2^nd Sunday of Easter [Year B – 2003] 

(Church of the Redeemer)

1 John 5:1-6 & John 20:19-31

The Rev. William Campbell, SJ

Executive Director, Nativity Preparatory School 

                In the year 1521, a young soldier joined a military campaign to defend his king’s castle. In the course of that battle, a cannon ball shattered his leg, and during the lengthy period of recovery that followed, he developed a profound, if raw, religious orientation. He was an avid reader, yet he had access to only two books: one about saints and a copy of the Bible. This brave soldier would spend his bed-ridden days dreaming that he was either a knight performing great deeds and securing glory for himself or that he was one of the holy men and women about whom he had read. As the months passed, he noted his own moods after each daydream. He realized that the dreams that brought himself glory left him feeling unsettled over the long term, whereas the dreams in which he fancied himself doing great deeds for God’s greater glory filled him with consolation.

During the next year, in which he traveled to the Holy Land, the now chastened soldier-turned-pilgrim returned to his homeland of Spain, and once there, wrote down the experience of his spiritual journey as an instructional manual for others. Today, we know this manual as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. These Exercises serve as a prayerful guide for decision-making. They urge us to be attentive to the calling that God has for each of us through the choices we make in this life. And their ultimate goal aims for a personal freedom before God and one another – an uninhibited capacity to respond in love to the God who creates us and who sustains us.

Clearly, this prayerful goal of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, is not unique to Ignatius or the Jesuits. It’s really a re-crafting of the desire that Christians throughout the ages have located in the sacramental act we call baptism, and it is what each of us strives for when we utter a profession of faith, like the disciple Thomas does in today’s gospel: “My Lord and my God.” How we respond to God’s loving call, now that is unique to each of us, and for St. Ignatius and the Jesuits, the response has long included the education of youth. But that we respond to God’s call, now that’s common to us all.

For several years now, I have assisted at the Jesuit parish of St. Ignatius, just up the road. One year, I had the responsibility of meeting with families as they prepared to celebrate the sacrament of baptism. We would gather in a room in the rectory, and like the disciples in today’s gospel, the anxiety level was quite high. I would begin each new meeting by asking an obvious question: “Why do you want to have your baby baptized?” I always marveled at the range of answers I received. Some would offer me a traditional theology explaining the need to cleanse their child from original. Some would speak of their desire to identify their child with a larger community of believers. And then others would speak from the heart with a candor and honesty that you just had to appreciate. “Because, if we don’t get this baby baptized,” they would say, “my mother will kill us!”

(Later this morning/in a few moments), we will welcome several new members into our Christian community. We do well to remember what we hope for them and for ourselves. Baptism is an initiation into the people of God: it is a public ritual that declares one’s membership into an extended family of like-believing people. Baptism is a call to discipleship: it is a declaration to live one’s life according to the requirements of the Gospel message as preached by Jesus. Baptism is a commissioning: it admits that one’s membership into this community of believers requires active participation, a willingness to minister to others in the name of Jesus. Baptism is a cleansing of original sin: it humbly states our need for the sustaining love of a redeeming God. And baptism is a dedication before this God: it is a graceful request that this God bless our lives.

This list in no way exhausts the aims we locate in our sacrament of baptism. But all authentic aims must share this reality: that baptism is a dramatic orienting of our lives, as individuals and as a community, to the transforming action of God. And isn’t this what our celebration of Easter is all about? The 19^th century Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once wrote: “Let him Easter is us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us…” His resurrection prayer captures this powerful, dramatic, dizzying reminder of the great mystery of God’s loving action in our lives.

And so too, does Thomas’s plainspoken proclamation: “My Lord and my God.” Thomas and his fellow disciples remind us that no matter how uncertain we can be in naming God’s grace in our own lives or of letting other’s name it for us, God will burst forth into the void of this uncertainty and offer us peace. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe! It is my prayer for your catechumens, their sponsors and this entire faith community that your dreams may fill you with consolations of God’s greater glory and I pray that you will let this loving God Easter within you…

Return to the sermons page