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And these things have been written so that you might come to believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God,
and you may have life because of him.
We read this gospel every second Sunday of Easter,
the week after Easter called Divine Mercy Sunday.
And we often name this passage, “Doubting Thomas”;
poor Thomas, he gets such a bad rap!
One of the things that has always struck me
about this particular gospel passage is that
Jesus has now risen from the dead,
glorious victory over death and he has wounds.
Why does he have wounds?
Is this what it will be like when we all are raised?
We will have all our wounds or broken legs, and our bad hips.
We will all have the same old things we had when we were living.
It has always struck me as as odd,
but yet that is how they knew him.
It was his identity.
This is the crucified Lord.
If he had come back without the crucifixion marks,
then they would not have recognized him.
They would have said,
“Well, you are not the real Jesus,
because the Jesus we know was crucified on the cross.”
It was an identity issue that was how they came to know him.
But here is what is important, these marks were also healed marks.
They were transformed marks.
They were not oozing the blood.
Christ came back as the resurrected Christ, glorious and peaceful.
And he offers them what he has received,
which is love and mercy and peace.
And he passes this onto them.
And of course, Thomas gives that awesome response,
“My Lord and my God, my Lord and my God.”
In other words, the testimony of faith
that we are called to give ourselves.
But here is what is interesting.
The healing comes through the cross.
We have to be careful not to stop at our cross, at our wounds
but allow the healing to take place beyond the cross.
Because the last word that God has is not the crucifixtion,
the last word God has is the resurrection.
It is his divine mercy, the love that overcomes all wounds
and all brokenness and all shortcomings.
And we are called to embrace that and allow that to happen in our lives.
The temptation comes when we are wounded,
which all of us are in some way, shape or form.
We all have shortcomings,
we all have something that we have dealt with.
Sometimes it is smaller,
something that has happened recently;
maybe an argument between friends or family
or maybe something deeper as an illness or a sickness
that we are dealing with ourselves or with a loved one.
Or it could be something more profound,
a betrayal in a relationship,
whether a domestic relationship
or one at work where we are no longer valued for who we are
and we feel betrayed.
Or we could have lost a loved one.
The wound is deep and it hurts.
The temptation is to stay with the wound, to stay there.
But Christ is calling us beyond the wounds of life.
He is calling us to the resurrection, to the heal wound.
He is calling us to the love and to forgiveness
that comes beyond the wounds.
And that is where the grace of God,
what we call the divine mercy,
God's love of mercy that brings healing to all wounds.
Now, we have to be careful here
because it sounds so wonderful,
but when you are in the middle of that woundedness,
that brokenness is not so wonderful.
It does not feel so grace filled
when we are full of pain and frustration
and maybe even anger as a result of it.
But we have to learn to cooperate with the divine mercy.
We have to learn to allow it to happen and work with it.
That is all great theology.
And it sounds wonderful, but what does it look like in practice?
Let me give you a simple almost benign example.
Recently I whacked my hand on a shelf and I got a cut.
The darn thing just would not stop bleeding.
And every time I seemed to hit it over and over again.
And I am thinking to myself,
“Yeah, well maybe if I might put a bandaid on it, it might help”
We might think it is so straightforward.
But we have to take care of it.
It is just a simple cut but unless I take care of it,
I am going to keep rewounding it
in the ordinary aspect of my daily life.Why?
Because it is right there on the surface of my hand.
If I am willing to care for it, to allow it to heal,
give it the space to heal, put a bandage on it,
take a little bit of caution around it so I do not keep hitting it,
then it will heal.
It will heal and then I will be fine.
Now, if that is what I need to do with just a simple cut on my finger,
then how much more do we need to take care of ourselves
when we are wounded and to allow God's grace to heal us.
If we allow God's mercy to flow through us
and over us and to bring us healing.
Again, it sounds really simple,
but sometimes self-care is really hard to do
because we have to admit that we need to care, that is number one.
Number two is that we have to allow God to help us
and allow others to help us
because God's care comes through each other.
And when that healing starts to come,
then we start to feel the balm of the healing.
We feel strength in and through the wound,
in and through the pain, in and through the hurt.
That is the process.
And we need to cooperate with that in our own life.
Whether these are physical, emotional, or spiritual wounds,
we have to cooperate with God's grace, God's divine mercy,
because he promises that he has the last word,
and his last word in our life is mercy, and love
which overwhelms all pain and suffering.
It does not feel like that in the middle of it.
But that is the grace.
And that is what we hear about in today's gospel,
it is what we are called to live.
He calls it peace, “my peace I give you.”
You can imagine the chaos that would have taken place in that upper room.
They were running for their lives.
They were hiding in the locked room.
And Jesus come in their midst
and he does not break them down and berate them.
He gives them a simple message of love by saying,
“peace be with you.”
You could see how powerful it was.
It performed right there.
He commanded them to be peaceful.
You could almost feel the healing to took over their hearts.
We are we are called to be part of that healing.
We are called to allow those words into our heart,
to feel the healing for us.
But here is what is important, that is not where it stops.
Because we come here each Sunday to receive
that healing for ourselves. Yes.
And it is super important that we do it.
We have to admit that we need it for ourselves,
but we also need to be part of the movement that he gives it to others.
We are called to share that divine mercy,
that loving, healing power with others.
Henry Nouwen has a beautiful phrase for this.
He calls it an archetype.
It is called the wounded healer.
You cannot give what you do not have.
So we have to first feel the healing
and then we have to be willing to pass
that healing on to others by being tender and kind and loving to others,
especially those who are not good at taking care of their own wounds,
who are not willing to give some self care.
That is where we play the role so that
we can bring healing in their life.
We bring them hope that no one else can bring.
There is life beyond the wound,
that there is healing beyond the wound, whatever that wound is.
So today, let us receive the healing balm of God's divine mercy,
his love to heal our wounds and to take care,
to give some self care to ourselves,
but also let us be willing to be witnesses to this, to the world.
Let us be part of the command, to love one another,
to pass on the divine mercy to all who are in need,
especially those who do not even know that they need it,
to spread the divine mercy to all to stay.
And these things have been written so that you might come to believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God,
and you may have life because of him.
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