A MESSAGE FOR LOW SUNDAY
The Gospel of the Sunday after Easter tells
the story of the Apostle Thomas. This is
the apostle who has gone down in history as “Doubting Thomas” because of his
lack of faith in the Lord’s Resurrection.
Our lesson from this is an obvious one, that we must have faith in what
God has revealed to us, even though we cannot see or hear it for
ourselves. We believe in the
Resurrection and all the other truths revealed by God, because God “can neither
deceive nor be deceived.” God would not
lie to us. He who is Truth itself, cannot
possibly give us anything but the Truth. And he who is all-knowing, who has a
perfect comprehension of all things, cannot possibly make a mistake and tell us
something that he “thinks” is true, but that actually is not.
Unlike our Protestant brethren, who have only
their own individual and imperfect understanding of the Bible to rely on, we
have the Holy Catholic Church to advise us with certainty about what God has
revealed. Our Lord promised that the
Church would teach us in the Spirit of Truth, and our faith in these words of
Christ allows us to have perfect certainty that whatever the Church teaches as
a dogma is as true as if it came directly from the mouth of God himself.
This certainty that our faith gives us is a
wonderful gift from God. Faith is one of
the three cardinal virtues, around which revolve all the other virtues that we practice. We must constantly pray for an increase of
faith, calling out to God with the sinner, “O Lord, I believe, help thou my
unbelief!” Our daily Act of Faith reinforces
this virtue in our soul, and is a constant reminder how safe we are in trusting
our Almighty Lord who can neither deceive nor be deceived.
Today’s Gospel is the opportunity for our
annual reaffirmation of that faith. We
can never have enough faith, so long as it is placed in the truths of God and
not in man. A misplaced faith in the
less than certain opinions of our fellow men is something else entirely. Trust in God, by all means, but be wary of
the opinions of men—they are so often wrong, either deliberately, to trick us
into falsity, or simply mistaken albeit sincere.
St. Thomas the Apostle was wrong, not because
he didn’t trust the declarations of the other apostles that they had seen the
risen Jesus. He was wrong because he
didn’t trust the words of our Lord himself, who had prophesied his own
resurrection. Let us reach out our hands
to God this morning as he descends upon our altar in the Holy Eucharist, and
follow St. Thomas in the reaffirmation of his faith, “My Lord and my God!”
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