This year, the calendar has handed us a coincidence that is worth more than many ecumenical speeches. For Catholics, 12 April is Mercy Sunday, that is, the Second Sunday of Easter, the Sunday of the Gospel of Thomas; for many Orthodox who follow the Julian calendar, the same day is Easter, the day they proclaim that Christ is risen.

It is not just a liturgical crossroads. It is almost a historical question addressed to Europe and the world: how can one be reborn without erasing the evil one has gone through?

The Gospel scene is familiar, but its power never ends. Thomas is not simply the disciple who doubts: he is the man who asks faith not to become evasion, spiritual propaganda, cheap consolation.
And Christ does not respond with an argument. He responds with the body.

In John’s account, the Risen One shows his hands and his side; in the tradition of Mercy Sunday, the Church links this very passage to the very heart of its proclamation: the peace given does not come from the removal of trauma, but from its crossing.

Thomas from great art to the present day

It is no coincidence that a Vatican page dedicated to this Sunday recalls that John Paul II wanted to name the Second Sunday of Easter ‘Divine Mercy Sunday‘, and another meditation by Pope Francis insists that from the wounds of Jesus come peace, joy and strength for the mission.

That is why, in the great Sienese painting, the centre of this scene is not really Thomas. It is Christ. In Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maestà, painted between 1308 and 1311 for Siena Cathedral, the Risen One does not appear as one who has left the cross behind once and for all. He still bears the sign of the violence he suffered.

The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo recalls that the Maestà was conceived as a gigantic altarpiece visible on both sides, with a rich series of scenes on the back: not an isolated image, therefore, but an entire painted theology of memory, pain and glory.

The human dilemma: either we remember without forgiving, or we forgive without remembering

Here we see manifested what, in our opinion, remains the decisive paradox of Christianity, perhaps the only logical and empathic paradox that truly lives up to the real paradox of the world.
Man most readily knows two opposite paths: either remembering without forgiving, or forgiving by forgetting.

The history of peoples, no less than individual biographies, is almost always nailed to this alternative.

If memory remains intact, it often continues to burn as a demand for revenge. If forgiveness comes, it sometimes comes at the price of a moral forgetfulness, of a diplomacy of oblivion, of a peace built on the silence of the victims. Christianity, on the other hand, affirms something almost unbearable: that there can be memory without revenge and forgiveness without lies.

This is why the figure of Thomas also speaks today to political and cultural Europe.

A continent that has known civil wars, totalitarianism, the Shoah, gulags, ethnic cleansing and nationalism cannot save itself either with a rancorous cult of memory or with a superficial ecumenism of good intentions.
It needs another moral grammar: one in which truth is not sacrificed to reconciliation, but in which reconciliation is no longer hostage to revenge.

In this sense, the Risen One with open wounds is a radically European image, because it tells us that civilisation is not reborn by denying its fractures, but by taking them on without allowing itself to be ruled by them forever.

Is God dead?

And it is here that the Gospel also surprisingly meets the secular word.
Let us think of Francesco Guccini’s ‘God is dead’ , in the voice of Augusto Daolio and the Nomads. There we find both the Nietzschean matrix of the expression, which is not necessarily synonymous with nihilism, but with the love of life rising from the earth, and the song’s final reversal, where the announcement of death is followed by the motif of a possible resurrection; it also recalls the climate of censorship at the time, when the song was blocked by RAI for alleged blasphemy, while Radio Vaticana was broadcasting it.

It is a historical detail that is more striking today than it was yesterday: a song that was judged scandalous because it dared to say that God is dead in the idolatries of consumption, violence and falsehood, and for this very reason it hinted at a possible rebirth in conscience, responsibility and hope.

The point, then, is not to confuse faith and secular culture, nor to dissolve the Christian East and West into a generic religious sentimentality. The point is to recognise that there is a place where these traditions can still speak seriously to each other: the place of wounds.
Personal wounds, historical wounds, the wounds of peoples.
Touching them does not mean complacency. It means rejecting both the rhetoric of eternal trauma and the falsification of ‘all is well’. It means understanding that peace is not amnesia and that mercy is not weakness. It is, on the contrary, the most demanding form of truth.

Perhaps, today, Christianity only continues to be credible if it starts from here.
Not with strength, not with prestige, not with identity wielded as a weapon, but with the courage to show wounds without making them an alibi for hatred.

The Risen One does not return to his own with a revenge in hand. He returns with wounds.
And in this way he makes the unthinkable thinkable: that the memory of injustice and forgiveness can dwell together. That peace is not a lie. That, even after wars, human history is not condemned to repeat only itself.