John 20:19-29

11/14/10
John 20:19-29
Hudson UMC

How do you spend your evening on Easter? When I think of what we have done over the past few years, it usually involves spending time with family, maybe watching a movie or playing some games as a group. It is a day that does not usually have an evening meal but is replaced by a kind of constant “grazing.” I would imagine that, for many people, Easter evening is a time to relax.

According to our text for this morning, for the disciples on that very first Easter, this was not at all the case. We read that on the evening of that day that they found Christ’s tomb empty, they were gathered in a house and the doors were locked “for fear of the Jews.” This is something less than a celebratory attitude, is it not? The longer we have been in the church, which for many people in this room has been decades and since their childhood, we may find ourselves losing sight of the fact that the world has not always celebrated the resurrection of Christ. Our customs and our traditions are actually very short when we compare them to the whole of the history of the world, or even all of Christian history.

The disciples had locked their doors because they were afraid. Why should they be afraid? They are afraid because they had thrown their lot in with Jesus. We often, in modern America, think of Jesus as a nice teacher who said some wise things and was somewhat warm and fuzzy, but that was not at all the common perception of Him at the time. Why did the authorities execute Jesus? Because they saw Him primarily as a political criminal, one who was going to rally the people against the status quo, who was going to overthrow the government. He was even called the Messiah, for goodness’ sake, which meant, for most people, that Jesus was going to follow in the footsteps of the great Davidic kings who ruled over Israel before foreign powers took over.

So, that’s what the people who hated Jesus thought, but what about His friends? After all, it is not surprising to have someone misunderstood by people who already don’t like Him. However, it still matters what the authorities thought of Jesus because, whether they were right or wrong, Jesus was considered a political revolutionary and He died a revolutionary’s death. His disciples would be guilty by association, not completely unlike the danger of being associated with a known communist when Joseph McCarthy was in power. Even if the disciples were convinced that Jesus was a gentle, compassionate, peace-loving person, it would not have mattered, because the authorities, those who had tremendous power over them, did not think so.

Even still, is it true that the disciples fundamentally disagreed with this picture of Jesus? It seems that they, too, saw Jesus primarily as a political leader. Peter, for example, was constantly ready to march off to war, even willing to take on a few hundred soldiers and guards by himself when Jesus was arrested. It might be argued that the disciples were just trying to protect themselves, innocent people being harassed by their government. However, it would not really be true. They thought of themselves, at least to a degree, as political revolutionaries, those who would become the new powerful people when Jesus took over Israel. At one point, James and John came up to Jesus and asked if they could sit on His right and His left when He came into His kingdom. They weren’t thinking about His kingdom in heaven, but His kingdom centered in Jerusalem. They were hiding behind locked doors because their dynamic leader was dead and they were at the mercy of the authorities. Even though they had heard Mary Magdalene’s story of seeing Jesus, risen from the dead, they weren’t sure that it was really true.

So anyway, here we have a bunch of disciples, not just the twelve, but likely others as well, behind locked doors for fear of the Jews. What do we read? “Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” Jesus managed to get into the house, even though the doors were locked. The implication seems to be that He did not pick the lock or break in, but that He just walked in. There is something amazing about the resurrected Jesus. He can walk through walls, but in the next chapter, we will see that He can still eat fish. He is certainly physical and physically raised, but are some clear differences from being resurrected in glory and being physical as we often think about it.

The point is that, though the disciples had barricaded themselves in this house so that nobody could get to them, it did not stop God from getting to them. It wasn’t exactly what they were expecting, but Jesus shows up anyway. While Jesus is among the disciples, He does two things, which are deeply related. First, He proclaims, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” Jesus was sending His disciples into the world to be the representatives of God. Just as Jesus was sent by God, the disciples are also sent by God to be about the business of God, to proclaim the good news of God. Just as Jesus made disciples of His own, so we are to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. The mission of the disciples, and thus, our mission, is bound up with the mission of Christ.

The other thing that Jesus does is breathe on His disciples, saying, “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.” This is both fascinating and frightening at the very same time. On the one hand, it is fascinating because Jesus has so completely grafted us into His ministry that He says that we have authority granted by God to forgive people of their sins or to refuse that forgiveness. This is a radical idea. Do you feel qualified to speak authoritatively into a person’s life and say either “Your sins are forgiven” or “You are still in your sins?” Left to my own devices, I must admit that this is something that seems to be far too big for me, and yet Jesus affirms it to be true.

It is frightening because I don’t think that most of us are ready to be given that kind of responsibility. We feel inadequate and indeed we are. We feel so very inferior to those original apostles who transformed the world with their witness. And yet, what have we seen throughout the whole Gospel of John? We see that the disciples haven’t always been the pillars of the faith that they become. We see that they are impulsive, they have their own ideas about what God is about that don’t necessarily have any connection to what God is actually doing and we see that, even in the presence of the resurrected Lord, they are confused and weak. All of that is just like how we often are. It is when the disciples are weak, and not when they are strong, that Jesus grafts them into His ministry. They eventually become strong, but what made them strong? The gift of the Holy Spirit, the same Holy Spirit that you and I are given when we are made the children of God.

This means that, though we often feel weak like the disciples, there is nothing stopping us from becoming strong like they did. You might think to yourself, “I could never be a dynamic witness for Christ. I just don’t have any gifts for ministry. I can’t preach, I’m not good at praying, and I keep getting distracted by other things.” Again, that is nothing different than the disciples. If the Holy Spirit can transform someone as impulsive, selfish, and this-worldly focused as Peter into a mighty preacher and witness to Christ, why can the Spirit not do the very same thing with you? That is why the gift of the Spirit and the being united to the ministry of Christ can be so frightening, and yet it is absolutely true. God has grafted each and every one of us into the ministry of Christ and yes, that means you.

The text now turns to deal with Thomas, whom the Western church calls “Doubting Thomas,” while the Eastern church calls him “Believing Thomas,” since they say the most important thing about him is not that he doubted, but that he came to believe. Thomas was not with the rest of the disciples when Jesus came to them. In spite of the fact that many of his closest friends told him that they had met with Jesus, in spite of the fact that he was bound with them in their fate, whether good or bad, because he, too, was a follower of Christ, he would not believe their witness.

Thomas’ response was, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” His skepticism continued on for a week. Imagine what that would have looked like. Most of Jesus’ disciples had met with Him but Thomas had not. For seven days, while everyone around rejoiced that Christ had been risen, Thomas insisted on his skepticism. We find the whole group, a week later, all gathered together, again behind locked doors. Jesus came to them again. Jesus shows amazing compassion for Thomas because, even though he, too, was hiding in this house and even though he had set up additional barriers between him and Christ (after all, nobody else had put their fingers in Jesus’ wounds), Jesus comes and offers Himself to Thomas.

We do not know for sure if Thomas followed through with his need to actually put this hands in the wounds of Christ, but his response is clear, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus response is, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not yet seen and yet have come to believe.” We could talk about how, since Christ has ascended, people are no longer able to literally “see” Christ but must come to believe through witnesses, which Thomas refused to do. We could talk about the nature of faith, but, since time is short, I want to highlight something that is not always brought up about this story.

The question I want to raise is, “What changed when Jesus revealed Himself to Thomas?” We could answer and say that Thomas’ understanding changed or that his perception of the facts changed, and that would be true, but if we were to ask, “What actual facts changed?” the answer would have to be, “nothing.” The fact that Thomas came to believe and confessed Jesus to be his Lord and God did not actually change any historical facts; it was true, independently of his confession.

If we approach this whole episode from an empiricist view, that believes that nothing can be real unless we can touch it with our hands or see it with our eyes, Thomas would have been completely rational in his refusing to believe until he could verify it with his own senses. In fact, according to this way of thinking, Jesus’ statement that people are blessed if they believe without seeing, would make no sense. It might be responded, “Stupid are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” or if not stupid, then hopelessly irrational.

And yet, in light of the fact that Jesus actually was raised from the dead, that He actually was alive, and that He actually was revealed to His disciples as such, it turns out that Thomas is not the only rational one among them, but actually the only irrational one. He was rational as far as he knew, but because his behavior was inconsistent with what actually was the case, he was actually the only one who was behaving irrationally. What really matters is not what we can see or touch but what really is.

It is interesting that even natural science has moved away from this empiricist notion that, if we cannot see it and if we cannot touch it, it must not exist. In a famous discussion between the great scientists Ernst Mach and Max Planck, Planck was advocating for the atomic theory, that everything we know is made up of atoms of different elements while Mach denied it. When Planck put forward all the evidence from various experiments that all pointed to the validity of the atomic theory, Mach responded, “Show me one.” Well, of course, as we all know, we cannot directly see atoms, nor can we touch a single atom. However, in spite of that, you will hardly find physicists today who will deny that atoms are real, even though they have not seen them or touched them.

So, the challenge for today in light of the story of Thomas is to reflect and see whether our behavior is rational or irrational in light of the resurrection of Christ. This is especially appropriate as we are getting ever closer to Advent. Do we live as if the Son of God has come among us in human flesh, was executed and then raised from the dead? That is to say, do we live as if God has actually interacted profoundly with this world of space and time, not just once upon a time, but here and now; that we are utterly grafted into the ministry of Christ, that we have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit and that we have the ability to forgive and retain sins? Or, do we live as if this is not the case and that we are just human beings who are just doing the best we can and getting by one day at a time?

We have been called into a dynamic ministry, to be the presence of Christ here in our community and, through that, to the world. We are the witnesses that Christ has commissioned in our weakness and given the Holy Spirit to be our strength, we are the blessed ones who have believed even though we have not seen. So, let us go and be about the business of Christ, healing broken relationships, growing in holiness, making disciples for the transformation of the world, and united with everyone else who is also laboring for God’s kingdom, starting right here in this church. Let us go because we are sent, just as God sent Christ into the world, so are we sent into the world, into this community, among these people that God loves so very much. Let us pray.

AMEN