Tag: Christian witness

Doubt and bearing witness: a homily for the second Sunday of Easter

Explaining St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, St. Thomas Aquinas says that in heaven there will be no faith. We will not need faith when we experience the beatific vision. We need faith now because we live in a world of uncertainties.

Palazzo Venezia, Rome (collection)

We live with doubts. Sometimes these doubts are justified. We doubt our political and church leadership when those in power are not honest, when they use words to hide the truth instead of expressing it. We doubt our abilities when we recognize the same tendency in our own hearts or when, despite our sincerity, our strength is insufficient and we fail. When the world changes unexpectedly, we doubt the future.

Why does Thomas doubt? From one point of view, uncertainty seems justifiable. Believing that a man has come back from the dead is not easy. But it would not have been the first time that Thomas witnessed such an event. He was present at the resurrection of Lazarus. And it seems unlikely that the other disciples had fabricated this story only to deceive him–it is hardly clear what motive they would have had to make up such a lie.

It is true that Thomas speaks of evidence, of what he can see and what he can touch, but his doubt is not really based on a lack of empirical evidence. He does not express the need for more study before coming to a conclusion. He expresses the refusal to believe, the decision not to believe: “I will not believe.”

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One Body, many witnesses

In today’s second reading, St. Paul warns us of autoimmune disease.  An autoimmune disease, as you may know, is when the body attacks itself, one of its own parts.  It’s a self-destructive disease.  Last week we heard Paul tell the Corinthians, who had been squabbling over who had the better gifts, that all these different gifts come from one Spirit.  One Spirit, many gifts. 

Today Paul continues the same theme with the analogy of the body.  The Church is like a body, with different parts—eyes and ears and limbs and so on—and if jealousy between these parts enters in and the eye stops seeing because it wants to hear, and the legs stop walking because they want to see, and the lungs stop breathing because they want to walk, then pretty soon instead of a body you have a corpse.  It is one of the most important metaphors in the Bible, and this morning I’d like to focus on two implications of this metaphor.  The first is that bodies share common goods.  And the second is that the Body of Christ is meant to be alive.  

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