John 20:19-31 | Göttinger Predigten im Internet

Second Sunday of Easter | April 16, 2023 | John 20:19-31 | Paula Murray |

A Sermon Based on John 20:19-31, by Paula Murray

¹⁹On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. ²¹Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” ²²And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” ²⁴Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. ²⁵So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” ²⁶Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁷Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” ²⁸Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” ²⁹Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” ³⁰Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; ³¹but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

The octave of Easter, meaning Easter Monday (could be the week following Easter Sunday, too), announced itself with a cold, and an unpleasant one at that. So, I sat in our family room with not one but two boxes of Kleenex and a bottle of Dayquil watching a stiff wind blow the petals off our ornamental fruit trees. It looked a bit like a blizzard, like the snowstorm we never really got this past winter. The grass was green and the sky a brilliant blue, but for a moment I could pretend that I was caught up in a late year snowy blast. For a moment.

As the blossoms blew into the neighbors’ yards, the trees from which they came look increasingly green as the leaves were revealed. Clearly one thing, the blossoms, hid another, the leaves, and I would argue that this is a pretty common occurrence. A smiling face can hide a load of anger. The haute couture clothing of a man or woman can obscure an immanent bankruptcy. Conversely, frayed jeans shorts and an old t-shirt can conceal flush bank accounts and a willingness to spend big in a pricy jewelry store. What we think to be true can turn out to be false, and vice versa.

And a man murdered in a bloody awful way can live, despite the whiff of decomposition emanating from His two-day old corpse. When it comes to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, there are two questions, or maybe three, not one. The first question is, obviously, is it true? Is the man who met the women at the tomb the man buried there after His death on the cross the previous Friday? Thomas, called Doubting Thomas by years of Biblical commentators, was not the only one to discredit the notion that Jesus had risen from the dead despite first, their Lord’s multiple predictions of both His death and resurrection, and, second, the evidence of their own eyes and noses when Jesus raised Lazarus four days after his death and his body’s ensuing decomposition. Jesus’ enemies seemed to believe the evidence of their own eyes and their noses. It was, after all, the raising of Lazarus from the dead that convinced them that Jesus, and Lazarus, had to die.

But that was not the case of those most closely associated with Jesus. Not a one of them, except John, the disciple He loved, believed that Jesus rose from the dead by the simple evidence of the empty tomb and the discarded graveclothes. And when the risen Christ did appear to them, in the flesh, so to speak, not a one of them knew who He was, not at first. Mary of Magdala presumed He was the gardener until He called her by name. The disciples huddling together in the locked room did not believe the man Who suddenly appeared among them was their crucified and risen Lord until He showed them the nail holes in His feet and hands and the slit from the spear in His side. Strictly speaking, those reminders of His crucifixion did not need to be there on His resurrected body; His made new skin could have been absolutely free from any blemish including those imposed on Him by His cruel executioners. But, there they were, the marks from the nails driven into His hands and feet, the cut into His side made by an impatient soldier wanting to be done with the grim business of death so he could wash the dust of the hills out of this throat with a beer or two. Clearly the marks made on His body were there to identify Him as the One sent to earth by God the Father to bring light to the world’s darkness, but Who had been tortured and killed by those who refused the light they were sent and who turned back to the darkness. Here is the eleventh verse of chapter one of this Gospel enacted. Those who He was sent to save turned so thoroughly to the dark and away from Christ’s light that they snuffed that light out.

Or so they thought. Which is what everyone else also thought. With the exception of the original ending of the Gospel of Mark, the crucified and risen Lord appears to His disciples, the twelve and others, and makes Himself known to them. They did not recognize Him at first sight, nor did they trust that He was Who He said He was, the risen Christ. This ought to be a great comfort to us when doubts assail us and faith falters. Even those who knew Jesus best were initially skeptical that the risen Jesus was, and is, Who He claimed to be. Yet they were still a part of God’s work for our salvation despite their initial unbelief. Prior to the age of DNA testing, it was sufficient proof for them that He carried the marks of His death on His body, but also that He ate with them and drank with Him. No ghost, their returned Master, or any other sort of unholy creature, but still recognizably human in that He breathed and spoke, took bread and broke it, grilled fish for His disciples and ate it with them. They and the Church has answered the first question about the resurrection of Jesus Christ with an unqualified yes. Yes, He Who was absent from His grave on Sunday morning and Who subsequently appeared to them behind closed doors was, indeed, the One buried in the unused tomb on Good Friday.

So, Jesus is clearly alive, but He is also clearly changed. Initially, in the vicinity of the tomb, He cannot be touched as He was before because He “has not ascended to the Father.” Later, He seems to come and go with a thought, without benefit of door or window or even the passage of time. Here, then, is a second question which I think we need to ask of the resurrection of our Lord and Savior. That question is how is He changed? Prior to His death and resurrection, Jesus, though the incarnate Son of God, used doors and windows like all of us do, to come into and out of spaces. He did not usually appear in the middle of those who were His disciples and friends, although He did once give the slip to His onetime neighbors in Nazareth who sought to throw Him off a cliff for pointing out their sinful arrogance. It may seem to us that He was changed enough in form that His disciples did not recognize Him, but that may simply be the effect of their expectations. Their expectation was that dead men in the everyday world do not walk the streets on the third day after their death. This would be their expectation despite what they had seen and smelled with Lazarus, or in the raising of the child of the synagogue official, or the young adult son of the widow. They would have heard the story of the prophet Elijah and the child he raised from the dead as well in synagogue or at their mother’s knees. But everyday expectations are powerful in their hold on our minds, so regardless of the evidence of their own eyes or the long experience of Israel, they did not believe that after His death Jesus would be raised from the dead and walk the earth again. Lest we think ourselves better than those early disciples, the likelihood is that the evidence of our own eyes would also have been overpowered by our everyday expectation that dead men don’t get up out of the grave to put on an early morning fish fry for their friends.

The differences between Jesus before His crucifixion and resurrection and after seem to me, anyway, to have to do with our perceptions of His human and His divine natures. Even with the healing miracles and the exorcisms, Jesus before His resurrection seems to our eyes more human than not. The opposite is true after His resurrection. Then we see His presence differently. Now, He makes Himself recognizable in the breaking of a loaf of bread, the fulfillment of prophecy, the peace He bestows on the fearful disciples just like angels say peace to those everyday people whose lives they interrupt with their awesome and fearful presence. But more than that, now He gives them the Holy Spirit, and with it the power to both forgive sin and to withhold the forgiveness of sin. The forgiveness is sin is God’s work, and it was Jesus’ willingness to forgive people and tell them that their sins were forgiven that got Him into trouble with the powers that be in the first place. But now, now that power is shared with His body the Church. This is what the fullness of the new commandment to love one another as He loves them means; that they, too, will bear His light into the world’s darkness. The will preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, that those who have not seen Christ either before or after His death on the cross and His resurrection may believe, be forgiven their sins, and be redeemed.

All of which answers the last question, the one Luther asked in his Small Catechism, “What does this mean?” In part it means that everyday expectations are often false. What the world teaches is more often lie than truth, partially or in the whole, and that lie is often told so as to obscure the truth of the Gospel. The creation we inhabit is a wonderful place, only the smallest part of which we see and understand. We know for sure only what God reveals to us, primarily through Scripture, although the Church’s long experience with its Lord, can be helpful to us all who now are Christ’s lights in a world that often seems pretty darn dark. The expectations that guide us through everyday life need to be aligned with what Jesus taught us, and with God’s Word in general. It also means that Easter is not to be relegated to one day or even a short season on the calendar, churchly or secular. With the gift of the Holy Spirit and all that came before it, Jesus Christ has made us a part not only of His kingdom but of its everyday workings, not only as the Church but as individuals. Faith is not passive, a gift to be held in the closet or a drawer and taken out when we are shaken to our core by something the doctor has told us or a news article. Faith is the daily struggle to free ourselves of all those everyday expectations that we use to limit the power and the work of the Holy Spirit with us and within us. The resurrection is real! As is the forgiveness of sin. The struggle of faith is not the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead. The true struggle of faith is to let that belief take root within us and use us to illuminate the fullness of the love of God for His creation.