SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER

April 12, 2026

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

John 20:19-31

 

The key feature in the story of Doubting Thomas is not so much his initial skepticism on hearing the disciples’ report—“We have seen the Lord”—as his profound transformation when he does see for himself. What is truly remarkable is the contrast between before and after: between his initial expression of defiance—"Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."—and his subsequent confession of faith—“My Lord and my God!”

 

It would be a mistake, however, to regard Thomas as all that different from the other disciples. The Gospels of Mark and Luke tell us that when the women came back from the tomb and reported that they had seen the Lord risen from the dead, the apostles did not believe them. Luke even comments that the women’s testimony seemed to them an idle tale.

For the rest of the apostles, as for Thomas, it took an actual appearance of the Risen Jesus to transform their skepticism and despair into faith and hope. For them, as for Thomas, seeing was believing. Luke even mentions that Jesus showed them his hands and side to convince them that it was really him. The only real difference between Thomas and the others was that Thomas was a week late. In this sense, the detailed report of Thomas’s experience in the Gospel of John is emblematic of that of all the disciples.

 

Their initial response, their default position, was to disbelieve the previous eyewitness testimony until they saw for themselves. Their subsequent proclamation of the Lord’s Resurrection was thus in no way the product of some sort of wishful thinking. Instead, it was the result of an experience so overwhelming that it changed everything. Their worldview was completely reordered. They gained a new sense of identity and mission, empowering them to travel to the ends of the known world to proclaim what they had seen, heard, and touched. According to reliable tradition, Thomas ended up preaching the Gospel on the Malabar Coast of southwest India, where he died as a martyr. There, to this day, local Christian communities trace their descent from the Church he founded in the first century.

 

In response to Thomas’s confession, “My Lord and my God,” Jesus replies, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." But those words might raise a bit of a problem for us. If neither Thomas nor the other disciples were able to believe in the Lord’s Resurrection without seeing for themselves, then how can we, who live two thousand years later, be expected to believe without seeing?

 

Part of the answer is that we believe on the strength of the apostles’ testimony, and the way that the Lord’s Resurrection transformed their lives. The apostolic preaching is the foundation of the Church’s faith and life, handed down from one generation to the next even to our own day. That is after all the root meaning of the word “tradition”—from the Latin traditio, to hand down. The Resurrection narratives in the New Testament record the initial experience that got the whole process going to begin with. As John writes in the conclusion of today’s Gospel: “these [things] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”

 

But that’s only part of the answer. For us today, believing without seeing is not the same thing as uncritically accepting Christian dogma solely on the external authority of Scripture and tradition in the absence of any other confirming evidence. For my part, I think that faith is a gift that only God can give. It comes when we hear the Gospel being preached or the faith being taught, and we mysteriously receive an inner assurance and certainty that confirms the truth of what we’re hearing. And again, that experience changes everything. Our lives can never be the same again.

 

In this sense, we’re not that different from Doubting Thomas and the other disciples. They couldn’t believe in the Lord’s Resurrection until the Risen Jesus manifested himself to them personally. And neither can we. Even though he doesn’t appear to us in the flesh as he did to them, and even though we’re unable to travel back in time to the First Century to see for ourselves, nonetheless, he still comes among us in his Word and Sacraments—and in the community of his Body, the Church. By this gift, we’re able to recognize his presence in our midst. So, believing without seeing is not the same thing as blind faith. On the contrary, Jesus comes to us and enlightens our minds so that we may know him as he really is. And when that happens, we inherit the blessing that Jesus pronounces in today’s Gospel: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”