every human being; the cry for unending life which is part of the person is indeed answered.”  To the continuous “no, no, no” of Good Friday, God continuously says, “Yes, Yes, Yes.”  He turns all the black balls white.

All of us can at times be tempted to listen more to the voices of this world that say “no” than to the Word of God which says “yes.”  Too often we want to rely on ourselves, others, and science only to see that none of these can give us the answers.

Marie Curie learned this lesson in her life.  She and her husband Pierre were two of the most brilliant scientific minds in the world during the early modern period.  In 1903 they received the Nobel Prize in physics for their groundbreaking work on radioactivity.  Pierre died in 1906, and Marie was despondent with grief, yet she did not give in to despair.  Every day she wrote in her diary a message to Pierre, and on the day of his funeral she wrote:

“Your coffin was closed and I could see you no more…. We saw you go down into the deep hole…. They filled the grave and put flowers on it.  Everything is over.  Pierre is sleeping in his last sleep beneath the earth.  It is the end of everything, everything, everything!  No, science, as such, does not have the answer.  The answer must come from the other side, God’s side.  It comes from the life and lips of the Man of Galilee.  Into the darkness of death He brings light.  Into the midst of our doubts He comes with His voice of promise, ‘I am the resurrection and the life, he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.’”

In a world that says “No, there is nothing after death,” God says, “Yes!  There is life beyond death.  This life is our preparation for that life.”

In today’s first reading St. Peter says, “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.  This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible, not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”  In this passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the dead is not only proclaimed.  We also are given a commission.  We are to make the “Yes” of God known to all the world.

We ARE His witnesses.  The Eucharist that we receive at Mass is the eating and drinking with Him that St. Peter mentions.  In our worthy reception of Holy Communion we are saying “Yes” to God, we are saying yes to the redemption that Jesus won for us not only by His death on the Cross, but by is resurrection from the dead.  It is this “Yes” — God’s Yes — that we need to take into the entire world.

The same Second Vatican Council, which was held because Pope John XXIII did not listen to the nay-sayers, re-affirmed this commission given to all of Christ’s disciples.  While the bishops, priests and deacons, through the special grace that they received through their ordination are entrusted the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments, the Council made it clear that the spreading of the Good News — God’s Yes — is not their responsibility alone.  It is the responsibility of all the baptized to be witnesses to the Good News of Jesus Christ.  In fact, it is to the laity that this witnessing to the Christ’s resurrection in the workplace, public square and marketplace is especially entrusted.

Are you a “Yes-person”?  Do you witness to the joy of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead to all those around you?  Or do you just do the minimum, maybe an hour on Sunday saying Yes with God, and then the rest of the week part of the world’s chorus of “No”?  It is never too late to accept God’s Yes into your life.  Commit yourselves anew to being witnesses of Jesus’ Good News.  Spread the joy and triumphant of Easter throughout your part of the world.  Invite others to join you in saying “Yes, Lord Jesus, You are Risen!  Yes, Lord Jesus, You are truly alive!  Yes, I want Your mercy to heal me, and forgive me from my sins.  Yes, Lord, I want Your Love and Your Grace!  Yes, Lord, yes!  YES!”

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[A fresco of  the Lord’s Passion by Fra Angelico]

I am sure that most of you know who the actor Sir Alec Guinness is.  For those who are more on the young side, he played Obi-wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope).

In one of his earlier movies, even though he was not Catholic, he played a Catholic priest.  They were filming in a lovely old village in France, and one day, after many hours of filming, Sir Alec was walking back to his hotel through the village streets while still dressed in his priest’s costume.  Suddenly a little girl ran up alongside him.  Apparently she was on her way home after running an errand.  Seeing the actor and thinking that he was a real priest, she skipped right up beside him, took his hand, and started walking along with him.  She started chattering away to him as if she had known him all her life.  The actor didn’t know French, so he didn’t know what she was saying, and he couldn’t say anything in response, but it didn’t seem to matter.  The little girl chattered happily on for a couple of blocks, until she had to turn off to another street.  Then she let go of his hand, waved goodbye, and skipped on home.

Sir Alec Guinness just stood there for a moment utterly amazed.  He was intrigued by a religion that inspired so much confidence and joy.  The little girl had mistaken him for a priest, and although she must have known that she had never met him before, she treated him as a life-long friend just because he was dressed as a priest.  This experience not only affected how Sir Alec played his role in the rest of the movie, but it also was the first step on a path that eventually led him into the Catholic Church (I found this story on www.epriest.com, “Homily Pack for Good Friday”).

So, what is it about our Catholic Faith that inspired so much confidence and joy in that little girl, and so intrigued Alec Guinness that it eventually lead him to enter the Catholic Church?  I think the answer is that God — the Creator of the entire universe — wants to be so close to us that He took on our human nature and experienced the absolute depths of human misery.  Is there any way, after contemplating Jesus’ Passion and Death, that we can doubt this?  As we heard in our first reading, the Prophet Isaiah did not doubt it, “He was spurned and avoided . . . a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity, one of those from whom people hide their faces. . . .”

Haven’t we all felt like that at times?  Since we live in a fallen world we have all been sick, betrayed, and hurt.  And we have all caused pain in other people.  Like the ripples in the waters, the effects of evil and sin have reached out and touched each one of us.

Jesus did not save us by eliminating suffering, rather He suffered WITH us and FOR us.  Jesus came down to our level, and stepped into the middle of our pain and sorrow.  Again Isaiah testifies to this, “It was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings he endured.”  By doing so, Jesus gives us an example of how we too are called to trust and love God, even in the midst of suffering.

You might be wondering how would all this lead to the confidence and joy that the little girl demonstrated with Alec Guinness, but if we really think about it, we will realize what this amazing truth of the Lord’s Passion and Death means.  It means that we do not need to be perfect BEFORE we can be friends of God.  It means that in Christ Jesus we can go right into God’s presence with all our sins and wounds and confusions and miseries.  We can enter God’s presence just as we are — in, with and through Jesus Christ.  Jesus did not stretch out His arms on the Cross to embrace just those who have never sinned, those who are already saints.  No, He stretched out His arms on the Cross to embrace US!  This is why St. Paul says in his letter to the Hebrews, “So let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.”

Although we are rightfully saddened by the pain our Lord had to experience in order to save us from our sins, at the same time our hearts are also glad because we know that we are not alone in our suffering, and we will never be alone.  Jesus is always near to us.  His throne of grace is just a simple prayer away, and His heart is open to pour grace upon grace upon us.

It would be unjust to leave this church today without thanking God for this great gift.  As we come up to the cross today to kiss it, let us do so with a smile of gratitude in our hearts.

But that is not enough.  We need to remember that there are still many people who have still not received this gift.  Just look around; as crowded as the church might be, there are still many people who are not here today.  There are still many who have not heard the Good News; who do not know that they can confidently approach the throne of grace, and are suffering alone.  Maybe we know someone like that.  Maybe we know someone who is afraid to come to Christ.  There is no better way to please our Lord and be His faithful disciple than by bring this Good News to that person.

From today until Easter all the tabernacles of the world will be empty, and all the altars will be bare.  Where will these suffering men and women go to find the comfort of Christ’s love?  If they have no place to go, we will have to GO to THEM.  We will have to being living tabernacles and our hearts will have to be the altars where Jesus’ love comes down to earth, by loving our neighbors as Christ has loved us.  Like that little girl, we must share the confidence and joy of our Faith with all those around us.  Maybe like Sir Alec Giunness, that will begin their journey to Christ Jesus.

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[A Mosaic from the Chora Church in Istanbul Turkey]

If you read much of the writings of the early Church Fathers, or some of the classics of Christian spirituality, one of the phrases that you often run across is “memento mori,” which means, “remember death.”  While it might not seem very cheerful, that brief saying is meant to remind all of us that we do not know the hour or the minute that we will die, so we should live all the moments of our lives for God.  We should not plan to live a less that Christian life for most of our lives, and then just go to Confession before we die to make things right with God.

However, I am sure that all of us have experienced people who seem to take “memento mori” as their own personal motto.  These are the Eeyores we encounter who always see the glass as half empty, and are always recounting all the woe in their lives.  I think if we are really honest with ourselves, we can all acknowledge times when we are “remembering death” in an unhealthy way.

The two days before Ash Wednesday, this year, I was feeling very much like Eeyore; I was not only remembering death, I was even making a list of all the bad things that were happening in my and my family’s life over the past couple of years.  Fortunately God did not allow me to slip into despair, for He graced me in a special way.  Before the latest family crises hit, I had made my Lenten plans to read a book a friend gave me.  Actually the friend who gave it to me, Michael Dubruiel, is also the author of the book, which is entitled, The Power of the Cross:  Applying the Passion of Christ to Your Life.  It is a wonderful book, and it has helped me learn more about how to carry the cross that Jesus has given me in my life, and to trust in Him — to have total confidence that He will never give me more than I can handle.

In this book, Michael tells a story about a man named John who was a fixture at the school Michael was doing graduate studies at.  John had been a “big success,” at least in terms that the secular world measures success.  He had started a business that made him a lot of money.  He had the nice car, the nice big house, and all the gadgets of luxury.  Then things started to change for John.  First his wife left him for a younger man, then his partner embezzled money from their company and John lost everything.  The house, the car, and all the money was gone.  John was living in poverty, alone, and he turned to the bottle for help.  After a few years of alcoholism, John finally hit bottom, through the grace of God known as Alcoholic Anonymous, John started to put his life back together.

You did not need to know John for long to learn all about the woe of his life.  One day, John was sitting behind Michael at Mass, and the Sign of Peace Michael noticed that John wore a bracelet with the phrase “memento viva” — “remember life” — on it.  After Mass Michael asked John about the bracelet, and John told him that it was a gift from his brother who told him one, “All you think about is death.  You’ve got to think about life!” (Dubruiel,  The Power of the Cross:  Applying the Passion of Christ to Your Life, Huntington, IN:  Our Sunday Visitor, Inc, 2004, pp. 163-164).

As followers of Jesus we do need to be people who “memento viva” — REMEMBER LIFE!  Though it is not this life that we are called to focus on.  Rather we are to set our eyes on eternal life.  This is what St. Paul means, when he tells the Romans in today’s second reading, “But you are not in the flesh; on the contrary, you are in the spirit, if only the Spirit of God dwells in you.”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus brings this message to Martha and Mary who are in grief after the death of their brother Lazarus.  Some commentators have wondered if Martha is mildly chastising Jesus for not coming sooner when she says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  However, at the same time she expresses her faith in Jesus; that God will give Him whatever He asks for.  Jesus tells Martha, in assuring her that her brother will rise, that He is “the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”  Then Jesus asks her, and us, “Do you believe this?”

It is easy to say we believe in the resurrection, that we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, but Jesus asks for more than just an affirmation with our minds and our lips.  He demands an affirmation with our lives.  How do we live our faith in Christ Jesus?  Do we just fulfill the minimum duties of our Faith, or do we see everything — every person, every situation — with the eyes of Faith?  Do we recognize Jesus’ presence in all the situations of our lives?  Do we recognize Jesus present among us right now?  Jesus does not just speak about the resurrection to Martha; He says that He is the resurrection and the LIFE!  At baptism we were given the new life of Christ Jesus and we are called to live that new LIFE in Christ, so that with St. Paul we can cry out “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives within me.”  We need to “memento viva” — remember life, the new life of Christ.

What keeps us from remembering life?  From living the new life of Christ?  In a word, SIN.  Sin damages the life of grace within us, and mortal sin actually kills the life of grace within us.  We need to remember death, that sin kills, so that we can remember life.  In today’s Gospel reading, after Jesus tells those with Him to unbind Lazarus who is still wrapped in the clothes of death.  We too need to be unbound from the clothes of death which bind us.  Jesus left us the sacrament of Reconciliation just for that purpose.  While the Confessional may seem dark, it is so that when we have allowed Christ Jesus to unburden us from our sins we can step into the light, into our new Life.  The Sacrament of Reconciliation is a sacrament of LIFE, it is remembering the life that Jesus gives us through His redemption.  This Tuesday we will have the opportunity to be unbound from our sins.  We will be having our area Penance Service on Tuesday at St. Gregory’s Church at 7 p.m.  There will be a number of priests available to celebrate the sacrament of God’s mercy with.  I strongly encourage all of you to avail yourselves of this opportunity to remember life, life in Christ Jesus.

“Remember life, keep Jesus in mind, unbind whatever else is there, and let it go” (Dubruiel,  The Power of the Cross:  Applying the Passion of Christ to Your Life, Huntington, IN:  Our Sunday Visitor, Inc, 2004, p. 166).

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