Fr. Bob White
I was over at my brother’s last Sunday for Easter. My nephew Bobby whom I baptized is now a strapping teenager. In the last year or so he’s put on fifteen pounds of muscle. My fear was that he was going to challenge me to an arm -wrestling match. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. I was off the hook. But if it had the challenge would have been a test of grit, not for Bobby but for me.
If a test of grit is one thing, a test of faith is another, like happened for Thomas in the Gospel story we heard for today. The apostles are all excited because they’d seen the Lord. But Thomas wasn’t there, and he was having, his doubts.
Thomas’ skepticism is often seen as a lack of faith, a weakness on his part. Yet, it took courage for Thomas to admit his struggle. If he was going to come to believe he knew he couldn’t be pressured into it. He was honest enough to tell the others that he wasn’t there yet.
Coming to faith, coming believe, it’s not just about giving intellectual ascent to certain creeds and dogmas. It’s much more than that. It’s about coming to believe in a person, Jesus Christ, the one who shows us the way home.
The faith we were born into, we have to make it our own. As we attempt to do that we may struggle to make sense of it all. That’s okay. Just as stumbling is what a toddler does learning to walk so like Thomas we stumble at times as we work to make faith our own. Coming to a deeper faith, it’s work. But Thomas got there and so can we.
And, parents, if your young adult son or daughter currently may not be going to mass, hand in there. Sometimes it isn’t that they’ve lost their faith. It may be that they’re just trying to find their faith. And they’re doing it in their own way and in their own time.
In the meantime, share why we mass is important to you and what your faith means to you. And then give them over to the care of God. It’s the best you can do. It’s all you have to do.
This is what Jesus did for Thomas. As Thomas struggled to come to faith Jesus encouraged Thomas by being vulnerable enough to show Thomas his wounds. And what Jesus says to Thomas he says to us, “Come, bring to me your doubts and struggles and touch my wounds and see that I am real.
Thomas’ procession of faith was the condensed version. “My Lord and my God”. Ours is similar. If an arm-wrestling match is a test of grit and coming to believe is a test of faith, then making faith our own is bit of both, grit and faith. Doubting Thomas demonstrated both and his faith became real. And so, for us, our faith becomes real as we have the courage to be honest and the trust to surrender. Courage and trust, thy them out for this week and see how it goes.
