With closed doors

It is often stated that we are living in a post-Christian era. The challenge ahead is to rearticulate what we claim to believe in, which may seem to have lost relevance and meaning. We are all tempted by the disbelief of Thomas, because whatever afflicts people and society puts faith to a hard test.

The world today more than ever expects from us Christians a renewed witness to the resurrection of Christ, a fresh way of understanding not only what Easter means, but also what is occurring in our fragmented self.

Central to this Sunday's liturgy is the second reading from the Book of the Apocalypse, where John recounts the vision he had when exiled on the island of Patmos. The figure of Christ as depicted here evokes the transcendence and superiority of Christ in his divinity. He holds "the keys of death and of the underworld". The keys stand for power: power over the signs of death in our daily living and over the 'underworld', which sounds mythological but which represents for us today wherever crime and evil seem to reign in society.

It is precisely there that we are called to experience Easter. Otherwise, Easter would only be an inward looking celebration, just a yearly ritual that bears no imprint at all on what negatively conditions our lives, something behind 'closed doors' and distant from the outside world.

When John had this vision on Patmos, he was actually in exile. We are today metaphorically in exile, in the sense that where our faith is concerned we feel at a loss, seemingly no longer able to come across with something that really makes sense and speaks loud and clear. But, as we can see from the shift that divides the first from the second reading, even in its early stages Christianity passed from being accepted with euphoria to being persecuted.

"The people", we read in Acts, "were loud in their praise and the numbers of men and women who came to believe in the Lord increased steadily". With John exiled and Christians persecuted, it's already a different story just within the span of the second half of the first century.

Even today we continue to experience the dividing line between our Easter 'Alleluias' and the hard realities of every day where like Thomas in the Gospel we refuse to believe. Thomas reminds us of the problem of unbelief today, particularly in the wake of a more scientific outlook on life. But now the great divide seems no longer to be between belief and unbelief, but rather between seekers and non-seekers. Because, since our alienation spurs us to seek, it can be our greatest blessing. We find it twice in today's Gospel that when Jesus came "the doors were closed". Because the problem with believing or not believing is when we turn in upon ourselves and close the doors.

Much of what we still see daily around us may seem to be in our mind the denial of what we've celebrated in our Easters. But, as Pope Benedict said on Easter Sunday, it is precisely in the wounds of the risen Christ that the true face of God appears: the face of a God who, in Christ, has taken upon himself the wounds of injured humanity. It is here that a nearly dead faith is reborn: because only a God who loves us to the extent of taking upon himself our wounds and our pain, especially innocent suffering, is worthy of faith.

As St Francis de Sales writes: "No, God cannot lose you, so long as you live in your resolution not to lose him". This resolution not to lose God may be what keeps our doors open, curing our disbelief and dispelling our doubts.