Divine Mercy Sunday

The Gospel reading for today, the beautiful Sunday of the Divine Mercy, takes all of our Easter idealism, our delight in the Risen Savior, and applies a sobering dose of reality. The reading as well as recent events in our country, world and parish, leads me to write about faith, doubts and crises.

It is very easy to be a person of faith when all goes well. When life is without any really deep crises or problems it is easy for each of us to be a person of faith. But when a crisis tears at our hearts, as when a young spouse dies or, worse still, a child dies, or a marriage is evidently on the rocks, then very often we feel our faith very weak. Many times we enter into a period of anger at God and a time of doubts. This does not mean that we have lost our faith. It simply means that we are being called to a deeper faith.

You know, it was easy for the disciples to believe in the Lord when they felt the magnetism of His words, when they witnessed His healings, when they saw His miracles. But it was much harder for them to believe after He had been arrested to be killed. It was harder for them to believe when they realized that they also could be killed for having been His followers. Thomas doubted the Resurrection because he had suffered the crisis of the crucifixion. His faith in God decreased. Like the other specially chosen disciples who would later be called apostles, like Peter, James, Andrew, Bartholomew, Simon and all the rest, Thomas ran and hid. He was not being found on Golgotha. He was too afraid to remember the promises of the Lord.  But his faith was restored when he saw the Lord. At this point Jesus told Thomas about a greater faith, a faith that He has called you and me to. The Lord looked at Thomas and then looked down the ages at us and said, blessed are those who have not seen yet believed.

When a crisis hits us we all pray for deliverance. "God, please keep my husband, my child alive. God, please save our marriage. God, protect my son at war." If deliverance comes we feel that we have seen the Lord. This is all well and good, but how much greater is our faith when we hold onto the Lord even when our prayers are not answered. Blessed are those who have not seen yet believed.

Last Sunday we were called to believe in the Resurrection. Our own faith in the Resurrection is not based on experiencing a presence of the Risen Lord, but on an empty tomb. When we feel empty, when we feel that the Lord is no longer in our lives, we have to recognize that more than ever He is alive, among us.

On a higher plane, for us to say to the Lord, "I love you and believe in you despite the times that I have been uncertain of you in my life," demonstrates a deeper faith than we had before our faith was challenged.

As his Holiness said few days ago: «Christians are a priestly people for the world. Christians should make the living God visible to the world; they should bear witness to him and lead people towards him. When we speak of this task in which we share by virtue of our baptism, it is no reason to boast. It poses a question to us that make us both joyful and anxious: are we truly God’s shrine in and for the world? Do we open up the pathway to God for others or do we rather conceal it? Have not we – the people of God – become to a large extent a people of unbelief and distance from God? Is it perhaps the case that the West, the heartlands of Christianity, are tired of their faith, bored by their history and culture, and no longer wish to know faith in Jesus Christ? We have reason to cry out at this time to God: “Do not allow us to become a ‘non-people’! Make us recognize you again! Truly, you have anointed us with your love, you have poured out your Holy Spirit upon us. Grant that the power of your Spirit may become newly effective in us, so that we may bear joyful witness to your message!

My brother, my sister, Let's not persecute ourselves. Doubting is part of being human. A person who does not react with anger at the time of a tragedy might be a saint, but most likely is a person who really never had a high quality of love. The person, who recognizes that God was certainly there even at the time of anger, is a person whose faith has grown.

We pray today, trough the intercession of Blessed John Paul II that we might all have a mature faith, able to grow through crises. We pray today that we might all be included in that phrase of the Lord's, blessed are those who have not seen but believe ■