Homily for the Second Sunday of Easter and Mass of Thanksgiving for Rev. Vincent A. Kuna, C.S.C.

We are all, of course, very familiar with this Gospel for the Second Sunday of Easter, and with the story of Doubting Thomas. As all of us face from time to time, the challenge of keeping faith, and the temptation to doubt, we rightly look to Thomas as a source of consolation and inspiration: even in his doubt our Lord appeared to him and strengthened his faith.

But in rushing to that resolution of the story we can’t gloss over the great insight contained in Thomas’ question. Having not been with the others when Jesus first appears and proves that He is no ghost, Thomas correctly asserts that the living Jesus could only be a phantasm or a figment of the imagination, unless He was truly the Jesus of the Cross – the very one the disciples had first followed in Galilee, and then abandoned, and seen tortured, murdered and buried. He needed to bear the marks of His Passion as we too bear the marks of our suffering.

Seeing with their own eyes that the Risen Lord was in fact Him would had been raised up on the cross, Thomas and the other Apostles come to truly believe in the Resurrection. And having received the breath of the Holy Spirit, they bore witness with great power to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

As we hear so often during the Easter season, from the Acts of the Apostles, this is the essential content of the Apostles’ preaching and ministry: it is Jesus’ Resurrection from the dead that they proclaim, and it is in the name of the Risen Lord that they teach and heal. The power of their witness to the Resurrection was so compelling that on just that first day of their ministry three thousand persons were baptized.

And yet, in our own time so many people – perhaps even many who once called themselves Christians – find it nearly impossible to believe in Jesus Christ, risen from the dead. They can, perhaps, accept the historical Jesus as some kind of teacher or moral exemplar, but they find it difficult to take seriously that the same man, killed like a common criminal some 2,000 years ago, is now the risen Jesus who lives to die no more.

Looking at the world around them and at their own lives, they see so many signs of suffering, of pain, of loss and grief. ‘How’ they wonder, ‘can Jesus be the Lord of Life if we continually experience such suffering and death?’ For them, the Resurrection seems to be just a fantastical legend or a pious myth, and like Thomas they say, “I will not believe.”

Our second reading from the First Letter of John tells us that, “the victory that conquers the world is faith.”

If our world is increasingly unable to recognize or understand Jesus, risen from the dead, perhaps it is because we have failed to make our faith in the Resurrection as compelling as the Apostles first did. Perhaps, we have failed to bear witness to the Resurrection by tracing the marks of the cross, pointing out to others the transformative, life-giving power of Christ’s cross even as it appears in our own daily struggles, and daily Resurrections.

Friends, we should long, like Thomas, to reverence the signs of suffering that our brothers and sisters bear in their flesh and in their spirits – not because we doubt the Resurrection, not because we glorify pain, but precisely because we believe that the cross is our only true hope of eternal life.

Our faith in the Resurrection, our commitment to the victory of life over death, compels us to sit with the patient dying alone in hospice care; to assist a struggling mother to choose life, and care for the child she carries to term; to feed and clothe the homeless, sleeping on the streets; to give medical treatment to the child dying in poverty from a curable disease.

Only when Christians reverence the wounds of their brothers and sisters; only when we remind ourselves and others that Jesus suffered with and for us; only when we choose life always and everywhere, especially when it seems so hopeless – then and only then, do we give the powerful and compelling witness that leads others to believe in Christ’s Resurrection.

Yesterday, in this sanctuary, Fr. Vince, and his classmates, Fr. Aaron and Fr. Charlie, were ordained priests through the Sacramental sign of the laying on of hands. Our Lord said to these men, as surely as he said to the Apostles, “as the Father sent me, so I send you.”


By the grace of ordination, now conformed to Christ the Head and Shepherd, Fr. Vince stands in the person of Jesus Christ. When he visits the sick, and comforts the dying, or counsels those who suffer; whenever he enters into upper rooms filled with the grieving, the fearful, the doubting, Fr. Vince will be the presence of Jesus Christ, speaking that beautiful greeting we hear so often in the Easter readings: “Peace be with you.”

Through his preaching and teaching, and especially through his administration of the Sacraments, Fr. Vince will serve God’s holy people – he will trace the mark of the cross in the lives of the faithful, and assure them of the new life it promises.

In Baptism, he will claim us for Christ with the sign of the cross, he will wash us clean of sin and give us the promise of sharing in Christ’s life, death and Resurrection.

In the Eucharist, he will offer the very sacrifice Christ offered on the cross, and he will feed us with the bread of life, which is a foretaste and promise of the heavenly banquet.

And in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, in accord with Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel, Fr. Vince will forgive us our sins, heal souls scarred by sin, and reconcile us to God.

We give thanks to God for the gift of the priesthood and for God’s care for us in and through Fr. Vince’s ministry. And we give thanks to Fr. Vince for laying down his life in service, conforming his life to the mystery of the Lord’s cross and giving witness to the Resurrection.

But as we give thanks in this celebration, we also recognize our own obligation. Fr. Vince’s priestly ministry is a gift to the Church meant to enliven and support the priesthood of all the baptized – to send all of us out to preach Christ crucified and witness to His Resurrection.

All of us share the vocation to trace the mark of the cross in every part of our lives and in every part of the life of the world – to claim all things for Christ, signing every aspect of life with the sign of our only hope. Friends, if we do this faithfully, we will be saying to all our brothers and sisters, not only with our words, but with our actions and our very lives: “Do not be unbelieving, but believe” – “and through this belief have life in His name.”