Like St. Peter’s, our faith is being tested right now.
Now, to be clear, I don’t believe the coronavirus is a punishment from God or an act of the devil. It’s not caused by demonic possession or the wrath of the Almighty for some transgression by our parents or grandparents. We’re long past those notions as a community of believers, or at least we should be.
On many Sundays, of our three Scripture passages, only the first reading and the Gospel are actually related. Often, if the first reading is from one of the prophets, our Gospel passage proclaims how Jesus is the fulfillment of that prophecy. In those cases, the prophet foreshadows the work and message of Jesus, not precisely in a fortune-telling way, but in a way the recognizes how the people of God B.C. were not quite following his rules and spiritual guidance. And the Gospel makes clear how Jesus came to complete the Law, not destroy it.
On those Sundays, the second reading — usually a letter from St. Paul — gently or firmly steers a group of believers back onto The Way of Christ. We humans do slip back into bad habits sometimes. The letters were written to Christian flocks in far-off places, and they were written to us. Hence their value.
Today, all three readings center around receiving and paying forward, and that blesses every one of us mightily.
Have you ever asked for something? Asked Mom or Dad or Uncle Mike or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny?
Did you get it? After you got it, was it really what you wanted? And even if you thought it was, did you get tired of it after a while? Or, after a long while, did you realize that, no, it really wasn’t what you wanted after all?
Back in the days of “Children should be seen and not heard” and “Because I said so,” Mom always justified those neanderthal rules with so-called “biological math”:
“You have two eyes and two ears but only one mouth. Which do you think are more important?”
And she, like all mothers, made a good point. If we don’t see and hear, if we don’t watch and listen, we don’t learn. If we don’t learn, we live in the dark.
Our solemnity today of the Body and Blood of Christ — Corpus Christi, in popular parlance — is a profound veneration of God’s gift of the Son to humanity as our Savior. Jesus gave us his literal body and blood as a sacrifice for our sins — those already committed and those yet to be committed — and he gave us his body and blood in the Eucharist so that we could do likewise in memory of him.
Now, if he were here with us today, and told us we had to eat his flesh and drink his blood, and we’d never heard that before, would we freak out as much as the Jews did in today’s Gospel?
As they were looking on,
he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight.
While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going,
suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them.
They said, “Men of Galilee,
why are you standing there looking at the sky?
This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven
will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”
Let’s join the friends of Jesus as they stood together that day in the First Century A.D., and for a moment let’s assume we have the same knowledge of science and other academic disciplines that they did.
The Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed — their names derive from the Latin “credo,” “I believe.” Even the most recent (and much-maligned) translation of the Roman Missal swapped in “I believe …” for the former “We believe …”, to assert that each of us individually embraces the truths contained in these statements of faith.
God the Father, the Creator.
Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten son, the Messiah who saved all of humanity from sin and death.
The Holy Spirit, who sustains humanity on our path home to God’s kingdom with abundant grace for all who ask for it.
These truths also form the core of the baptismal liturgy, spoken as the encapsulated promises that parents make on behalf of their children during this Sacrament of Initiation — promises that all the faithful renew during the Easter Vigil. The conclusion to this litany wraps it all up neatly and reverently: “This is our faith. This is the faith of the Church, and we are proud to profess it, through Christ Our Lord. Amen.”
(Quick aside: As a youngster I thought the Nicene Creed was the “nicer creed” because it didn’t say “hell” while the Apostles’ Creed did.)
So our creed, in whichever form we choose to proclaim, is a complete summary of who we are as Catholic Christians, a fits-in-your-pocket list of things we believe. Much like the oft-quoted/paraphrased “If you pray nothing else but ‘thank you,’ that’s enough,” from Meister Eckhart, our creed keeps beliefs simple, compact. Easy to break open.
And that’s a wonderful thing.
In today’s Gospel from the evangelist John, Jesus tells Didymus, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” Those include us, of course; we have not seen Jesus in the flesh.
And yet … we have, if we are in sync with the 25th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 25:33-40), seeing Christ in all humanity, especially the least of us.
Because true faith requires action, which will return — must return — when the coronavirus crisis ends. The second Letter of St. James (Jm 2:14-26) declares faith without works to be dead. Harsh, but true.
So let’s be un-harsh.
Faith with works is alive, very much so.
Now, what do we know about living things?
First, they must be fed. To feed faith, we have the Eucharist, the Word, the reflections and ponderings and insights of Church — us, all of us — guided by the Spirit. Check.
They need shelter. Our souls and our hearts are perfect places for faith to reside. Check.
Living things should be exercised regularly. That’s where doing good works comes in. We need only eyes to see and ears to hear to know what needs to be done. Even now, physically distancing from each other, we can use any number of technologies to be social, to support each other. To do little tasks for one another, six feet apart and heavily sanitized, that recognize Christ in all of us. Check.
They should be loved and embraced. Hmmm.
“Credo” is an action verb. When we were baptized, when we repented and reconciled for the first time, when we received First Holy Communion, even when we were confirmed, we were not supposed to put faith on auto-pilot. We weren’t supposed to say “Sounds good to me; I’ll buy in,” and aim ourselves in a straight line at a constant speed on a smooth path to Heaven. No adjustments ever needed.
No, we were not supposed to.
“Credo” is an action verb that guides our lives full of twists and turns. Lives with a whole lot of activity.
Activity requires choices, which is why we must choose to love and embrace our faith. To think about, to deeply ponder what we believe, and then wrap our arms around it.
Daily.
Hourly.
Maturely.
Children believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny out of simple faith. They believe in something that brings them joy, and when they learn the truth, depending on how old and how mature they are, either they move on and they’re fine, or they have to have their naive belief pried from them, and they’re heartbroken.
As adults, we’re blessed with greater wisdom, greater experience, and far more options. We’re blessed with a grown-up, two-way relationship with God.
We’re blessed with the joy of Easter truth — that Jesus died for us, for all of humanity, to fulfill God’s promise of salvation. That Jesus rose from the dead of his own accord, to destroy death and show the way to the rooms he is preparing for us in his Father’s house. That Jesus is with us always, and that his Spirit is with us anytime we call.
There are many ways we as Christians can be the sheep of Jesus on judgment day, can be the ones who fed and clothed and visited him, even without immediately recognizing him. That’s faith with works, faith in action.
But consider this: The first thing we can do to put faith into action is to believe. To choose to believe. To choose to grab hold of the faith the way a parent holds a child’s hand in a crosswalk, the way a lifeguard clings to a drowning person and swims to shore, the way a person in peril finds that last ounce of strength when they’re dangling off the edge of a cliff.
To choose to weave Truth, God’s Truth, all of it, into the very fabric of who we are.
No, we haven’t seen the 33-year-old Nazarene carpenter and touched his wounds, as Thomas was finally able to, but we do see wounded 3-year-olds and 63-year-olds and 93-year-olds, and our active, energized faith is our blessing to them.
Children believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny out of simple faith. They believe in something that brings them joy, and when they learn the truth, depending on how old and how mature they are, either they move on and they’re fine, or they have to have their naive belief pried from them, and they’re heartbroken.