A Look at This Sunday's Gospel Lesson (John 20:19-31)

[These "looks" are something I write every week, mainly with the idea of helping members of the congregation I serve as pastor, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, to get ready for worship. But since our congregation uses a lectionary (a plan of Bible lessons) rooted on the Church Year shared by most Christians throughout the world, I hope that others find these pieces helpful, too.]

Second Sunday of Easter
April 19, 2009

The Bible Lessons:
Acts 4:32-35
Psalm 133:1-3
1 John 1:1-2:2
John 20:19-31

Prayer of the Day:
Almighty God, with joy we celebrate the day of our Lord’s resurrection. By the grace of Christ among us, enable us to show the power of the resurrection in all that we say and do, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

Comments

I haven't yet decided which text I'll choose as the basis for my sermon. But below are substantially revised comments on the lesson I first wrote last year. John 20:19-31 is used on the Second Sunday of Easter in all three years of the lectionary cycle.

¹⁹When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”

(1) The phrase "the first day of the week" is deliberate and significant. The creation motif is strong in the Gospel of John, starting with its opening echoes of Genesis' first creation account and the designation of Jesus as "the Word" who was both God and with God before the universe came into being. Jesus has come, according to both John's Gospel and the writings of Paul to usher in a new creation (Second Corinthians 5:17). The rabbis often taught that creation fell into sin on the seventh day and that God would renew His creation or create anew on a new first day, sometimes called the eighth day. (John also likes to speak of things happening on the eighth day or eight days later.)

(2) M. Craig Barnes, the wonderful preacher, suggests that disciples were afraid of their fellow Jews not just because of the possibility of their being killed, but also because they were ashamed for their disloyalty to Jesus.

(3) "Peace be with you" was a common greeting in Old and New Testament cultures. There is though, a particular irony in its use here and a particular need the disciples would have felt for God's peace.

(4) It's important to remember that the word translated as "Jews" is more readily rendered as "Judeans," residents of what, after the ancient reign of King Solomon, became the southern kingdom, whose worship and civic life was centered on Jerusalem. (The northern Kingdom, called Israel, was centered on Samaria.)

To read John as antisemitic. It would hardly make sense given that the one proclaimed in John's Gospel and in our Gospel lesson, as "Lord and...God" was Himself a Jew.

²⁰After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

(1) Jesus allows the disciples to see His wounds, confirming evidence that the full-embodied form before them is the Savior they had seen die.

(2) After satisfying themselves that this is Jesus and He is risen, the disciples rejoice. The only basis for joy that a Christian has--indeed, the only way people can call themselves Christian--is when they too, have their own satisfaction seen, for us through the eyes of faith, that Jesus is risen. Paul writes:

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (First Corinthians 15:12-19)

²¹Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

(1) Jesus underscores the peace that He gives by repeating this blessing to the disciples.

(2) Through Jesus, we're deputized and empowered to share the Good News as He had been. This echoes words from Jesus' high priestly prayer found in John 17.

²²When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.

This is a sort of Pentecost, when you think of it. (Acts 2) The word spirit is pneuma in the Greek of the New Testament and ruach in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. Both words can mean wind, breath, and spirit.

In the second Genesis creation account, God breathes His ruach into inanimate dust and the first man comes to life.

In the first creation account, God's Spirit, like a mighty wind, bears down on the stormy waters of primeval chaos and life comes into being.

According to John's Gospel, when Jesus exhaled His final breath on the cross, He literally "gave up His spirit." (John 19:30)

Through the impartation of His Spirit, Jesus, God-enfleshed, creates the Church, the community of believers in Him who proclaim forgiveness of sin to all who repent and turn to Christ and the need for repentance and believe to all.

²³If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Here, Jesus entrusts what's called "the Office of the Keys" to the Church.

Martin Luther explains this in The Small Catechism:

What is the Office of the Keys?
It is that authority which Christ gave to his church to forgive the sins of those who repent and declare to those who do not repent that their sins are not forgiven.

Christ not only conveys this frightening authority to the Church in John 20:23, but also in Matthew 18:18, where He says:

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

²⁴But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came.

(1) Thomas' nickname, the Twin or Didymus, has often been seen as an indicator of "double-mindedness" on his part. This would fit well with James' New Testament admonition to believers who don't really believe:

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. (James 4:8)

Advocates of this symbolic meaning for Thomas' nickname often offer Thomas' words in John 11 as further evidence of a struggle to believe on Thomas' part. There, with word already having arrived that the Jewish authorities are intent on having their Roman overlords execute Jesus, Jesus announces that His friend Lazarus has died and He must go to him and wake him from death. Thomas says to the others, "Let us also go, that we may die with him.” My mentor, the late Pastor Bruce Schein, insisted this isn't piety, but sarcasm. This is a common opinion.

But recently, my colleague Pastor Scott Baker has argued that it's just as likely that Thomas was being sincere in expressing his allegiance to Jesus and a willingness to die with Jesus. The reason then, for Thomas' unwillingess to accept the news of Jesus' resurrection has less to do with any special inability to trust on his part, but with the track record of his fellow disciples. He doubts the credibility of the disciples. As Scott writes of the disciples and Thomas's skepticism about their witness:

These are the ones who abandoned Jesus. Peter, who denied him. And now, they are hiding afraid in some locked room and saying they have seen someone who Thomas knows is dead...[But] Have they left their locked room? Have they gone out to tell the world? Wouldn't such news cause them to make a confession of faith like, "My Lord and my God"? Thomas...doesn't believe the ones giving witness.

I shudder to think about this, knowing how often my life has rendered my witness for Christ unbelievable. God, forgive me.

How many people are there in our lives who are willing to believe in Jesus, but can't because they find it hard to believe Christians?

(2) We often often call the Twin, Doubting Thomas. But as Brian Stoffregen points out, the text, in the original Greek, never speaks of Thomas as one having doubts. The text, in the original Greek, describes him as apistos, not believing.

²⁵So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “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.” ²⁶A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”

(1) At v.26, whole week has passed; it's another first day of the week. Once more, Jesus transgresses locked doors, indicating that He is no longer limited by time and space as He had been before His death and resurrection.

(2) Once again, Jesus greets the disciples with the words, "Peace be with you."

²⁷Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

(1) Jesus doesn't tell Thomas, "Don't doubt." (Although that's not a terrible translation.) He literally says, "Be not faithless; be faithful." The point is that we must open ourselves to allowing God to create faith in us. We must cease and desist from our resistance and ask God to do this. We must put our dukes down and let God be God.

²⁸Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”

To me, Thomas' response is so ironic. The faithless one issues the most emphatic and all-inclusive confession of Jesus to be found in the Gospels: "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 come to believe.”

These words are really about all of us who haven't seen the risen Jesus (YET) and still believe in Him.

³⁰Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. ³¹But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

(1) I've called this the mission statement of John's Gospel.

(2) The unspoken implication here is this: I've told you everything you need to know in order to believe in Jesus Christ. To come to faith in Christ, we don't need more evidence; we only need to surrender! This is the choice of faith that Psalm 16:4 and 5 mention.