John 20:19-30
We know this story, right? Every year on the Second Sunday of Easter we get the same Gospel text from the 20th chapter of John. Year in and year out. Every year, one week after Easter we hear “The Doubting Thomas” story. That’s what we call it, which isn’t really fair to either Thomas or the text because there is a lot more going on in these twenty-one verses, and some of the most important things in the text, arguably, have nothing to do with Thomas. But still, having said that, this story is so familiar that even non-church people know it. Doubting Thomas is a cultural touchstone. Right?
We know this story, do we not?
I wonder.
This year the story sounds different to me. This year, when I read the first line of this story it hit me in a way it never has before.
“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews…”[1]
Stop there for a minute. Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus faces opposition and antagonism from a particular group of conservative Judean religious leaders. These were the leaders who collaborated with Roman authorities to help keep a lid on things, particularly in Jerusalem. John’s gospel simply refers to this group as “the Jews.” This was never meant to be understood as “all” Jews. Jesus was a Jew. His disciples were Jews. So, throughout the gospel of John, when the writer talks about “the Jews,” he is referring to this particular group of antagonists, and not Jews in general.
Except, maybe, in this one instance.
After Jesus was arrested, the disciples fled back to the room where they had shared the last supper. And that’s where they have mostly stayed for three days and nights, huddled together behind locked doors.
Put yourself in the room with them. It’s evening. The sun has set. Someone has lit a small lamp or two but those lamps seem to fill that large room with more shadows than light. In those shadows your mind keeps replaying the events of the last few days—Jesus being arrested in the garden, Jesus being dragged away in chains, the crowd that had shouted Hosanna a few days ago now shouting for him to be crucified. And yes, you see that picture in the shadows, too—Jesus being tortured and crucified. Jesus laid in the tomb.
Everyone in the room with you is grieving. You all have very good reasons to be afraid. The world outside those locked doors is not a safe place for you. You know that there are people out there who would do to you what they did to Jesus, your teacher, your friend.
You are grieving. You are afraid. And you are in turmoil because earlier in the day, Peter and another disciple erupted into the room all in a lather to say that the tomb was empty and the grave clothes were all neatly folded and set aside. On top of that, Mary Magdalene is telling you that she has seen Jesus and spoken to him… and all you can think is that her grief has made her delusional.
And where is Thomas? Where did he go? What is he doing? Why isn’t he in the room with the rest of you? The last time one of your companions slipped away somewhere by himself it was Judas, and we all know how that turned out, don’t we.
So there you are, huddled together in a room full of fear and grief and shadows. And of course the doors are locked. You don’t know who you can trust. You don’t know who might make some deal to hand you over to the authorities. You are afraid of your own people.
Six years ago we all heard this text behind locked doors. We were all afraid of our own people then. Well, not so much the people as the virus one of them might pass along. Our doors were closed to protect all of us from all of us.
This year, though, is different. This year I think we understand a little more clearly that what we are seeing in this passage from John’s gospel is a scene of political terror. We are seeing a small community traumatized by state violence, a community that has every reason to think that more violence may be coming their way.
This year the story resonates more profoundly and directly. This year we have seen heavily armed “agents” wearing masks conducting sweeps through our communities, disappearing our neighbors from their work, their cars and their homes, even from courthouse hallways and steps. This year we have seen our neighbors spirited off to detention camps or deported to foreign countries without anything like due process. This year we have seen people killed while protesting these actions.
This year we all know someone or know about someone who is living in grief and fear behind locked doors, not knowing who they can trust, afraid of their own people.
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”
Jesus showed up behind their locked doors, emerging from the shadows of their distress to free them from the fear and grief that were paralyzing them, to unlock and open for them a whole new understanding of life and death and God, and to empower them to continue with the work of proclaiming the counter-imperial commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness.
Jesus does the same thing for us. Jesus appears inside our locked up spaces. Jesus passes through the shadows of our fear and unbelief to come and stand beside us and among us, to show us that he is alive—and to teach us how to live in a new reality. If we will believe. If we will trust.
When Jesus steps into the locked up places in our hearts and minds, when Jesus steps through our fears and unbelief to stand before us, to stand in the midst of us, he does it for a reason. The living Jesus stands in our midst not just so that we can resume the same old relationships with God and with each other that we had before, but so that we can begin an entirely new relationship with God and with each other.
Jesus does not just want us to learn about him. Jesus wants us to learn from him so we can live in unity with him and continue his work of making the commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy a reality on earth as it is in heaven.
We are not united to a dead, historical Christ who lives only in the pages of the gospels. We are united to a living Jesus who stands here among us, who meets us at the table of companionship. We are united with a living Jesus who meets us in disguise on the streets, who comes to us hungry and thirsty, unwell and unhoused, who encounters us as a stranger, a refugee or an immigrant.
But Jesus doesn’t just show up. Jesus knows that there’s something more that we need so we can rise out of our pain and fears and unbelief to do the work he calls us to do. Jesus knows we need a spirit of courage that will make us brave enough and bold enough to love each other and love the world, a spirit of joy and wonder that will keep us from slipping into cynicism or despair in a world that is all too often indifferent when it isn’t being downright nasty. Jesus knows that if we’re going to help heal the world’s angst we need to be free of it ourselves. So he gives us the antidote.
“Peace be upon you,” he says. Shalom aleichem. Put away your anxiety. Let go of your fear. Put away your disagreement. Stop trying so hard to be right. Try, instead to be loving. Stop the finger-pointing. Stop investing so much energy and emotion in nonsense and things that don’t really matter. “Peace be upon you.”
This is not the peace of empire, the Pax Romana, the Pax Americana, a peace enforced by force or coercion, a peace procured through the art of the deal. This is the shalom of God, the peace of wholeness, the peace of mutuality. This is a peace that embraces diversity and fosters equity and strives for inclusion. This is the peace that works for justice, loves kindness and walks humbly with God.
“Peace be upon you,” said Jesus. And then he showed them his hands and his side. “Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” They recognized him by his wounds. His wounds proved that he was the real Jesus. His wounds convinced honest and reasonable but skeptical Thomas that he was truly the risen Christ.
In Wounded Lord, Robert Smith’s commentary on the Gospel of John, which he completed shortly before he died, he wrote: “Those wounds will never go away. The exalted Christ has not passed to a sublime existence immune to suffering. Even after Good Friday and Easter, God continues to turn to the world through the wounded Christ.
“To believe in this Jesus means to take him, wounds and all, into our own lives. To believe means to participate in Christ’s own suffering on behalf of the true life of the world.”
Our Christ, our God, is not some transcendent deity who sits in heaven far removed from the pain of our existence. Our Christ, our God is wounded from embracing the world, wounded from loving the world. We can sing about victory all we want, but the reality is that we are still in the struggle, and the Good News, the really Good News is not that our Messiah, our Commander is immortal and impervious, but that he has a Purple Heart. The Good News is that his wounds were fatal, but his fatality was not. His wounds mean that our wounds may kill us, but that won’t stop us.
“Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
This is where we go from being disciples to being apostles. Now we have the same mission Jesus had. We are not supposed to just sit still and happy in our own little pool of peace. We are being sent. We have to go out in peace. And withpeace. We have to be grounded in the Shalom of God—the blessing of well-being—but on the move, carrying the shalom of God with us, sharing it and spreading it.
“When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
In the original Greek it says that he breathed into them. This is such a profoundly intimate moment, a moment of physical closeness. The word that’s used in the Greek, emphisao, is the same word that’s used in the Greek version of Genesis 2 when God breathes life into the human that God has made out of earth. This is the breath that gives life. Jesus breathes the Spirit of life into them…and into us.
Breathe. Take a deep breath and inhale the Spirit of God that is being breathed into you. Right now, right where you are. Breathe. Breathe in the Holy Spirit, the breath of Christ.
Now breathe out. Let everything holy in you, the Christ in you, the love and goodness in you fill the room.
And now, think about this. This new life that you are inhaling and exhaling—it has a purpose. You are being sent.
“As the Father sent me, so I am sending you,” said Jesus. You are being sent to teach forgiveness to a world that is addicted to the poisonous drug of retribution. You are being sent out to bring the shalom of cooperation to a world that is obsessed with competition. You are being sent out to bring a breath of fresh air to a world that is gasping for the love of Christ and the breath of the Spirit.
So take a deep breath. And go. The world needs the breath of Christ. This year more than ever.
[1] John 20:19 (NRSVue)
Painting: Deep Breath by Melody Weidner
Thoughts Along the Way 