Word to the Wise
Tuesday, July 3, 2012 - July 3 - St. Thomas, Apostle
[Eph 2:19-22 and John 20:24-29]You are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone.
There are still plenty of us alive in the United States who can remember certain lessons from the Baltimore Catechism! One of those lessons came from answering the question: What are the four marks of the church? The response was: One, Holy, Catholic and APOSTOLIC. I put the last one in capital letters because we are celebrating today the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle. The quote from St.Paul's letter to the Ephesians was intended to remind them of the tremendous impact of their baptismal faith and what it included by way of belonging! They were (and we are) among those included in Jesus' statement at the end of today's gospel scripture from the Gospel of John: "Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed."
Faith is really both a noun (in the sense of content or WHAT we believe) and a verb (in the sense of what we DO when we believe). Scripture scholars tell us that in the Gospel of John, faith is always a verb! Thus, Thomas' struggle to come to terms with what he had just heard from his fellow disciples about Jesus' appearance to them and his subsequent profession can be something all of us can relate to in our own experience. However, we know that we do believe in certain truths that have been "handed down" (to use St. Paul's expression) to us from the first apostolic preaching. We express these truths in the creeds that are part of our tradition (the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the creed of Pope Paul VI, etc). There is a lot of content in St. Thomas' profession as well! I find it spiritually helpful to reflect on the very strong personalities among the apostles (including St. Paul). In Thomas, we have the role of the skeptic, and that fits in well with the impusiveness of Peter, the bluntness of St. Paul, the ambition of James and John, etc. We do not simply inherit what they handed down. We inherit THEM as well. They are our "fellow citizens" in the communion of saints. If they, with all their challenges, among the blessed, we have a lot of hope for ourselves! AMEN
config
view
logs
3840.0 KB
78 ms
4
