Reach Hither Thy Hand

The Gospel of the Sunday after Easter tells the story of the Apostle Thomas.  This is the apostle who has gone down in history as “Doubting Thomas” because of his lack of faith in the Lord’s Resurrection.  Our lesson from this is an obvious one, that we must have faith in what God has revealed to us, even though we cannot see or hear it for ourselves.  We believe in the Resurrection and all the other truths revealed by God, because God “can neither deceive nor be deceived.”  God would not lie to us.  He who is Truth itself, cannot possibly give us anything but the Truth. And he who is all-knowing, who has a perfect comprehension of all things, cannot possibly make a mistake and tell us something that he “thinks” is true, but that actually is not.

Unlike our Protestant brethren, who have only their own individual and imperfect understanding of the Bible to rely on, we have the Holy Catholic Church to advise us with certainty about what God has revealed.  Our Lord promised that the Church would teach us in the Spirit of Truth, and our faith in these words of Christ allows us to have perfect certainty that whatever the Church teaches as a dogma is as true as if it came directly from the mouth of God himself.  It goes without saying that the Church’s mouthpiece, the Vicar of Christ himself, must be very careful about what he says or opines.  The less educated among the faithful are likely to accept what a pope says as being the absolute truth, even when it is nothing more than an opinion.  It is easy to misunderstand the actual scope and limitations of a pope’s infallibility, and we must always base our acquiescence to any pope on the traditional teaching of the Church.  This is itself based on divine revelation, which cannot be altered, modified, adjusted or otherwise changed to fit the latest inventions of modern thought and culture.  The Holy Ghost guides the Church in this respect, and our two thousand years of experience have allowed us to become a little complacent, lazy even, when we listen to and absorb the words of recent pontiffs.  Let’s renew our strict adherence to the truths that have never changed nor ever can be.  Of these truths we may be certain.

This certainty that our faith gives us is a wonderful gift from God.  Faith is one of the three cardinal virtues, around which revolve all the other virtues that we practice.  We must constantly pray for an increase of faith, calling out to God with the sinner, “O Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief!”  Our daily Act of Faith reinforces this virtue in our soul, and is a constant reminder how safe we are in trusting our Almighty Lord who can neither deceive nor be deceived.

Today’s Gospel is the opportunity for our annual reaffirmation of that faith.  We can never have enough faith, so long as it is placed in the truths of God and not in man.  A misplaced faith in the less than certain opinions of our fellow men—popes included—is something else entirely.  Trust in God, by all means, but be wary of the opinions of men—they are so often wrong, either deliberately, to trick us into falsity, or simply mistaken albeit sincere.  We may leave the judgment of their motivations to God, but in the meantime, we must treat what they say with caution, if not outright suspicion.

St. Thomas the Apostle was wrong, not because he didn’t trust the declarations of the other apostles that they had seen the risen Jesus.  He was wrong because he didn’t trust the words of our Lord himself, who had prophesied his own resurrection.  Let us reach out our hands to God this morning as he descends upon our altar in the Holy Eucharist, renewing our faith in him and him alone, and following St. Thomas in the reaffirmation of his faith, crying out with him “My Lord and my God!”