And this book taught me a very important lesson. On page 55, there’s a picture of the Priest holding up the host, entitled “The Changing of the Bread.” Here is what it says: “This is the holiest part of the Mass. The priest first changes the bread into the living body of Jesus. He uses the same words Jesus used. He then raises the Sacred Host over his head for you to see. It is really Jesus. Look at it and say: “My Lord and my God.”
And I learned, a few years later, where those words came from. You heard them too, just a few minutes ago. They are the words spoken by Thomas when he touched the wounds of Jesus and realized that it is not a ghost he is seeing, but “My Lord and my God.”
Thomas had a hard time believing it was the Lord without being able to see and touch him. “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe,” he stubbornly insisted.
But then, eight days later, Jesus again appears to his disciples in the upper room, including even Thomas. And Jesus says to him: "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it into my side; do not be faithless, but believing.”
And then Thomas says it: the same words little Jimmy learned to say on the day of his First Communion: “My Lord and my God!”
And then Jesus, thinking of little Jimmy, says the last words to Thomas in today’s Gospel ‘You have believed, Thomas because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’
Saint Thomas Aquinas was addressing the same reality when he wrote the famous Catholic hymn we call the Pange Lingua, or the Tantum ergo. You probably know the most famous stanza by heart, even in Latin:
Tantum ergo Sacramentum
Hence so greatly the Sacrament
Veneremur cernui:
Let us venerate with heads bowed
Et antiquum documentum
And let the old practice
Novo cedat ritui:
Give way to a new rite;
Præstet fides supplementum
Let faith supply or supplement or make up for
Sensuum defectui.
How the senses fail.
Or, as the old English translation puts it:
Faith for all defects supplying,
Where the feeble senses fail.
Senses fail. Usually our senses do a good job. Saint Thomas (the one from Aquino) understood this. In his famous Summa Theologica, he describes both exterior and interior “sensitive faculties.” There are five exterior senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch). But then he describes four interior senses: consciousness (or common sense), imagination, instinct and memory.
Now in a few minutes we will recite the Creed, the summary of what we believe has been revealed to us by God. We will say that we believe in God, although we have not seen him. And we will profess that we believe that he made heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible. Even though, by definition, we have not see the invisible things (namely angels and demons). We have not seen, but we still believe! We have not touched, but we still believe!
And so we go back to Jesus’ last words to Thomas: ‘You have believed, Thomas because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’ And we believe because we have Faith. This same faith which Saint Paul today calls our victory over the world.
In the Letter to the Hebrews we read the definition of Faith: “Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.”
Such Faith is a gratuitous gift of God’s grace, and the origin and essence of that Faith is in knowing the Lord Jesus way down deep inside.
- the same Jesus who walked into the room where the doors were locked and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
- the same Jesus who walks through all the doors we have locked with our fears, our terrors and our sins….who walks into our hearts and says, “Peace be with you.”
and our the terrors
- The same Jesus you first knew as a little child, kneeling beside the bed, trying to remember which shoulder to touch with the sign of the cross.
- The same Jesus who delivered you from all the real and imagined fears of adolescent selfishness and who taught you to love and to laugh and to forgive.
- The same Jesus who showed you a path he had laid out just for you and introduced you to all those people he wanted to you to love.
- The same Jesus who gives you meaning and satisfaction and purpose and direction.
- The same Jesus who rescues you, again and again, from your selfishness, foolishness and sin.
- The same Jesus who died for you on that Cross and rose triumphant from the tomb that you might never really fear death again.
-The same Jesus who will return in glory to judge the living and the dead and who will raise up your mortal body from the tomb.
- The same Jesus whom we see with our hearts and touch with our souls when the priest raises up a little piece of bread, consecrated and transformed into his Body.
- The same Jesus whom we approach, trembling with Thomas and with all the Church, whom we look upon and touch and say: “My Lord and my God.”
