Dear Sisters, dear brethren, the words which ended the Gospel reading you have just heard seem originally to have been the closing words of St John’s account of all that he wanted to tell the Church about our Lord. At the end of this dramatic revelation of the risen Christ, first of all to the ten apostles without Thomas, then to the eleven with Thomas, our Lord commends Thomas’s words of faith, ‘My Lord and my God’ with these words: ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’ Those would have been the final words spoken by our Lord in this Gospel until the 21st chapter was added to make a new and different end of this Gospel, and how wonderfully reassuring those words of our Lord’s are to us, none of whom has yet seen our Lord in His human form.
I want to reflect a little on the significance of these final words in the light of what St John goes on to say himself in the following sentence which brought our Gospel reading and this chapter to an end, namely: ‘Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book.; these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.’
This is the entire purpose for which St John has written down his Gospel; it is so that we may have faith in Jesus in two essential ways: first as the Christ, that is the ‘anointed one’ or Messiah, and secondly as the Son of God. As Christ, Jesus is a very special man: He is the one anointed by the Holy Spirit to be the Redeemer of the world. Being our Redeemer is described as a particular work Jesus was given to do, a work that was to bring us to faith in Him. Exactly what is so important about having faith in Him will become clear in a few moments. The work of being our Redeemer was carried out by Jesus in all His signs, or miracles, and in His teaching, but most of all in His Passion, Death and Resurrection which we have just been celebrating. Those events, the events of Holy Week and Easter, are the climax and fulfilment of his work. But there is more to this than literally meets the eye. For all that is visible in Jesus is the human element. He is truly man. But there is also that about Him which is not visible to us: He is truly God as well as man. He is, in fact, as St John says here: ‘the Son of God’. That is more than a merely honorific title. It is the essence of what Jesus is in Himself. He is Almighty God who has become man in order to become the Christ, the anointed Redeemer. He is uniquely the Son of the Eternal Father, equal to Him in all ways.
Now what is so important about having faith in Jesus Christ, about believing in Him? It is that by this faith in Him we may, as John puts it, ‘have life in His name’. So, according to John, faith in our Lord, and life, belong inseparably together. Faith is not just some kind of abstract mental act. Nor is it just speaking or thinking in a certain way. It is about a wholly new way of life, a wholly new way of living in God. Note that I am not saying living with God, but in Him. For St John, faith has begun a wholly new kind of existence for those who are privileged to have been given it, a life which begins here in this world, but which looks forward to, and will be fulfilled in, eternal life in heaven.
What does this mean? Life in Christ is for St John the entire purpose of our Lord’s having become Man, and having died and risen to new life. This new life is a spiritual life, the one for which we were created by God in the first place – a life which was lost to us because of the sin of our first parents, and a loss which is continued whenever we sin. But once we have been set free from sin, then we do truly begin to live the life which we hope to live fully in heaven.
In order to understand what St John means by faith and life here in the Gospel, we must turn back to the second reading, taken from St John’s first letter to those he addresses as his own children whom he has begotten in baptism. Here we heard these words: ‘Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ has been begotten by God, and whoever loves the Father that begot him loves the child whom He begets.’ In baptism we were born anew, and in that birth God became our Father, not just metaphorically, but in reality. It is only because of this new birth that we are able to address God as ‘Our Father’. Without the new birth of baptism we simply could not do so except in a sort of poetic way. But God is truly our Father and we are truly His children through the new birth of baptism, and it is to baptism that we must turn to understand all this yet more fully.
At the Easter Vigil throughout the world the sacrament of baptism was celebrated in which many men and women were given the new birth by which they, like us who have already been baptised, became God’s sons and daughters. But there is only one person who can by nature be called Son of God, and that is Christ Jesus. As St John said at the end of today’s Gospel reading: ‘these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that believing this you may have life in His name.’ Baptism, then, makes us into God’s sons and daughters by adoption, after the model of the Only Son of God by nature, Jesus Christ our Lord and Redeemer.
Now I have said that a new life has begun in us at our baptism. What sort of life is it, in fact? It is a life lived in unity with God and by leaving behind the old ways of sin and of the world. The world seems often to be very real and very enticing, but it is only full of empty promises and comes all to soon to an end in death. But the life we have been given in baptism endures to eternal life. Yet we would be very mistaken if we thought that this new life was something that made no demands on us. Leaving the ways of the world behind takes courage and something more: grace and love. St John emphasises constantly the power of God’s love to transform us into the ever greater likeness of Christ. He asks this question: ‘who can overcome the world?’ and he answers: ‘only the man who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.’ This is our new life: faith in Jesus and life in Him.
Life in Him. What does that mean? It means two things: first of all, obeying God’s commandments. These commands are not difficult for those who love God, says St John, because the difficulty comes from the world and Christ has overcome the world already by his death and resurrection. We share in the effects of that by our faith, which comes with baptism and becoming God’s children.
But there is something else which must not be missed. John says that Jesus the Son of God became man so that He might come to us ‘by water and blood’. What does he mean? He means that Jesus comes to us not only by His incarnation but by His death and resurrection. It is especially from His death and resurrection that He gives to us both the water of baptism and the blood of Holy Communion. The sacraments which we celebrate are the life of whoever believes that Jesus is the Son of God. For these sacraments are not empty rites, but the actual lifeblood of the Church, guaranteed as true and real by the Holy Spirit who has also been sent to the Church as a witness to the truth that Jesus is Son of God, Redeemer, and is the risen Saviour who raises us up to new life in baptism. The water of baptism planted in us a seed which is nourished by the food of Holy Communion. This food prepares us for our own bodily resurrection to eternal life with God our Father, with God the Son our brother, and with God the Holy Spirit who is the love of God poured into our hearts.
This is what Thomas came to believe when he beheld Christ’s wounds: not signs of death but of new life communicated to us in Christ’s body and blood. So too we can say at Mass: 'My Lord and my God’, looking forward to that day when we will behold with ecstatic joy those wounds, knowing that we have been made alive by them for ever. This is what it means to ‘have life in His name’.
Make A Comment
Comments (0)