“Now a week later his disciples were again inside

and Thomas was with them.

Jesus came, although the doors were locked,

and stood in their midst and said, ‘Peace be with you.’

Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands,

and bring your hand and put it into my side,

and do not be unbelieving, but believe.’

Thomas answered and said to him, ‘My Lord and my God!’

Jesus said to him, ‘Have you come to believe because you have seen me?

Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.’”

“They devoted themselves

to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life,

to the breaking of bread and to the prayers…

And every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

Seeing is believing, so the saying goes. For Thomas, it certainly was. He didn’t believe the testimony of his closest friends. He wouldn’t accept their eye witness account of Jesus appearing to them. He had little else to go on and all the other evidence and his experience pointed to a dead messiah. As I have shared in a previous article, Jesus is the primordial sacrament of God. Jesus is the visible sign of God’s invisible grace, to paraphrase St. Augustine. He is the full revelation of God and is the Word made flesh. This is the Jesus that Thomas knew. This is the Jesus that Thomas saw crucified. A week later, when he appears again with Thomas present, Thomas gives us the clearest statement of Jesus’s divinity by exclaiming, “My Lord and my God!” His disbelief has turned into belief. Jesus is alive and he is God. 

I had also previously shared that the church is the sacrament of Jesus. After he walked and talked, ate and drank, preached and healed, died and rose again among us, Jesus was assumed into heaven. He returned to the Father so that, in his humanity, where he has gone, we may also go. He is no longer here, but he has left the church to be his body on earth. Empowered by the gift of the Holy Spirit, the church is the visible sign of Jesus’s invisible grace. The closest any of Jesus’s disciples got to seeing the Father was in seeing Jesus. The closest anyone can get to seeing Jesus now on earth, is in seeing the church. You and I are called to embody Jesus. We are called to put flesh on God’s love for others. It is through God’s work in the church that bread and wine become Jesus’s body and blood in the Eucharist. It is through the reception of Jesus’s body and blood that we are transformed and sent to be his body for others. You and I are the closest anyone will ever get to seeing Jesus on earth. 

The early church was marked by their devotion to the apostles’ teaching, based on the scriptures and the Word made flesh, to living life together in love for others, to the presence of Jesus in the Eucharistic breaking of bread, and to communion with God in prayer. These things mark the church as different from the world. They give witness to our risen savior. They embody Jesus Christ. These are still the things that mark our communities of St. Boniface and St. Patrick. In the early church, the encounter with Jesus and living an authentic communal life in his love resulted in the Lord adding to their number daily those who were being saved. We are a community of those who are being saved. We are not perfect, sometimes far from it, but Jesus is in our midst and in us. May others come to see Jesus in us, a visible sign of his invisible grace, and come to believe. The closest anyone will get to seeing Jesus on earth is seeing us.