Second Sunday of Easter
Today’s Invitation
Today we invite you to explore the resurrection as symbolizing a transcendent world; engage faith as a question of courage; and embody faith and doubt with the examples of martyrs in Palestine and Central America, and “making a way out of no way.”
Second Sunday of Easter
Reading 1
Through the hands of the apostles, many signs and wonders occurred among the people. By mutual agreement, they used to meet in Solomon’s Porch. But none of the others dared to join them, despite the fact that the people held the apostles in great esteem. Even so, more and more believers, women and men in great numbers, were continually added to their community — to the extent that people even carried their sick relatives and friends into the street and laid them on cots and mattresses, in the hope that when Peter passed by, his shadow might fall on one or another of them. Crowds from the towns around Jerusalem would gather, too, bringing their sick people and those who were troubled by unclean spirits, and they were all being healed.
Responsorial Psalm
R: Give thanks to Our God, who is good, whose love is everlasting.
Let the house of Israel say it, / “Your love is everlasting!”
Let the House of Aaron say it, / “Your love is everlasting!”
Let those who fear Our God say it, / “Your love is everlasting!”
R: Give thanks to Our God, who is good, whose love is everlasting.
I was pressed, pressed, about to fall, / but Our God came to my help.
Our God is my strength and my song. / Adonai, You are my savior.
Shouts of joy and safety ring / in the tents of the virtuous.
R: Give thanks to Our God, who is good, whose love is everlasting.
It was the stone rejected by the builders / that proved to be the keystone;
This is Our God’s doing / and it is wonderful to see.
This is the day made memorable by Our God./ What immense joy for us!
R: Give thanks to Our God, who is good, whose love is everlasting.
Reading 2
I, John, your brother, who share with you the trial, the kindom and the perseverance we have in Jesus, was on the island of Patmos because I proclaimed God’s word and bore witness to Jesus. It was the first day of the week and I was in the Spirit, when suddenly I heard behind me a piercing voice like the sound of a trumpet, which said, “Write on a scroll what you see.” I turned around to see who spoke to me, and I saw seven lamp stands of gold and, among the lamp stands, a figure of human appearance wearing an ankle-length robe with a golden sash across its chest. When I saw it, I fell down as though dead. It touched me with its right hand and said, “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last, the Living One. Once I was dead, but now I live forever and ever. I hold the keys of death and the underworld. Write down, therefore, everything you see — things as they are now, and things that will take place in the future.”
Gospel
In the evening of that same day, the first day of the week, the doors were locked in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Temple authorities. Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Having said this, the savior showed them the marks of crucifixion. The disciples were filled with joy when they saw Jesus, who said to them again, “Peace be with you. As Abba God sent me, so I am sending you.” After saying this, Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven. If you retain anyone’s sins, they are retained.” It happened that one of the Twelve, Thomas — nicknamed Didymus, “Twin” — was absent when Jesus came. The other disciples kept telling him, “We have seen Jesus!” Thomas’ answer was, “I will never believe it without putting my finger in the nail marks and my hand into the spear wound.”
On the eighth day, the disciples were once more in the room, and this time Thomas was with them. Despite the locked doors, Jesus came and stood before them, saying, “Peace be with you.” Then, to Thomas, Jesus said, “Take your finger and examine my hands. Put your hand into my side. Do not persist in your unbelief, but believe!” Thomas said in response, “My Savior and my God!” Jesus then said, “You have become a believer because you saw me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Jesus performed many other signs as well — signs not recorded here — in the presence of the disciples. But these have been recorded to help you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Only Begotten, so that by believing you may have life in Jesus’ Name.
The Inclusive Lectionary © 2022 FutureChurch. All rights reserved.
The inclusive language psalms:
Leach, Maureen, O.S.F. and Schreck, Nancy, O.S.F., Psalms Anew: A Non-sexist Edition
(Dubuque, IA: The Sisters of St. Francis, 1984).
Used with permission.
Explore
Symbolizing a Transcendent World
Two thousand years after the classic story of “Doubting Thomas,” we may find ourselves in a time when it is because we see that we struggle to believe. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” Is it not the actions done in the name of God that push me to the brink of unbelief, that push me to doubt? Is it not the constant spiritual act of insisting on seeing and engaging with the horrors of the world that push me to doubt? How much “reclamation” can one do? When is doubt the reasonable response?
The locked doors that begin the story again just seem reasonable. The disciples by all means were modern day Palestinian solidarity activists and undocumented immigrants. A world of no borders and a free Palestine not only fit neatly into the political spirituality of the Jesus Movement, they also have faced the same fate of state repression that makes locked doors reasonable. Is it not reasonable that Thomas accepted that his leader/mentor/liberator was martyred, and thus the movement was over, or at least would need some time to reshape? Thomas must have seen other movements have the same fate in the line of crucifixes that often populated territory occupied by Rome.
Reading Thomas’ story in the context of a fascist state, what I find more intriguing is not just that Thomas seems reasonable, but that he also seems to be the most truthful. Is it Thomas’s doubt that also gives him the best possible chance to analyze the world around him without any rose-colored hope? This rose-colored hope is what most of Christianity views as the resurrection. The rose-colored reality rooted in the “next life.”
I wonder how Thomas felt upon the capture and imprisonment of Jesus. I wonder if Thomas felt his entire life riding upon whether Jesus would be put to death or not. Perhaps a similar fulcrum point a lot of us feel around the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil or the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and most importantly the liberation of Palestine. Was Jesus’s crucifixion a fulcrum point in history for Thomas? Was it a “if it happens we shall still have a movement, but if Jesus is gone our movement cannot last and we will live under occupation forever,” point for Thomas? Was Thomas’s faith in Jesus not just his faith in the resurrection, but in fact in the Jesus movement –a movement that perhaps he put his faith in, in the first place, because it offered him a life outside of occupation, outside of a life of exploitation, outside a life of ruin?
“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” But indeed it was because of what Thomas experienced and saw that made him doubt. What if Thomas had been a person of radical doubt before he met Jesus? Perhaps Jesus’s evangelization only secondarily had anything to do with God, but instead it was rooted in helping Thomas to imagine a transcendent world outside of occupation – a completely new world at their grasp, in both ancient and contemporary contexts a world with a free Palestine no longer under occupation.
I often wonder whether God would rather us believe in the resurrected Jesus, or in the transcendent world. A world transformed. A sustainable global world built on peace, non-domination, care, and insisting on everyone’s needs being met. Perhaps they insist on each other more than we realize. We have to believe in a better world even when we can’t see it. And we have to believe the push for it will continue even after the political tipping points have passed (e.g. Genocide of Palestinians, Kahlil, Garcia, Grant’s Pass, revoked visas, etc.). We must have faith that the push for this transcendent world will be ushered in, even after we die fighting for it.
Charlie Enuf
Engage Catholic Social Teaching
You almost have to wonder if the plea from a story like “Doubting Thomas” is just to insist on engaging with the world and its horrors. Perhaps a bit too on the nose for this section of the publication.
Thomas threw a wrench into this question of “insisting on faith” – that perhaps it then is also a question of courage. Is faith not simply a question of belief, but also a question of courage? It seems there is a great tradition of thinking so, be it Paul Tillich’s Courage To Be, or any Palestinian survival and resistance. Perhaps it is through doubt that we gain more courage The two aforementioned people(s) seem to think so. I often wonder whether Thomas found his faith stronger after doubting – or whether he found himself less steady.
It seems perhaps this is also echoed in Pope Francis’s Easter message, which he delivered just hours before dying. In this message, titled “Urbi et Orbi” Pope Francis gives a strong message of peace, but a peace rooted in disarmament. He lists off war-torn countries, praying for each one of them, pleading with the world for peace through disarmament: “Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament.”
What Francis perhaps is modeling here, and how Francis is putting himself into conversation with the apostle Thomas, is that Francis is insisting on both seeing and having faith. He sees the truth of the evils in the world. He has discerned where the devil is popping up, in the evil of unrestrained militarism; in the suffering of colonized and occupied peoples. What, then, is the full relationship between insisting on seeing, feeling, being victim to, and witnessing the violence of the world and insisting on having faith in a better future?
It seems Francis in his insistence on being present to all suffering within the world has come to the conclusion that disarmament is key to a new future. Who knows exactly how far he would take it. I tend to think disarmament would unravel our entire state of existence. Our entire state of capital. Our entire global state of American Imperialism.
A Contemplative Exercise
There seems to be a certain power in meditation on and/or with those who have faced martyrdom for their faith in a better world. I recently came across, again, this website that honors eco-martyrs from Central America, I think run by previous Just Word author Elizabeth Gandolfini. I would also recommend praying for/with all of the Palestinian martyrs and spending time reading some of their stories.
Art
Song: “Find It,” by L’Rain
I have no real reason to pick this song on this day. Other than when I was writing, I reflected on the possibility that Thomas doubted because he felt no way ahead of him. No way of living life out in “The Way” of the Jesus movement. This song intersperses the vignette “making a way out of no way,” a line out of an old spiritual. The phrase also became the title of a collection of Womanist theology essays put together by theologian Monica Coleman.