Known by His Wounds: Homily for Divine Mercy Sunday One Catholic Life

If you have been listening to the Bible in a Year podcast and are still on schedule,

then you probably finished listening to the Gospel of John on Good Friday.

Don’t worry if you’re not on schedule,

my family and I are a little behind, too.

But if you are on schedule, then during Holy Week

you heard John describe all the many signs and wonders

that Jesus worked:

He turned water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana.

He cured the official’s son from a distance.

He healed the man who had been blind, lame and paralyzed for 38 years;

he cured another blind man by making mud and smearing it in his eyes.

He raised Lazarus from the dead.

We have all heard these stories before,

and we know that the signs and wonders

that Jesus worked while he lived among us

were meant to encourage the people to believe in him.

Today we’re told that that is the very purpose of John’s Gospel:

“these are written that you may come to believe

that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God…”

The signs and wonders Jesus performed were powerful and effective,

even if they were temporary.

Jesus turned water into wine

that was gone once the wedding guests drank it up.

He gave sight to blind eyes that would soon be closed again in death.

He raised Lazarus from the dead only for him to die again.

His bodily cures did not last forever,

and they were never meant to.

But he used those visible signs and wonders,

those temporary cures

to build up people’s faith,

to bring about eternal healing and salvation.

Some might say we need those signs and wonders today,

that since Jesus no longer works such miracles among us,

the Church was better off in its early days.

We might wish to see signs and wonders with our own eyes:

Jesus curing cancer in our friends and family,

or driving out the demons of addiction and depression.

Surely a little extra wine at our wedding this summer would be nice.

Then, like the early disciples,

we would be more easily able to believe in him,

and so would all those we know who have fallen away from the Church.

But let us not be jealous of those early Christians

who had the signs and wonders of Jesus in person

to help them in their belief.

On the contrary, as St. Augustine says,

today Jesus puts those who have never seen and yet believe

ahead of those who believe only because they see.

Even those who lived with Jesus and saw him every day

struggled with their belief.

So fragile was the disciples’ faith at that time,

that even when they saw the Lord

they found it necessary to touch him

before they could believe he had really risen from the dead.

They were unable to believe the testimony of their own eyes,

until they had touched his body

and explored his wounds with their fingers.

Only after this could Thomas,

the most hesitant of all the disciples, exclaim:

“My Lord and my God!”

It was by his wounds that Christ,

who had so often healed the many wounds of others,

came to be recognized himself.

They knew him by his wounds.

Now we might ask:

couldn’t the Lord have risen with a body

without any wounds at all,

a body with no scars?

And we know he certainly could have;

but he knew that his disciples carried within their hearts

a wound so deep that the only way to cure it

was to keep the scars of his own wounds in his body.

The disciples had left everything behind to follow him.

They had devoted their lives to him,

only to see him brutally crucified like a common criminal,

and buried in a tomb, dead and gone,

like all their hopes and dreams, seemingly.

Their pain and disappointment was a gaping woundbr ...