I usually try to reflect on all of the readings for the day and to integrate them into a single focus, but today I reflect on only on the last verse from today’s Gospel (John 6:40): “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life, and I shall raise him on the last day.”
How and when do we see Jesus?
My insights on this come primarily from a sermon I remember from when I was a young boy. I will paraphrase the main ideas that stuck with me here. Father started out by producing a box of cake mix and a package of flower seeds. He asked us children what we thought was inside the boxes. Of course, because we could, by that time, read, we knew. He then asked us why we thought that a cake mix would turn into a cake and that a seed would turn into a flower? We answered that we had seen it happen before.
From little children on, we learn to make sense of the world by what we see. Seeing is believing, we are taught. That is how Thomas approached his faith. He needed to see the risen Lord’s wounds before he could believe. And Thomas did see them, and he believed. Where does that leave us? No one since Thomas has had that experience, and yet we gather in churches on Sunday, and many of us during the week, because we believe in the real presence of Jesus in our midst.
But I think that we need to think about the relationship between seeing and believing differently. With wisdom, we learn that the relationship is the other way around. Believing is seeing. As we grow older, we learn that you cannot always believe what we see or hear. Take, as an example, the evening news. Not everything reported turns out to be true.
Jesus knows about human skepticism and bias. He knows he could not count on material evidence to convince us that he truly was the Son of God. “I told you that although you have seen me, you do not believe” (John 6:36). The point here is that our faith in the resurrection isn’t about seeing the material body of Christ. What we really need to learn is how to see with our believing. Believing is seeing.
It is through our faith that we can see Jesus. It is through our faith that we can see the wounds and the scars of his suffering when we look at each other. It is through our faith that we can see Christ in the pain and suffering in ourselves and that of others. It is through our faith that we believe Jesus was sent by the Father to suffer on our behalf with the ultimate wound of death. It is through our faith that we see the Son. It is through our faith that we know that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.
Next time you go to church, don’t just look down or straight ahead. Don’t concentrate on what is written in our missals. Don’t be saying a Rosary during Mass. Look around at the other people. Watch the priest during the consecration of the Eucharist. Jesus is there. Believing is seeing.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!