5-3-26 Fifth Sunday of Easter
“There is a story from the Second World War of a young girl who fled into hiding during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. She found shelter in a cave outside the city. Alone, cut off from everything she knew, she lived there until the end of her life. Before she died, she scratched words into the wall of that cave:
“I believe
in the sun, even when it is not shining.
I believe in love, even when I do not
feel it.
I believe in God, even when He is
silent.”
That is
not certainty. That is trust.1
In the
opening of the gospel this weekend, Jesus asks of his disciples (and that
includes us) “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in
God; have faith also in me.” Not always the easiest of things to do,
right? Even the apostles in the gospel this weekend want details on how
everything Jesus is saying is going to unfold.
Thomas, who often desires assurances, wants Jesus to be specific concerning
how can they follow him if they do not know the way. Thomas can be like us, perhaps; he doesn’t want to start out on a journey without
a map or GPS coordinates of how they are to proceed exactly. We at times want the assurances that God’s
protection is going to be there and that nothing bad is going to happen. We want certainty before committing, and God
wants us to have faith in his presence even though the objective evidence may be to the contrary. In the Resurrection accounts Thomas wanted proof before he would commit
to accepting that Jesus was raised from the dead. “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.” (John 20:25).
Sometimes, although we might not state it, we too want some type of
assurance before we commit to believing that the Lord will come through for
us. At such times we want proof before
we are willing to entrust ourselves to faith in God.
John Ortberg authored
a book a number of years ago, called: “If
You Want to Walk on Water You Have to Get Out of The Boat.” It is as book about risk-taking, and as such,
it is focused on the famous biblical account, Matthew 14: 22-23, where
Jesus appears to the apostles walking on
the sea of Galilee, in the middle of the night, and they think he is a
ghost. Peter says that he will leave the
boat if it is Jesus. And Jesus responds with “Come.” (Matthew 14:22-23) Peter gets out the boat and starts to walk
toward Jesus. Then the wind and waves
increase, and Peter doubts that he can reach Jesus. Now while the story focuses on Peter, and his
problems with doubting, there is an underlying question- Why didn’t any of
the other men get out of the boat?
The point of the book is about necessity of risk-taking as an exercise to
develop our spiritual muscles. That
‘risk taking” can be a matter of personal choice. In other words, we can play
it safe and choose just how much faith we are willing to give in trusting God. Or we can be open always to trusting God despite
the strange things that can happen to us while just living. In other words, we can stay in the sureness of
the boat until Jesus comes to us and proves himself, or we can, like Peter,
trust like entering a dark, unlit, room, that Jesus will be there for us. During the sermon on the mount when Jesus
tells the disciples to feed the crowd that has come to listen to him, Philip
responds to this suggestion of Jesus with disbelief saying : “Even two hundred
days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a
little bit.”( John 6:7 ) In a manner of
speaking at that time, Philip is sort of a fatalist (i.e., someone who believes
that the outcome is predetermined, thus making any effort on our part is pointless). At the Last Supper when Jesus states that
seeing him and what he has done should be proof enough that he is in the Father
and the Father is in him. But, Philip wants more evidence before he can accept Jesus’ statement. Indeed, the works that Jesus did and which
the apostles were eyewitnesses should have been enough, right? But apparently it was not, at least for
Philip. And if we were sitting around
the table with those apostles at the last supper, would we have agreed with
Philiip or would we accept in full faith that what Jesus has just said about the Father and him is
true? St. John
is the only biblical writer who spends over four chapters in his gospel on the
Last Supper event. The other gospel
writers spend part of a chapter discussing this scene. Obviously, for John, the Last Supper scene
was a pivotal moment in the life of Jesus and the apostles, and later in the
life of the Church. While this weekend’s
gospel reading focuses on only a part of those chapters, within the words we
read, are examples of what faith means if one wants to follow Jesus. Faith
means at times holding fast to Jesus, when all the objective data in our lives
challenges us to believe otherwise. A
bad diagnosis, a sudden divorce, the loss of a child can be just a few of these
sudden life-changing challenges. At such times like those we might “consider the Book of Job. Job loses everything—his family, his
livelihood, his health. He asks the question we might ask: Why me God? Why? His friends try to offer answers and explain
how God works. They insist that Job’s suffering must be the result of his own wrongdoing,
his own sinfulness. But their explanations
fail. They were woefully incorrect. In the end, God does not explain. God does not lay out a systematic explanation
of how God works. God does not answer
Job in the way we might expect. Instead,
God does not keep his distance from Job.
God comes to be with Job. And out
of the whirlwind, God speaks—not to explain, but to reveal I am here with you.
“I am God, and you are not.” That is not
a dismissal of Job’s need for an answer. It is an invitation. An invitation to trust what we cannot fully
understand.”2 Of
course we might say that that situation is much different from our personal
one. But the Book of Job comes from the
Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament. The
story of Job is not necessarily meant to be a real story of one man but rather it
is a collection of situations that we all face at times, and which can
challenge our faith to its very foundation.
Those kinds of things are probably at play when, in the second reading
this weekend, Peter in his First Letter addresses the newly formed Christians and
says that they are living stones which are being used to build an edifice of
faith for them and for all the generations of believers yet to come. Peter writes: “Come to him, a living stone, rejected
by human beings but chosen and precious in the sight of God,
and, like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual
house (I Peter 2:4-5). God
uses our trust in Him, to build up in us, this house of faith. A house that is not for us alone but, through
our faith is one by which others can begin to believe in the power and presence
of God in our world. Such faith is
sorely needed in our world today. In
other words, the struggles that we face can become the building blocks of that
faith, as it was for the apostles, the early Christians, and the followers of
Christ. As a house that is built on
strong stones, we can have faith, even when we may not have all the answers to
our prayers, or the total explanations to our situations. With such faith we can also confidently
exclaim with the psalmist in the Responsorial psalm for this weekend: “See,
the eyes of the Lord are upon those who fear him, upon those who
hope for his kindness, to deliver them from death and preserve them in
spite of famine.” A
faith that is forged even in adversity, like Job’s, can exclaim with all the people of God that
God is faithful. And that we can trust
Jesus when he says “…. have faith in God; have faith also in me.” (John
14:1) and we can believe with St. Peter-
“ You are a chosen race ………, a people of his own, so that you may announce
the praises’ of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”
(1Peter 2:9)
1. Voicings.com. 2. Ibid
