Sermon for Divine Mercy Sunday (Easter 2)
preached by Fr Christopher Woods, Vicar of St Barnabas
Gospel reading: John 20: 19-31
The disciples in this morning’s Gospel are not in a state of Easter triumph, are they? They are gathered behind locked doors, fearful, and uncertain at what sort of world they are now living in. They have heard strange and astonishing reports, but they are still carrying the shock of the crucifixion. Their hearts have not yet caught up with the news of the Lord’s Resurrection. The author of John’s gospel gives us, in other words, not a polished picture of the Church, but a truthful one. The early Church begins as a group of frightened people into whose midst the Risen Christ comes.
That is already a consolation, because it means that the presence of the Lord is not dependent upon the emotional maturity or spiritual ‘success’ of the disciples. Jesus does not wait until they are serene, calm, and devoutly composed. He comes while they are still afraid. And the first thing he gives them is peace.
This peace is deeper than reassurance or comfort. It is the gift of his own risen life, the beginning of a restored world. The author of John’s Gospel suggests that peace necessarily belongs to reconciliation and to the healing of what sin and violence have torn apart. And so, when Christ stands among them and says, “Peace be with you,” he is not merely calming their nerves. He is giving them a share in the life that has conquered death.
It is impossible to hear those words of Jesus in these days without feeling how far our world seems from peace. We live amid dreadful conflict, where war, displacement and fury have so deformed the lives of countless people. The scale of suffering can make religious language seem thin or evasive. When children are buried, when homes are destroyed, when memories harden into vengeance, people do not ask frivolously where the mercy of God is to be found. The want to know genuinely where they can find it. They ask because they are struggling to see how mercy can still be spoken of at all.
The Gospel answers this question with remarkable sobriety. The risen Christ does not appear untouched by what has happened to him.
He shows the disciples his hands and his side. The wounds remain visible in his Resurrected body. Easter is not presented as the eradication of Good Friday, as though suffering were simply brushed aside by magic. The one who stands before these disciples in glory is the same one who was crucified. His risen life does not erase the wounds; it transfigures them.
That matters for us. St Thomas Aquinas says that Christ retained his wounds after the resurrection for our sake: as signs of his victory, as grounds for the strengthening of faith, and as an everlasting plea for mercy before the Father. The wounds remain because love remains. The marks of violence have not vanished, but neither do they any longer speak of defeat. They have become, in the risen Christ, signs of a love that has gone to the uttermost and has not been overcome.
That is why the mercy of God is not something abstract. It is not a vague religious assurance that things will somehow turn out well in the end. It is the mercy revealed in Jesus Christ, who has been subjected to human cruelty and grief, and who bears the marks of that descent. The Christian answer to the suffering of the world is therefore not a theory. It is a person.
This is also why Thomas the Apostle is so important. He will not accept the resurrection second hand. He cannot rest in the testimony of others when his own heart is not yet able to hold it. There is something refreshing and honest about him! He wants the truth, and he wants a truth robust enough to bear the weight of the cross. Jesus does not reject him for this. He visits him again, and he offers Thomas exactly what Thomas needed: the wounded body, the pierced hands, the opened side. St Gregory the Great says that the doubts of Thomas was more useful to us than the immediate faith of the others, because through it we are brought to a firmer grasp of the reality of the resurrection. Thomas is not a nuisance. His doubt is a gift. Through him, room is made for those whose faith is costly, whose hearts do not move quickly, and who cannot speak glibly in the face of suffering.
That has a great deal to say to the Church now. We do not serve Christ well by sounding too certain too quickly. There are moments in history when the suffering of the world makes easy piety intolerable. The Church must be able to remain near the wounds, because the Lord remains near the wounds. We must not offer explanations where only compassion and prayer will do. We must not promise cheap peace where justice has been abandoned. We must not speak of mercy as though it were softness. Divine mercy is difficult, because it is the radiance of crucified love.
And this is where our life as Christians comes into sharp focus. The Church is called to become, by grace, a place where the mercy of Christ is encountered and embodied. The Acts of the Apostles gives us a glimpse of that life in its earliest form: the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayers, the holding of goods in common, gladness of heart and a generosity of spirit. The risen life of Christ takes flesh in sacrament, worship and acts of charity. It becomes visible in a community that is learning how to live together under the mercy of God.
So when Thomas at last sees the Lord for himself ‘wounds and all’, his response is one of adoration: “My Lord and my God.” That is where the Gospel leaves us. Not with everything tidied up, not with every question answered, but with Christ present in the midst of his people, and still bearing the signs of his love. To worship him there is not to turn away from the suffering of the world. It is to place the suffering of the world where alone it can finally be held: within the mercy of God.
