Thomas believed in Christ because of what he saw. He saw wounds transformed into precious stones, he saw how pain was overcome and that suffering and death did not have the last word. So he could believe in what constitutes the core of Christian belief: a God who shows himself in Christ, in the resurrection, in love that is stronger than death. But what about those who didn’t see anything of the kind?
Thomas was followed by countless more people who did not have his healing experience, who did not see the sun rise after the night of pain, the sun whose wounds were still festering and painful. What can we offer those who did see? They are the subject of Jesus’ final Beatitude.
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Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Who is not familiar with the eight Beatitudes, the ceremonial gateway to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount! At the end of John’s gospel in the scene of his encounter with “doubting” Thomas, Jesus adds another final Beatitude, when he says to the apostle: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Many gospel commentators maintain that the beatitudes at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount do not describe “eight types of people”, but eight aspects of the same outlook on life of a disciple of Jesus. These are now joined by this ninth one.
Isn’t this last beatitude in fact a key to understand the previous ones (or at least some of them)? Are we not poor, mourning and thirsting for righteousness because – or at least also because – we did not see and still cannot see? And even those who are pure in heart are so far only promised that visio beatifica, (beatific vision); not even they “see” yet.
Jesus came into the world “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” And when, after those words, the pharisees, the smug “possessors of the truth resentfully ask him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” Jesus answers them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”
In the eight Beatitudes, Jesus prophetically turns our gaze from the past in which we did not see, and the present in which we still do not see, to the eschatological future of the Kingdom of God, where we will see God, where we will be filled, comforted, and receive mercy … But He does not add any further promise to the last beatitude. Does that mean those who endure the state of “not seeing” already have their reward in faith alone? Does it mean that faith alone fills this state with meaning, transforming it and conferring on it value and depth without removing the veil of mystery from sightless eyes? “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
In his encyclical Spe salvi, Pope Benedict recalls emphatically that the term elenchos (conviction) in that sentence does not mean simply the subjective opinion of the believer, but a “proof” (argumentum): “Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a ‘proof’ of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a ‘not yet’. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.” Faith is the substance (hypostasis) of what we hope for. That means, the pope says, that “through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say ‘in embryo’– and thus according to the ‘substance’– there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty: this ‘thing’ which must come is not yet visible in the external world (it does not ‘appear’), but because of the fact that, as an initial and dynamic reality, we carry it within us, a certain perception of it has even now come into existence.”
It is important that in this major commentary, the pope places the words “proof” and “thing” in quotation marks. Proof in this context is not a proof as used in mathematics, and the natural sciences, nor even in philosophy or logic, which would not admit doubt and would definitively refute objections; the proof that we can and ought to provide “an unbelieving world”, is our “witness” the testimony of our lives. The “thing” that faith relates to has not yet become a “deed”, a fact that is evident to all – we can only enable a glimpse of it by our lives as witnesses. We have to “account for the hope” that is in us.
But how are we to do so if we ourselves are among those “who have not seen” – and are even warned not to present ourselves as those who “see” and “know”? The answer is that we are not asked to give an account of what we “see” or “think”, or what are our convictions, but of our hopes, our faith, and our love. These are what we must prove and demonstrate, so that more light may penetrate the dark recesses of the world.