Today is Divine Mercy Sunday in the Catholic calendar. It’s also known as Doubting Thomas’s Sunday, for today at Mass we read the portion of the Gospel of John that recounts the Apostle Thomas’s transition from disbelief to belief. Notably, the risen Christ invited Thomas to satisfy himself with physical evidence: the wounds in His resurrected body.
There’s a huge message in that. Jesus could have dismissed Thomas’s disbelief with a sniff and an offhand remark: “Ten of you believe; that is sufficient. What need have I of an eleventh?” He did not. He invited Thomas to do what was necessary to achieve belief.
He wants all of us, if we will have Him. Every man that ever lives will be offered salvation at every moment of his life, including the very last one. C.S. Lewis illustrated that in That Hideous Strength, in the demise of arch-materialist Augustus Frost.
Still not asking what he would do or why, Frost went to the garage. The whole place was silent and empty; the snow was thick on the ground by this. He came up with as many petrol tins as he could carry. He piled all the inflammables he could think of together in the Objective Room. Then he locked himself in by locking the outer door of the anteroom. Whatever it was that dictated his actions then compelled him to push the key into the speaking tube which communicated with the passage. When he had pushed it as far in as his fingers could reach, he took a pencil from his pocket and pushed with that. Presently he heard the clink of the key falling on the passage floor outside. That tiresome illusion, his consciousness, was screaming to protest; his body, even had he wished, had no power to attend to those screams. Like the clockwork figure he had chosen to be, his stiff body, now terribly cold, walked back into the Objective Room, poured out the petrol and threw a lighted match into the pile. Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul—nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half-saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that. With one supreme effort he flung himself back into his illusion. In that attitude eternity overtook him as sunrise in old tales overtakes and turns them into unchangeable stone.
A similar scene occurs near the end of the movie God’s Not Dead:
Salvation is continuously on offer to every man that lives. That is the ultimate meaning of the Infinite Mercy of God.
May God bless and keep you all.
