Today’s readings: Acts 2, 42-47; 1 Peter 1, 3-9; John 20, 19-31.

We may think of the times we live in today as extremely challenging for the faith and as exceptional insofar as the difficulties in witnessing to one’s belief are concerned. Not true. The Apostles and their first disciples faced big challenges to give witness to what they believed had really happened and to convince others, within and outside their communities, that the man Jesus, whom many had seen dead and buried, was alive.

To be honest, even for us today it is not so easy to read how Jesus appeared on particular days and at specific times and take it lightly or just as it sounds. The gospels and later writings make it clear that the fact that Jesus was risen and alive was not some form of inner spiritual feeling or experience of the Apostles.

Belief is not simply an experience that pertains to the soul but to the whole person, body and soul. For the fourth-century Eastern Father of the Church Gregory of Nyssa, the life of the soul and that of the body are inextricably bound. Both body and soul shall be redeemed, and their redemption is interrelated. Believing is seeing, insists St John in his gospel. There are things tangible in one’s life of faith. The Apostle Thomas was invited to come and see, even to touch.

New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, in his book Surprised by Hope, sought to differentiate between the miracles Jesus performed on behalf of Jairus’ daughter, the widow’s son at Nain, and Lazarus, and the unprecedented action of God in raising Jesus to the new life of the age to come. There is a remarkable distinction to be made between the resuscitation of a corpse and the resurrection.

Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning and initial example of the new creation. It is dissimilar to anything we read about in the gospels. The dawn of the eighth day, referred to in today’s gospel narrative, signals a day that is beyond the seven-day cycle and thus stands outside of the normal movement of time. It is the dawn of a new age in which time comes to be fulfilled, marking the irruption of the divine into the movement of history.

With his raising of Lazarus to enjoy the old life he had before he died, Jesus created a signpost of the end-of-history resurrection, of something that is beyond history and time. Perhaps our major challenge in time is to exit unbelief and acquire an eye to read the signs of the divine, signs that are surely given and which can be intimations of resurrection.

Belief is not adhering to doctrine, or simply accepting what the Church teaches. If belief, as we read from the book of Acts, is not translatable into concreteness, in new forms of relationships that go beyond what is humanly possible, then it is easily doomed to dissolve into nothing. For the first Christians, that Jesus was risen and alive was not a doctrine to believe.

What transpires from that experience is a community built and consolidated on essentials. As the first reading states, people were not joining in because they were seeing miracles happen, but miracles were happening because there was something extraordinary with the community itself.

Pope Francis, since his election as Pope, has frequently spoken of the need for the Church not to be self-referential, as if it has its own light. A Church closed in on itself, on keeping boundaries, intent on its self-preservation, is doomed to “get sick”. The Church instead is called to come out of itself, to be a catalyst of the new life of Jesus in a world in need of healing.

Resurrection is regeneration. It is the antidote of stagnation. We are called to stop speaking of reform and renewal, which ultimately mean merely recycling of things known and worn out. What people expect from the Church is not spoon feeding about what is right or wrong, nor microwave answers to surface questions. People simply need to see again Jesus alive in their Church. Everything else is futile.

From time to time, small ‘resuscitations’ happen in our lives and around us. Those are signs, useful hints that can stand for the resurrection. It’s good to be on the look-out for these signposts.