Second Sunday of Easter, C - April 18, 2004

            Many claim that in our day and age it is very difficult to believe in miracles, especially in such an outrageous miracle as the Resurrection of Christ from the dead.  And these people tell us that it is difficult to believe in miracles in our day because of our advanced scientific view of the world, the universe and its laws.  In our enlightened time, we base our beliefs, we are told, on evidence that can be tested. 

            Then what on earth do these supposedly scientifically minded people do when the sun dances in the sky, in the plain sight of thousands of people (including many unbelievers, gathered there to scoff), just as our Lady predicted it would do at Fatima?  What do such people do when witnesses galore see someone blind or crippled from birth healed in the waters of Lourdes?   How do they handle the claims of the Christian faith, which asks for no leaps of faith, but urges us to commit ourselves to something -- great events -- on the basis of numerous eyewitnesses, many of whom were quite willing to die rather than deny, as St. John the Apostle described it, what they had heard, what they had seen with their own eyes, what they had looked upon and touched with their own hands, as Thomas did in today’s Gospel, placing his hands in the very wounds still evident in our Lord’s resurrected body.

            No, often it is not an enlightened scientific worldview that keeps people from believing.  Strange that so many would still try to describe our times as enlightened, this past century that has seen more violence and bloodshed than all previous centuries combined.   Rather, what often keeps people from believing in something like miracles, in something like the Resurrection, is a loss of belief in life itself, real, true life.  And what I mean by that is this:  if we fool ourselves into thinking that what is urged upon us by Hollywood and the media is real life, we will become so befuddled, so desperately unhappy – like most of those who inhabit Tinsel Town –  that it would be hard to believe in anything good anymore. 

            Is it real living, is it real life, to reduce our existence to buying and selling, possessing and consuming things?  Life reduced to trips to the shopping mall and the cinema is a life hardly worth living.  Is it life to mindlessly crave and chase after ever more blaring entertainment and so growing ever more cut off from reality?  How can we say we are living, truly living, when many in our nation – perhaps now most – are no longer capable of keeping even the most basic of commitments with fellow human beings?  Is a culture, a society such as ours, alive, really alive, that insists that somehow one has a right, in the most gruesome manner, to destroy innocent human life in the womb?  Is it really living to just want an ever-increasing temporal extension of existence without ever using the longer time allotted us to see real meaning and purpose in life?

            Pope John Paul II has described our culture as the “culture of death.”  And by that he doesn’t simply mean that our city streets -- and nowadays our rural schools -- are murderous; that abortions are as common as appendectomies; that the elderly are ever more threatened with death administered by doctors who once upon a time were considered agents of life, that war has become not a last resort of defense but a means of pushing some dubious worldview.  But the Holy Father also means that for many people life has become a kind of living-death, death in the sense not of shortage of things (God knows, we are heavily burdened with so many things and possessions, so many things to take care of), but in the sense that existence has lost its meaning, kind of like salt that has lost its savor.  People in the developed world are comfortable, well-fed, always working or always being entertained, buying and accumulating, living from one thrill to the next and almost always disappointed and almost always unhappy.  Where is the life, the poet T.S. Eliot asks, where is the life we have lost in living? 

            Yes, the Resurrection is hard to get a handle on when our life on this earth is drained of its color, its romance, its vitality, its tremendous surprises and adventures that only religion, only the Faith, can give it.  For really, how tragic that so many in this living-death turn to illegally procured chemicals to make their brains think that they are truly happy and alive.  For really, how can the decaying glitter of a shopping mall compare with the stunning, almost frightening grandeur, of a gothic cathedral?   Can that weekend party -- which will come and go so quickly as we grow old -- compare with the true story of the Creator of all the stars and of the whole universe, God Himself breaking into our world on a clear, cold night in Bethlehem?  Which is really more exciting, that new gadget so quickly obsolete or the possibility of one day, after this short time on earth is over, of seeing God face to face and knowing a joy that the best things of this life are only dim hints of? 

            Parties, shopping, gadgets, entertainment can all be fine and good things; but they are simply not enough.  In the end, they come to mean little or nothing.  Many people, I believe, are too busy vainly, frantically, trying to find a lasting happiness that they miss the very thing that would bring it to them:  the resurrection of Christ from the dead that would make them happy now and fill with meaning all aspects of their lives.  For no matter how much we accumulate, how much we save, how much we strive to extend our lives on this earth, ultimately we have to face the end of our life in this world.  Then what?  Then what, if there is no resurrection?  But, of course, there was.  Christ’s.  Like Thomas in today’s gospel we may find it difficult to believe, but we have his word for it, he who put his finger in the wounds of Jesus and exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!”  Thomas, who then spent the rest of his life spreading the good news that death is not the end, that death -- the thing we really fear -- has been conquered by the unending life of the Son of God. 

            The resurrection really happened.  Jesus was taken down off the Cross, and His dead body placed in a tomb.  His bitterly disappointed disciples hid away in secret places out of fear that they too would be arrested.  The darkness and deep agony of the first Good Friday swept over the world.  But, on Sunday, the first day of the week, the tomb was found empty.  And that very evening, all huddled up in fear behind locked doors, the disciples were astounded to see in their midst, not an apparition, not a ghost, not a vision held only in their hearts, but Jesus Himself, bodily alive, who later told John, “There is nothing to fear.  I am the First and the Last and the One who lives.  I hold the keys of death and the nether world.” 

            As we say it so often in the Mass, “Dying he destroyed our death, rising he restored our life.”  Our life, real life, true life, not the cheap imitations of TV land, but real life that begins now for believers and never ends.