Today’s readings: Acts 4, 32-35; 1 John 5, 1-6; John 20, 19-31.
I have never considered Thomas as an unbeliever. His faith is rather a reasonable way of believing. We have to concede, after all, that his companions were not more brave than he was, because their belief was more based on evidence. Thomas was right in demanding something more.
His so-called lack of belief serves us more than the belief of the other apostles. Believing that Jesus is risen and lives on, and holding on to all that this faith implies, is not just an emotion. It needs grounding. Jesus, on appearing to the 12, breathed on them the Holy Spirit, which is the unique and vital principle that organises the new community and grounds the Church. For later generations, the Church was to be the only sign and instrument of the veracity of the resurrection.
The truth of our faith is not transmitted primarily in words but in gestures. We will never succeed in translating into concepts the truth of Christ risen and be persuasive. Truth has more to do with praxis rather than concepts. The first reading from Acts today highlights precisely not how the Church was structured or organised, but the novelty of the style of life as everyday practice.
There was something radically new and visible to the crude eye in those who professed to follow Jesus Christ. So when those first communities were proclaiming that Jesus was alive, that was not simply a truth they were preaching but a truth they were living. This invokes today’s Church and explains with ample clarity how today’s difficulty in believing is more to be located in the lack of credibility of those who profess themselves believers, rather than in the often quoted secularised culture or mentality.
Edward Schillebeeckx, a renowned theologian, once wrote that Christianity is not a message to be preached but an experience that becomes a message. Our problem today most probably lies in the fact that we’ve translated the message into a doctrine and what we seek first and foremost is to teach that doctrine. Communicating the gospel of Jesus Christ is something radically different from that.
St Augustine himself from early in the history of Christianity distinguished between what he named the way of experience and the way of doctrine. It is experience that comes first, and doctrine can be more comprehensible and acceptable in the context of a lived experience. But doctrine by itself, lacking the backing of a lived experience, is hard to accept and grasp.
Christ cannot be proclaimed in today’s culture if not through witness. Even the so-called culture of Christianity is today being rapidly liquidated. Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most influential social thinkers of our time, and in one of his latest books, Culture in a Liquid Modern World, writes that culture in our contemporary liquid-modern world has lost its missionary role and seeks no longer to enlighten people.
The culture we breathe today, he affirms, is not to satisfy existing needs but to create new ones. Culture today likens itself to a giant department store where the shelves are overflowing with desirable goods that are changed on a daily basis, just long enough to stimulate desires whose gratification is perpetually postponed.
Our Christian culture has also become a liquid culture. There are hardly any truths, even in religion, that stand the test of time and can be simply repeated from generation to generation. In biblical terms, truth and falsity are not differentiations of an abstract and mental type. Truth in Christianity is faithfulness. Falsity is unfaithfulness. If we are unfaithful, our message is false. So simple.
Christ’s resurrection is hard to believe not because science made us shrewder, but because we proclaim it as doctrine, not as a truth translatable in daily life as liberating, real and visible. So, reading today’s gospel, we need to empathise with Thomas who was struggling to bridge the emotions he had gone through with something he was told and expected to believe. After all, the credentials of his companions were not spotless.