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     The daily gospel scripture for the next few days will be taken from Jesus' "Farewell Discourse" at the Last Supper.  Scripture scholars tell us that it is useless to try and impose a logical structure on this part of the gospel except to say that Jesus was preparing the disciples for what was to come, and in doing so, has left us a tapestry of preaching about his mission, his relationship to his Father and his promise of the Holy Spirit.  The Evangelist may have had several different traditions or memories of that evening which he used to reconstruct the scene and may have used statements from other points in Jesus' ministry.  We cannot be certain.  What we do have is rich and powerful, like a dessert whose many flavors we can try to identify but which come together more or less to create a single dish.

     In today's passage, Jesus' reply to Thomas has taken on a life of its own in Christian tradition to the point that some interpreters have used it to dismiss billions of people to hell because they never explicitly expressed faith in Jesus even if they had never heard of him!!!!  That is a distorted interpretation, to put it mildly.  Jesus is indeed the "way and the truth and the life" and many will benefit from his mission to the world on behalf of his Father, just as in ordinary life we may benefit mightily from the actions of a single person who makes a momentous discovery, but whom we may never meet or get to know.  At the same time, there are those of us who do know and have faith in Jesus, as he exhorts us at the beginning of this gospel passage:  "Do not let your hearts be troubled.  You have faith in God in God; have faith also in me."  It is up to us to make him known.  As St. Paul says in his Letter to the Romans: "But how can they call on him in whom they have not believed?  And how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard?  And how can they hear without someone to preach?  And how can people preach unless they are sent?"    Our baptism is our being "sent."  After his resurrection, Jesus tells the disciples, "As the Father has sent me, so also do I send you!" [John 20:21].  

     There is more to come from the Farewell Discourse to challenge us for the next few days.  Stay tuned!  AMEN