Christ Comes to the Locked Room of Your Heart Again and Again and Again

Sunday of Divine Mercy

I still think that Thomas gets treated unfairly. The doubt that Thomas expresses—"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”—is usually described as an absence of faith in Christ. The other disciples believe in the reality of the resurrection, but Thomas lacks belief in Christ. He needs to see for himself before belief becomes possible. The default interpretation of the Gospel is that most of the disciples believe in Christ, but that Thomas does not—not until Christ shows up and proves the resurrection to him.

Like I said, I think that Thomas gets treated unfairly. What we see in the Gospel today, really, is not an absence of belief in Christ but a struggle to believe witnesses about Christ. Thomas is given to us as an image of ourselves, as an example for us who have not witnessed the resurrected Christ with our own eyes but who are told to believe in Christ because of the testimony of those who have witnessed the resurrected Christ. The movement that Thomas is asked to make, from belief in the testimony of another to belief in the reality of Christ, is the same movement that we are asked to make in our lives of faith.

What the Gospel today makes real to us is the fact that our faith in Christ is mediated by the lives of others. The supposed absence of faith in Christ that forever brands Thomas as ‘doubting’ is really an image of crisis for what will become the Church. A community of witnesses testifies to the reality of Christ, and those who have not put fingers into nail marks or hands into the broken side of Christ are asked to believe in the reality of the resurrection. Our belief comes to us through the Church, and the Church comes to us by way of family and parish communities and received teachings and the witness of the saints and a sacramental life rooted in worship. There are many ways in which we are given testimony about Christ and asked to believe, but none of us, I don’t think, ever gets to stand before the resurrected Christ to find the confidence and the certainty that we desire.

We, like Thomas, are asked to believe—first to believe others about Christ, and then to believe Christ himself. Our belief is hard work, it makes demands on us. We are asked to make a choice to place our trust in a reality that we will never understand, and the foundation for that choice is not really Christ himself, the God-man standing in front of us wounded and resurrected, but rather the witnesses who constitute the Church, which is the body of Christ. No wonder why Christ says that blessed are those who do not see but believe: that is the condition of faith for most Christians of most centuries.

The consolation for us is, I think, that Christ comes back for Thomas. If you are looking for an image of divine mercy, you will not find a better one than what is given to us in the Gospel today. Christ returns to the locked room not for the other disciples but for Thomas. And the reason that Christ returns is really quite insignificant, if you really think about it. Christ does not return to save Thomas or to deliver Thomas from death or some immediate threat to his life, but only to relieve his doubt. The peace that Christ gives to the other disciples—perfect peace, the peace that comes from resting in the arms of a resurrected Christ who has conquered death and made eternal life possible—Christ wants Thomas to have that same peace, and so Christ comes back to the locked room. Christ not only wants to save Thomas, he also wants to let Thomas rest, to set his mind at ease, to grant him the consolation that comes from witnessing the glory of the resurrection for himself.

What I want to say is that Christ, on this Sunday of Divine Mercy, wants to give us that same peace. The work for us is a little harder. Christ will likely not appear to any of us today so that we might place fingers into nail marks and hands into his broken side. But Christ returns to us constantly through the life of the Church, entering the locked room of our hearts and offering us the peace that comes from resting in his divine embrace.

How? How really is that kind of peace possible? I think that the answer comes to us when we realize that the peace of Christ comes when we find and identify and see for ourselves the hundreds of thousands of millions of times that Christ has come to us in our lives to offer us his peace. There is an old medieval expression, ‘the good is diffusive of itself,’ and what that means is that the goodness of God expands into the world, into our lives, always, constantly. If there is something good that exists—a person, a part of the created world, a desire or a thought or a gesture or anything at all no matter how insignificant—it comes from God. If there is goodness in your life, no matter what it is, no matter how fleeting, that goodness comes from Christ.

What does that mean for us? To me, that means that hundreds of thousands of millions of times, Christ has returned to the locked room of my heart as surely as he returned to Thomas, the Christ of divine mercy wanting to offer me the peace that comes only from him. The goodness in my life, whatever it is, no matter how small, it comes from Christ and not from me or any other person. Christ might come to us through the lives of others and through the life of the Church, but what that really means is that Christ works tirelessly to find hundreds of thousands of millions of ways to returned to the locked room of our hearts so that we might find peace—so many mercies, more than we will ever remember or see or anticipate.

Our pride, I think, wants us to believe that goodness in life, no matter how large or small, is ‘natural,’ it comes from us, from our world, from the work we do or choices we make. We tell ourselves that we make goodness or manufacture goodness, that if there is good in our lives, then that we have earned it, worked for it.

Those are the lies that pride tells us. We might cooperate with God in life, share in his labors, even merit some of the goodness that we experience. But if there is goodness in our lives, no matter how large or small, its origin is found only in Christ—the Christ of divine mercy who finds hundreds of thousands of millions of ways to enter the locked room of our hearts so that we might know his love for us, trust in his saving work, and rest in the peace that only he can give us.

Homily preached on Sunday, April 7th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary