ARE YOU A DOUBTING THOMAS?

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I’d like to start off with a brief prayer appropriate for this season:

Dear Lord, may your Passion, Death and Resurrection be as worthwhile, and may it have not have been in vain, for as many souls as possible.

Are you a Doubting Thomas? Or do you know one? It’s not hard to find them nowadays! Those who think of Jesus Christ as some great prophet or wise teacher, or even as some revolutionary against the Romans, sure, but they say He was not, and is not, God!

While no disrespect is meant to St. Thomas the apostle, one of the original twelve, he might be best noted for his famous line in John’s Gospel in which he said of the resurrected Jesus "Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe" (John 20:25).

Eight days later Jesus did take him up on that offer saying to Thomas "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing."

Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "You have believed because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe" (John 20:27-29).

There is an avalanche of evidence that is given to us these days that we might believe. We only have to open our eyes to see it.

That way we may be like Jesus’ disciples He was addressing when discussing the proper understanding of His parables in Matthew's Gospel Chapter 13, verse 16 when He told them “blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear.”

Our God, in His goodness desiring us to know Him as fully as we can, given our limited human intellects, has given us many proofs about His Divinity, not in His being just some wise teacher.

• Put your finger in Our Lord’s side, figuratively speaking, of course and read about Eucharistic miracles attesting to Christ’s Real Presence in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
• Put your finger in His side and read about exorcists and exorcisms.
• Put your finger in His side and read about church-approved Marian apparitions.
• Put your finger in His side, as you read about many people who while near death have experienced His tremendous love and peace beyond all their understanding
• Put your finger in His side and be among those who are not disbelieving but can believe.

The original Doubting Thomas, St. Thomas, was indeed a very courageous Apostle, who was martyred in India while spreading the Good News of our Lord’s Gospel Message. How many of us are still Doubting Thomases to this day?

How many people have fallen into the temptation of thinking that Christ and the Gospels are all some kind of medieval fairytale? That obeying Jesus and following in His footsteps keeps us from being truly free, that is to say, being truly free to sin.

This, as opposed to the freedom that comes from following our Lord and Savior, who loves you in a manner that you can't begin to imagine but is very real.

Can you look at a crucifix and see someone who has not only experienced the tremendous pain of injustice but also who understands human nature better than any of us?

Jesus was by no means Pollyannaish about what would be involved for his apostles and disciples when they started to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt 28:19-20). He knew all too well the hostility they would face.

Let's examine now, in this age of tremendous amounts of information, just how God has given us very meaningful clues to at least cast doubt on one’s being a Doubting Thomas.

Saint Luke says that in the forty days between the resurrection and Our Lord's ascension into Heaven, he presented himself alive “by many proofs” (Acts 1:3). We know some of them, from New Testament scriptures.

They include His post Resurrection appearances:

• To Mary Magdalene (Mark 16:9; John 20:11-18)
• To other women (Matt 28:8-10)
• To Peter (Luke 24:34)
• To ten disciples (Luke 24:36-43; John 20:19-25)
• To the Eleven, including Thomas (Mark 16:14; John 20:26-29)
• At his Ascension (Mark 16:19, 20; Luke 24:50-53; Acts 1:4-12)
• To the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Mark 16:12, 13; Luke 24:13-35)
• In Galilee (Mattt 28:16-20; John 21:1-24)
• To 500 people (1 Corinthians 15:6)
• To James and the other apostles (1 Corinthians 15:7)
• To Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-6; 22:1-10; 26:12-18; 1 Corinthians 15:8)

So how can a man come back from the dead? Resurrexit, sic ut dixit! He has risen as he said!

How could something so horrible as Christ’s death by crucifixion lead to so incredible, His Glorious Resurrection? We see here at Easter the ultimate case of God bringing out good out of evil, in this case, the greatest good out of the worst evil!

And we also see a centurion noting accurately upon our Lord’s death that “this truly was the Son of God!” (Matt 27:54) Jesus would be walking once again among His astonished witnesses before the weekend was over, of course!

What seemed like a surrender turned into a tremendous victory over sin and death for our salvation, but it's up to each of us to see to it in our own lives that His Passion and Death, as well as His Resurrection, was not in vain for any one of us.

Sadly, there was a hard-heartedness among those among the chief priests and the Pharisees who still did not want to believe in Jesus’ Divinity even after “darkness was over the land” as He was being crucified (Luke (23:44-45).

And what’s more when He actually died “behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split; the tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many” (Matt 27:51-53).

You may recall that Simeon, an old devout righteous man, spoke of Jesus at our Lord’s Presentation in the Temple in Jerusalem when He was just a newborn baby, that He would be a sign that would be contradicted (Luke 2:34). Such a contradiction of our Lord and His Gospel message continues to this day, as mentioned earlier.

The renowned author C.S. Lewis’ in his famous book Mere Christianity posited that a man who claimed as Jesus did to be the Son of God if he were just some great moral human teacher would have to be either a madman “on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg” or perhaps even something worse.

Lewis thus concluded his memorable argument against those who would deny Jesus’ Divinity by saying “let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Elsewhere in the book, Lewis noted that “God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. God designed the human machine to run on Himself.” Lewis compared our situation to that of a car needing gasoline to run properly! God is the fuel source!

He noted the folly of our trying to achieve happiness without “bothering about religion”. He wisely points out, that throughout history, fallen humanity has fallen flat on its face by paving a road to Hell with only the finest intentions by allowing “the selfish and cruel people to rise to the top” bringing “misery and ruin”, like a machine breaking down. Lewis concluded his diagnosis of our failures by saying “that is what Satan has done to us humans.”

Indeed, just in the last century alone we’ve seen the horrors of monstrous regimes run by despots like Hitler, Stalin and Mao that caused a tremendous amount of needless bloodshed, misery, and the deaths of tens of millions of people!

Do you think we would be suffering from the crises of war, famine and so much injustice these days if we naturally observed the social kingdom of Christ? Of worshipping God as Man in Jesus rather than Man as God in one of a depressing series of demonic dictators? Of course we wouldn't!

Is it not possible, if not likely, that part of what makes Heaven so heavenly is that it is a place where the Ten Commandments are observed naturally?

As we read in the Baltimore Catechism God "made each one of us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven." 

When you pass away, you will be judged not on just who you loved but how you loved. Not just on what doors were open for a career, but the doors that you did or didn’t open for Jesus? Did you let him take your stony heart and replace it with a more valuable loving heart that he could work with?

We must strive to be such “citizens-in-training” for heaven as best we can while on our earthly pilgrimage, lest we lose sight of what's important, our salvation, and possibly not just lose sight but lose our souls as well.

Heaven is real and so is hell, and Christ died for us not to be in that horrible pit but to accept and choose to love Him and not be unbelieving but believe. As Saint John said, in his Gospel chapter 20, verse 31, that "you may have life in His name." Amen.

God Bless,

Christopher Castagnoli
for www.ourcatholicprayers.com

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