The Only Gift We Have

April 12, 2026

Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday) — Year A

Acts 2:42–47  |  Psalm 118  |  1 Peter 1:3–9  |  John 20:19–31

There’s a story I love by Anatole France, called "The Juggler of Notre Dame." A poor street performer joins a monastery, but he can’t read Latin, can’t sing the Psalms, can’t compose beautiful prayers like the other monks. Not surprisingly, he feels like a fraud. So one night, in desperation, he sneaks into the chapel, stands in front of a statue of the Blessed Mother, and does the only thing he knows how to do: he juggles. He tosses his colored balls into the air and offers up his clumsy little act as a prayer. When the other monks discover him, they’re horrified. Disrespect! Sacrilege! But before they can drag him away, the statue of Mary comes to life, leans down, and gently wipes the sweat from the juggler’s brow.

This story is a beautiful example of what God wants in our faith life — not the version we sometimes carry around in our heads, the one where we have to clean ourselves up before we’re allowed to approach God. The real one, the one where God meets us in the middle of our fumbling, sweaty, half-baked attempts and says, “This. This is enough. I see you.”

Look at the disciples in John’s Gospel today. It’s Easter evening. Jesus has risen. But the disciples are locked in a room because they’re terrified that the Scribes and Pharisees are coming after them next. These are the guys who walked with Jesus for three years, watched him heal the blind, raise the dead, and feed thousands, and right now they’re hiding behind a locked door like kids during a thunderstorm. So, what does Jesus do? He doesn’t kick the door down. He doesn’t lecture them. He just appears in their midst and says, “Peace be with you.” He breathes the Holy Spirit on them, and he sends them out. He commissions the very people who abandoned him a few days earlier. He doesn’t wait for them to get their act together. He meets them where they are, in the locked room.

Then, there’s Thomas — poor “doubting” Thomas, who’s been carrying that nickname for 2,000 years just because he had the honesty to say what most of us would say: “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Jesus comes back a week later, just for him. He doesn’t shame him. He invites him: “Put your finger here. See my hands.” Then he gives us — you and me, the future Church, the people who would never get to touch his wounds — the line that should be tattooed on our hearts: “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” That’s us. We’re the ones in that blessing. We don’t get to put our hands in his side. What we get is something much more subtle but just as beautiful: we get to encounter the risen Christ in the bread and the wine; in the sunrise on the way to work; in the stranger we sit next to on a flight; in the grumpy store clerk who unexpectedly smiles after we engage them in the checkout line; in our spouse, our kids, our friends, even our goofy pets. Jesus can show up in any of them.

The reading from Acts shows us what the first Christians did with that gift. They didn’t write a doctrinal statement, nor did they launch a marketing campaign. They got together every day. They broke bread. They prayed. They sold their stuff and gave to whoever needed it. And Luke tells us, almost in passing, that the Lord added to their number day by day. They weren’t trying to grow the Church — they were trying to live the Church, and the growth took care of itself. That’s worth sitting with. The early Christians weren’t impressive by any worldly standard. They were a tiny, persecuted Jewish sect in a corner of the Roman Empire. But, they lived like they actually believed what they said they believed, and the world took notice. Then in Peter's letter, he describes the beauty of our ultimate inheritance in heaven, and the possibility or even the need for trials and tribulations here on Earth to refine our faith like gold in fire.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Leaf by Niggle,” Niggle is a painter who spends his whole life trying to paint a magnificent tree. He keeps getting interrupted by his neighbors, his obligations, and his own distractions. He dies with nothing to show for it but a single beautiful leaf on an otherwise empty canvas. His life looks like a failure. But, when he reaches the next world, Niggle walks into a meadow, and there is his Tree — finished, alive, every branch and every leaf exactly as he had imagined it. The work he thought was unfinished was being completed all along, in a place he couldn’t see.

I think most of us are very much like Niggle and/or the Juggler. We’re trying really hard to make it through this life, trying to live out our faith. We’re sitting in our locked rooms doing our small, fumbling, half-finished work, wondering if any of it counts. We’re not the monks with the beautiful Latin, or singing songs with beautiful voices. We’re regular people offering what we have, hoping it’s enough.

Today’s readings are God’s answer: it is. It always has been. The juggling counts. The leaf counts. The locked-room prayer counts. The breaking of bread with friends counts. Patience and kindness on hard days count. None of it is wasted. All of it is being woven into something we won’t see in full until we get to Heaven. But with God’s help — living through us — a masterpiece of faith is being built, one humble stroke of a brush, or toss of a ball, at a time. We do our humble, faithful acts in front of a God who, it turns out, was never grading the routine, only watching with love, the one who showed up to offer it.

Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed.