Entering with Thomas into the School of Faith, Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle, July 3, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of Saint Leonard, Wawel Cathedral, Krakow, Poland
Tertio Millennio Seminar
Feast of St. Thomas, Apostle
July 3, 2023
Eph 2:19-22, Ps 117, Jn 20:24-29

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today, as we begin this Tertio Millennio Seminar here at Wawel Cathedral, in the Chapel of Saint Leonard where Father Karol Wojtyla, the day after his priestly ordination, celebrated his first three Masses on All Souls’ Day 1946, respectively for the repose of the souls of his dad, mom and brother Edmund, we do so on the Feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle. And it’s hard for me not to think of what the future St. John Paul II said about the Gospel we just heard at World Youth Day in Rome during the Great Jubilee Year of 2000. There, St. John Paul II told the over two million young people assembled for the Vigil of Prayer that the Upper Room was, for St. Thomas and the apostles, and for all of us, a true “school of faith,” and highlighted for us what are the great lessons of that school of faith. As we begin this Tertio Millennio Seminar, which is meant to be for us, too, an opportunity for us to grow in total personal trust of God as well as in the knowledge of the content especially of the social teaching of our faith, it’s fitting for us to follow in the footsteps of Saint John Paul II as he leads us into Jesus’ school of faith and learn valuable lessons from the apostle we celebrate today.
• It’s a pity that St. Thomas, who left everything to follow the Lord Jesus, who gave his entire life for the Lord and died in witness to faith, is called “Doubting Thomas” almost as much as he is called “Saint.” He is the most famous doubter in history! But his doubts were not unique among the first disciples and apostles. With the exception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, none of the early disciples believed after the resurrection. The women went to anoint a corpse. The disciples in Emmaus were talking to an anonymous Wayfarer about a Jesus whom they thoroughly believed was dead. When Mary Magdalene and these Emmaus disciples went to inform the other apostles that they had seen Jesus, the apostles didn’t believe them. That’s why Jesus, when he appeared to them as St. Mark reminds us through St. Peter, “rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart because they had not believed those who saw him after he had been raised” (Mk 16:14). Faith, as we know, is the belief in something on the basis of a belief in someone giving witness. They had a double-distrust that led to their lack of faith in Jesus’ resurrection. First they distrusted the witness of Mary and the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, thinking that they were just too gullible. But more importantly they distrusted in Jesus’ words that he would rise on the third day. Thomas’ distrust was not qualitatively different at all, just quantitatively: he didn’t believe his fellow apostles’ testimony either. And so, with St. John Paul, as we enter into Jesus’ school of faith, we need to acknowledge that occasionally, we, too, have had our doubts, that we, too, have been weak in faith.
• From Saint Thomas there are three main lessons we learn about faith. The first is how faith is meant to be lived. St. Thomas showed this in the scene outside of Bethany. Martha and Mary had sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was deathly ill and Jesus committed to going there. Some of the apostles noted that people were threatening to kill Jesus and they tried to persuade him from walking into an ambush. But Thomas said, “Let us also go to die with him” (Jn 11:16). He recognized that faith in Jesus meant following Jesus all the way, including to death. He was ready, at least at the level of his will, to stand by Jesus, to identify his own destiny with Jesus no matter the consequences. That’s where faith always leads. A faith that doesn’t trust in the Lord, in his promise of resurrection, in his teaching us the way to live and die enough to stake our life on his resurrection and ours, really isn’t worthy of the description “faith.” Even though St. Thomas, like the other apostles, would abandon Jesus in fear as Jesus was arrested in the Garden, even though he would spend the first Triduum cowering, he was one who, like Peter, had a willing spirit despite his weak flesh. And he knew that faith wasn’t meant to be merely conceptual. It was supposed to be existential. That’s the first important lesson to grasp.
• The second came during the Last Supper. Jesus spoke about his need to go away but then come back again and concluded, “Where I am going, you know the way.” That’s when Thomas, who had the guts to say what others were thinking but were perhaps too timid to ask, blurted out, “Lord, we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way?” He was willing to question Jesus when he didn’t understand. His was what St. Anselm, basing himself on St. Augustine, would later call fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. He believed in the Lord, but wanted to understand better what Jesus was saying. We, too, need to be willing to ask questions of the Lord. Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman once said that a thousand questions don’t constitute a single doubt. St. Thomas Aquinas’ whole method in the Summa Theologiae was to question aspects of the faith, to raise all of the objections to truths of faith, in order to understand the faith better. Sincere questions don’t cause us to doubt Jesus or what he himself has revealed. On the contrary, they help us to solidify our faith. And we see in Thomas’ case that they can lead sometimes to great rewards from Jesus as the Master, in response to his beloved apostle’s question, said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”
• The third lesson in the school of faith happens in today’s Gospel. Thomas was unwilling to accept the testimony of the other apostles, the women or the disciples from Emmaus, as if they were all together in a collective hallucination. But it wasn’t a general incredulity. He had obviously been struggling about the criteria to accept Jesus’ resurrection, almost certainly because he had been pondering Jesus’ words that he would rise from the dead. And he had come to the conclusion that the criteria would be Jesus’ wounds, which were the sign of his love, which would be the connection between Jesus’ risen body and his earthly body. He had somehow intuited that after the resurrection, Jesus would be recognized not by his face but by his wounds! Jesus’ physical appearance might be different, his voice might different, almost everything else different — as we would see in some of his appearances that they wouldn’t recognize either his face or his voice — but Thomas grasped that the wounds would have to be there. That’s why he said what he did: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” And when Jesus appeared to him and, rather than castigating him, lovingly invite him not just to see his wounds but put his finger into his hands and his hand into his side, St. Thomas dropped to his knees and burst out with the greatest theological confession of Jesus’ divinity recorded in Sacred Scripture: “My Lord and my God.” Normally when we focus on that expression, we focus on the titles of divinity, but five years ago, when I was at Mass with Pope Francis on Divine Mercy Sunday in the Vatican, the Holy Father looked at this phrase from another angle and focused on the adjective “my,” which he noted was a possessive adjective. Jesus was not just the Lord and God, but Thomas’ Lord and God. It pointed to the personal relationship between the two. The Holy Father said, “Jesus wants us, too, to relate to him as ‘my Lord and my God,’ to belong to us as we long to him, … That’s what St. Thomas can teach us.”
• But Jesus takes that lesson in the school of faith even further when he says to Thomas, at the end of today’s passage, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” Earlier in the Gospel, Jesus had said to his disciples, “Blessed are your eyes that see what you see.” St. John the Evangelist in his first letter would announce what he had “seen with his eyes.” There is indeed beatitude in seeing God, because in order truly to see him we need to have faith, because Jesus Christ, having taken on our humanity, looks similar to other human beings. We need faith to be able to see behind the human face, to peer beneath the human body. But Jesus indicates a greater beatitude to one who does not see but still believers.  The ultimate test of faith is when we don’t see with our physical eyes or probe with our index fingers or hands, but make the same act of faith in Jesus. This is what led another Thomas, Saint Thomas Aquinas, to write in his famous hymn Adoro Te Devote, “Plagas, sicut Thomas, non intueor, Deum tamen meum te confiteor. Fac me tibi semper magis credere, in te spem habere, te diligere,” literally, “Wounds, like Thomas, I do not see, nevertheless I confess you my God to be. Make be always more and more believe in you, have hope in you and love you.”
• I think St. John Paul II would want us to apply that greater beatitude especially to two contexts during this Seminar. The first is to his divine mercy. We will have a chance to visit the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Lagiewniki, right next to the Shrine of St. John Paul II. In almost every Church we’ll enter, we’ll see both an image of John Paul II and an image of Divine Mercy. John Paul II would want to us to see Jesus in that image blessing us through his wounds, with his gloriously scarred right hand raised in blessing, with his side pouring out blood and water as a font of mercy for us, even with his scarred feet showing how we is making haste to come toward us. St. John Paul II had a great trust in the mercy of God and is doubtless praying that in our school of faith during these days, we, too, will trust in that gift, which is so necessary not only for our individual salvation, but as he stressed, for peace in the world. And the second context by which he would like us to confess the Lord with greater faith, hope and love believing in his wounds without physically seeing them is in the Holy Eucharist, in which we receive Jesus’ wounded but risen Body, the blood that flowed from the holes left by the nails and the sword, the living Water that poured out together with his Blood, as well as his Soul and Divinity. From his first three Masses here in this chapel, to the Masses he would celebrate at St. Florian’s as a university, to the Masses he’d celebrate upstairs and in his residence as Archbishop, to those he would celebrate in the world, he was always celebrating, as he wrote in his encyclical on the Eucharist, on the “altar of the world. It unites heaven and earth. It embraces and permeates all creation. Truly this,” he wrote, “is the mysterium fidei that is accomplished in the Eucharist.” The source and summit, root and center, and most important lesson of the school of faith is the Eucharist, in which we meet and have the privilege to receive the same Master who out of love invited Thomas to probe his wounds. The only fitting response to this gift is to say, with Saint Thomas the Apostle and Saint John Paul, “My Lord and My God!”

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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