The Lord be with you.
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John.
In the evening of that same day,
The first day of the week,
The doors were closed in the room where the disciples were for fear of the Jews.
Jesus came and stood among them.
He said to them,
Peace be with you,
And showed them his hands and his side.
The disciples were filled with joy when they saw the Lord,
And he said to them again,
Peace be with you.
As the Father sent me,
So am I sending you.
After saying this,
He breathed on them and said,
Receive the Holy Spirit,
For those whose sins you forgive,
They are forgiven.
For those whose sins you retain,
They are retained.
Thomas called the twin,
Was one of the twelve,
Was not with them when Jesus came.
When the disciples said,
We have seen the Lord,
He answered,
Unless I see the holds that the nails made in his hands,
And can put my finger into the holds they made,
And unless I can put my hand into his side,
I refuse to believe.
Eight days later,
The disciples were in the house again,
And Thomas was with them.
The doors were closed,
But Jesus came in and stood among them.
Peace be with you,
He said.
Then he spoke to Thomas,
Put your finger here,
Look,
Here are my hands,
Give me your hand,
Put it into my side.
Doubt no longer,
But believe.
Thomas replied,
My Lord and my God.
Jesus said to him,
You believe because you can see me.
Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe.
There were many other signs that Jesus worked and the disciples saw,
But they are not recorded in this book.
These are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,
The Son of God,
And that believing this,
You may have life through his name.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Unless I can't see,
Unless I can't,
Or I don't experience something that cannot be true.
What a strong statement that is and something that we believe today so much.
Our rational minds,
Our scientific thinking,
Needing to know,
Being driven by this quest for knowledge and where does it bring us?
Please don't get me wrong.
I love science.
I love finding out things.
Yet.
I find myself in a place where I become overwhelmed with wanting,
Wanting more knowledge because every time I find or I gain a piece of knowledge,
I find that I didn't really settle the question that I have.
I didn't really answer this yearning in my soul.
It's so easy to then become caught up in trying to find the next thing.
Maybe if I study this,
Maybe if I experience this,
Then this emptiness inside of me will go away.
Just like Thomas,
We struggle to believe because we don't feel,
We don't experience.
And yet it is so beautiful to then realize that this emptiness is,
It just is.
And this emptiness inside of us is because many times we try and go and find knowledge and experience and we try and find God in this massive beautiful world that we live in.
In the experiences that we have with each other,
We go and search for gurus and we search for leaders and spiritual people to guide us to find God and to find something that will help us make sense of everything of the world.
We forget that God is inside of us.
We forget that when we become still,
If we only just sit and we allow the thoughts that race through us and around us to just acknowledge them for the thoughts that they are,
And we allow the stillness that is inside of us to take over.
If we start hearing that stillness and start experiencing that God is there,
It's not an easy practice,
It's not an easy thing to do because we are conditioned,
The ego,
Not because we have the word the aya,
The need,
Needs to,
Wants to,
Drives us to want to be busy and to analyse and to experience and to understand and it's not that.
Many of us do experience God and experience our spiritual expression in being busy and in doing things and that's how we grow as human beings and in this incarnation we add to our knowledge and our experiences of God,
We forget that it starts in here and it can only start there when we believe.
We can't do this experiment really and say that if I do this and this then I'll believe.
It starts with the idea of surrender.
Let me surrender myself,
Let me surrender this mirage,
This image of the world that I have created about the world and about myself and let me just be and that I believe is when we start really experiencing and each of us will have a different experience,
That is the way of the universe and that is the way I believe that the Lord planned it,
That we would all have a slightly different view.
So today as we celebrate the victory over the world let's maybe look at it as the option or the opportunity to have victory over the ego because the world is just a set of thoughts that we have made up and connections that we have made up on our reality.
So it is not the world,
Nobody knows what the world really looks like except for God.
Hence the victory that we celebrate over the world today is the victory over ego.
It is the victory over the perception that we are separate from each other.
It is the victory over these thoughts that mundane things will matter in the end.
So as we go forth this week let's try and keep in mind that everything that we experience is an experience that we build up through our filters and through our preconceived ideas and our ego.
It's not the world.
And then in the end all the challenges that we face might not really be as harsh as we think and not that one would negate the experience.
There's a difference between the challenge and the experience.
The experience for each person is unique and the experience is intense.
But let's maybe go forth and re-acknowledge that each of us have their own experience so that we cannot judge if people react in certain ways.
We don't know their journeys.
So today,
This week,
If somebody is going through a difficult time or if somebody is reacting in ways that you do not understand,
Have some compassion and wish them well.
Give for them joy and ease and the peace of the Lord that he brought to his disciples.
Amen.
