Easter II, 2026

 “I don't want to walk and talk about Jesus,

I just want to see His face.”
—Mick Jagger

Knowledge. This morning’s Gospel, if it is about anything at all, is about knowledge.

Another Thomas—Thomas Aquinas—believed that the whole Christian faith is about knowledge. He taught that the “knowledge of God is the end of all things,” and that the Christian life consists in growing in the knowledge of the love of God. Little by little, he said, we become more aware of the depths of God’s love for us, until at last we are overwhelmed by its immensity.

Heaven—what he called the Beatific Vision—is simply living in complete awareness of, and awe before, God. There, all we can do is fall down in worship, because all we experience is the love of God and the sheer joy it engenders. We were created to know and to love God, and that goal finds its completion in heaven with Him.

Last week, we celebrated the Sacred Triduum—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter—and we remembered the depths of God’s love for us. Through the Church’s liturgy, we enacted the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ and were made witnesses to those events ourselves. We saw, heard, tasted, and even smelled the love of Jesus, who died and rose for us. Through the liturgy, the mystery of God’s love was made known.

So often when Lorrin and I are walking through the supermarket, she turns to me as we pass by the floral department and says, 

“You never buy me flowers!”

Of course, I do buy her flowers—just not as often as I probably should.

The flowers, you see, are a sign—an emblem—of love. While flowers are lovely in themselves, it is what they represent that matters most. When you give a loved one flowers, they become a visible reminder of your love, a tangible expression of what is in your heart. It is a way of making love known.

And as human beings, we cannot get enough of that. We need affirmation. We need confirmation that we are loved. In the darkness of this world, we need the shining light of love.

In this morning’s Gospel, the risen Jesus shows the disciples the wounds He bore for their sake. He does not show them to prove the truth of His claims, but so that they might know the depths of His love for them. He shows them His wounds and says, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

In other words: the love that God has given to you through me—share it with others.

Then He gives them the Holy Spirit and sends them out to spread the knowledge of that love. He is charting the course of Christian discipleship: to know God and to share that knowledge with the world.

Thomas, the namesake of our parish, was not present for this encounter. Naturally, he wanted the same experience. He wanted to know this love for himself. He wanted to see the wounds that proved it.

And when the risen Jesus appears to him, Thomas places his fingers in the wounds. He sees. He touches. He knows.

And Jesus says to him, “Do not doubt, but believe.”

And then He continues: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Blessed are those who have not placed their fingers in the wounds, yet still trust in the love of God made manifest on the hard wood of the Cross. Blessed are those who will believe because that love has been made known in the lives of His disciples.

Thomas gets a bad reputation. He has become an icon of doubt, set against faithful belief. But Thomas is like all of us—he wants to know. He wants to see that what his heart hopes is true really is true. He does not want merely to talk about Jesus; he wants to see His face.

His longing is our longing.

As Christians, we all long to behold the risen Lord—to look into His eyes and know how deeply we are loved. And so we spend much of our lives trusting in that love, even when we do not see it clearly at every step.

That is why we are here—gathered together this morning (or evening) as a community. We are here to behold the depths of God’s love for us, revealed in Jesus Christ, whose life, death, and resurrection perfectly embody that love.

And if we truly understand the love that has been offered to us, we should be overwhelmed—because it is a love beyond our comprehension.

We are here to know—and then to go out into the world and share that knowledge.

This past week, like many of you, my family watched the live broadcasts from the Artemis II mission. We were struck by the images of our fragile blue earth, like a marble rising over the lunar horizon as the spacecraft passed by.

I was immediately reminded of the words of the medieval English mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich, who saw the world in just this way:

“Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand… It is all that is made… It lasteth, and ever shall last, for God loveth it.”

In this “little thing,” she saw three truths: that God made it, that God loves it, and that God keeps it.

And so it is with us.

Know this, dear sisters and brothers: Christ died and rose for you. Know that God is reaching out to you at this very moment with the same love by which He holds the whole world together.

Receive that knowledge. Put your whole trust in it. Be overwhelmed by the love that God is extending to you.

And then go out into the world and share that knowledge.

The world needs to hear it—and you are the ones called to proclaim it.