(Sunday readings: Acts 4:37-43; Col. 3:1-4 OR 1 Cor. 5:1-8; John 20:1-9)
In many languages we say, “Seeing is believing.”
When the Beloved Disciple entered the tomb of Jesus, “He saw and believed.” This is not a case of “seeing is believing.” What did he see? The emptiness of the tomb. In other words: nothing. And he believed. The tomb had become, as it were, a portal to the deepest conviction of faith.
The first persons who went up to the place where Our Lady appeared, above the village of La Salette, saw nothing. Of course they saw the all the same things they would have seen before the Apparition, but they saw nothing that could confirm the story told by Maximin and Mélanie.
And anyone looking at those two children would not be spontaneously inclined to believe them. They were nobodies.
In the first reading, Cornelius and his family believed Peter’s words. They heard and believed. And so it continues to this very day. As St. Paul says in Romans 10:14 and 17, “How can they believe in him of whom they have not heard?... Faith comes from what is heard.”
Most of those who listened to what Maximin and Mélanie had to say, became believers. There was a quality of truth in their words, accompanied by something new in their manner, whenever they spoke of their “Beautiful Lady.” They had become “witnesses,” not only because they saw and heard something, but because they faithfully carried out their commission to make it known.
From a material point of view, none of us living today can possibly have seen what the Apostles and other witnesses of the Resurrection saw.
From another point of view, however, most of us have seen, in the bleakest moments of life, what Mary Magdalen and Peter and the Beloved Disciple saw: emptiness, nothing, a void. They had every reason to lose hope, but one of them, at least, believed nonetheless.
Our darkest moments, then, can be a portal to faith. Like the empty tomb, they do not have to be the end, but a glorious new beginning. The Lord is truly risen!