2^nd Sunday of Easter (Mercy Sunday); April 11, 2021

Acts 4:32-35.  Ps 118.  1 Jn 5:1-6.  Jn 20:19-31

Deacon Jim McFadden

            The seven weeks between Easter Sunday and Pentecost constitutes the Easter season.  While lest well known than Advent or Lent—people will give you quizzical looks when you say “Happy Easter” well into May—the Easter season is important because it gives us the time as a Church community to absorb the significance of the experience of Jesus’s Resurrection.  And, by doing so, we reflect on the difference the Easter event makes in our own lives.

            The first thing we have to deal with is that there is a difference between the pre-Easter and the post-Easter presence of Jesus.  It’s the difference between the historical Jesus and the Risen Christ.   While we’re talking about the same Person, things have radically changed.  Let’s look at the account from John’s Gospel: even though the doors were locked, “Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you” (Jn 20:19).  The Resurrected Christ does not enter through doors, as people with physical bodies do.  This strongly suggests that the disciples have a spiritual realization of Jesus.  They come to know the Risen Christ not through the eyes of physical seeing (what St. Bonaventure would call the Eye of the Body (empirical perception) or through the eye of rational thought (inferential reason), but through the Eye of the Soul.  As St. Paul would put it in his 2^nd Letter to the Corinthians, “…for we walk by faith, not by sight”  (5:7).  So, the relationship we have with the Risen Christ is not bound by space and time.  He is present to everyone and everything in the cosmos at any given moment.  A physical body does not have that attribute.

            The second problematic concern is that the Risen Christ is still the Wounded Christ: “When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side.  The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord” (v. 20).  Today, the 2^nd Sunday of Easter, we are called to contemplate, along with Thomas and the other disciples, the wounds of the Risen One, Divine Mercy, which overcomes our limitations.   and shines into the darkness of evil and sin.  But, why is the Risen Lord still wounded?  He’s gone through his Passion and Death—isn’t that past history?  Why the wounds?  He’s Resurrected; why can’t He appear without the signs of his ordeal?  Why can’t we move on from that grizzly crucifixion? 

            What we have to deal with is that the glorified Christ puts his Resurrection and woundedness together.  At the Ascension Jesus is glorified—he is returning to his Father but in his wounded humanity.  As St. Anastasius of Antioch put it in a discourse, “Because he was deprived of his glory for a little while (when He became human), the glory that was his as the Father’s only-begotten Son, but through the cross this glory is seen to have been restored to him in a certain way in the body that he had assumed” (cf. Matins, April 6, 2021).  If we unpack what Anastasius is saying, the 2^nd Person of the Trinity is glorified in the wounded humanity of Jesus.  Somehow is woundedness is his glory.

            The Early Church Fathers, as represented by Anastatius, had a sense of this when they had this image of Jesus as standing  eternally in the heavens with the palms of his hands opened before the face of the Father.  It became a symbol of what glory meant.  It’s a symbol for humanity, who go into eternity still in our wounded, broken state.  It’s this mystery the Medievalists were working with when they saw the imperfect men and women die during the Black Death.  So, they came to the insight of ‘purgatory’ to solve the problem for themselves.

            We see this image in the Risen Christ, who brings his woundedness, his humanity before the Father and that itself is his glory.  Why?  Following the Death and Resurrection of Christ, we can not talk about the transcendent God without talking about humanity: in Christ, they are forever united.  Given that, Jesus could trust that his Father would love him in his woundedness and precisely because of his wounded humanity.  We, also, are one day going to come before the Lord, not in any way air-brushed or perfect, but in our wounded humanity.  Our final great act of trust is to believe, to hope, and to finally know that He can love us anyway—even in our imperfections and woundedness. 

            That’s why He invited his doubting disciple to “Put your finger here and see my hands…” (Jn 20:27).  In so doing, Thomas showed his own wounds, his own injuries, his own lacerations, his own humiliation.  By placing his finger into the imprint of the nails, he found the decisive proof that he was loved, that he was expected to follow Jesus, that he was understood in his frailty  and brokenness.  How many of us are like Thomas, who are searching deep within our hearts to meet Jesus just as He is: kind, merciful, and tender?  For we know that deep down that Jesus is just like the one Thomas encountered.

            May we hopefully have the courage to hold our wounded humanity before his face and let him love it because it is only his love that makes us whole, believable ourselves.

            My brothers and sisters, it’s not fire that will burn away our imperfections, but it is the gaze of God, the perfect gaze of the Father.  Let the Father love you in and through his beloved Son Jesus.  Let his love burn away your sinfulness and woundedness.  When the Father gazes upon you through the wounds of his Son, all he sees is his beloved daughter, his beloved son.  Let him love you.  Amen.