The Spirit, Forgiveness, & Doubt | John 20:19-29 | 4.12.26

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And happy Easter to you.

This is the second Sunday in the Easter season.

Easter runs all the way, from Easter Sunday all the way to Pentecost, and it's a time in our church life where we are asking questions of ourselves.

What does it mean to us that Christ is risen?

And it's also a time where we begin to turn our gaze towards Pentecost, where we remember and give thanks for the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church.

Today we're going to read also of two of Jesus' resurrection appearances in John's gospel.

But before we read again together, let's pray and ask God to bless our time.

God of the universe, source of all that is and all that will be, we turn to your word this morning to receive and to be renewed by you.

Continue to speak to us through it and remind us of who we are and what it is you call us to do.

Help us to find our faith again.

From wherever we've tucked away the small scraps of our faith this week.

Hold it up again for us as a mirror that we might continue to grow in the likeness of Christ and become who you have made us to be in his name.

Amen.

Our reading is from John the twentieth chapter.

I'm going to read verses 19 through 29.

Let's listen together for God's word to us.

When it was evening on that same day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Judean authorities.

Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you.

After this, he showed them his hands and his side.

Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you.

As the Father has sent me, so I send you.

And when he 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.

And if you retain the sins of any, they are held.

But Thomas, who was called the twin, one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came.

So that 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.

A week later, the disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them.

And although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you.

Then 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.

Thomas answered him, My Lord and my God.

Jesus said to him, Have you believed because you have seen me?

Happy are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

Y'all, Thomas gets a bad rap.

Does he not?

I spoke about this passage with a few different folks this week about what we were going to read.

And every time I said we were going to talk about Thomas, the person responded, Ah, yes, doubting Thomas.

We have all come to know him as doubting Thomas.

But is that really fair?

I can just imagine him now shaking his head.

Guys, it was one time.

And all I wanted to experience was the same thing that everyone else had experienced.

Personally, I'm grateful for folks like Thomas.

Folks who want to experience their faith the same way they've seen other folks experience it.

They want powerful, transformative moments.

They want encounters with the divine through prayer.

They have this sort of Pentecostal ache.

And they wonder if my faith doesn't look like theirs, is mine false?

How do I know that my faith is real?

But do you want to know how I know?

How I know that Thomas's faith was real?

Because he was not hiding in there behind those locked doors with the others.

He was already out there living it that very same day.

Maybe he was on a grocery run, or maybe he was conducting his own investigation, but he wasn't hiding in fear.

This is the same Thomas, by the way, who was willing to follow Christ even if it meant his own death.

As one commenter reminded me this week, earlier in John's Gospel, Thomas is the only disciple with the courage to follow Jesus no matter the cost.

Not Peter, the rock, not John the beloved, not the sons of thunder, not Simon the zealot.

When Jesus hears that his dear friend Lazarus has died, all of the other disciples try to talk him out of returning to Bethany to mourn.

Because the last time they were all they were there, all hell almost broke loose, and they were threatened with death, run out of town, and made to feel unwelcome, to say the least.

All the disciples believed that returning to Bethany, even to mourn the dead, would end in their death.

And so while all the other disciples hemmed and hawed about not going back to Bethany, Thomas alone speaks up, standing in solidarity with Jesus.

Let's go with him, Thomas says, so that we may die with him.

Those are not the words of a doubter.

Those are not even the words of a believer.

Those are the words of a follower of Christ.

In our gospel reading today, we find the disciples behind those locked doors, still on the same day that Mary found the tomb empty.

On that same day where she came running to tell them, I have seen the Lord.

And then Jesus walks right into the middle of them.

No announcement, no smoke and mirrors, just there he was.

I like to imagine he just stood there for a minute to see how long it took him to notice.

And I imagine he lets the moment breathe before he says, Peace be with you.

Locked doors apparently are not a problem for God.

Jesus offers the disciples three things.

He offers them peace, the same peace he'd promised them before any of this happened.

Back when he told them he was leaving and they didn't understand, and their hearts were troubled.

My peace I give to you.

He wasn't just being poetic, he meant it then, and he means it now.

And he offers them a commissioning.

As the Father has sent me, so I send you.

The whole gospel has been building to this moment.

Peace and sending.

And finally, he tells them, you were never meant to stay behind these locked doors, you were meant to go.

And then he breathes on them.

It's one of the most quietly stunning moments in all of Scripture.

I'm gonna mention a few Greek words today, so hang with me.

This Greek word for breath, uh, Mphiseo, it only appears uh in the Hebrew version in one other place.

So it's only in Greek once, and it's only in Hebrew once.

In Genesis 2, when God breathes life into the dust, and it becomes a living being.

John wants you to catch that.

This is a new creation moment, the risen Christ breathing the Spirit into his frightened, locked-in friends.

And yet Thomas misses all of it.

And when they tell him, when they come to him, breathless, saying, We have seen the Lord, he says, I need to see for myself.

I want that experience too.

Can we sit with that for a moment before we rush to judge him?

Would you not also want to see the risen Lord?

No one in this resurrection narrative, by the way, actually believes without some form of encounter with Jesus.

Mary doesn't believe until she hears her name spoken by him in the garden and recognizes him.

The disciples locked in the room don't believe until Jesus is standing right in front of them, showing them his hands and his side.

They don't even react to the first peace be with you.

He has to show them his hands and his side first before they respond.

And even then, John tells us it took seeing them.

And Thomas isn't asking for anything that the others didn't already receive.

He just wasn't there yet.

An entire week passes.

Thomas patiently waiting for his experience with his Lord and his friend.

Can you imagine the agony, the mental anguish, the PTSD?

You watched your friend killed, and everyone else you know and trust says, Well, we've seen him, but you haven't.

His friends droning on and on about how Jesus breathed life into them.

And yet one week later, Jesus comes again to that same place.

And this time, Thomas is there, present, whatever that cost him, still showing up even in his pain, and Jesus goes straight to him.

See my hands.

Do not be faithless, but trust, my friend.

And here is where I want you to pay attention because this is the moment the whole gospel has been building toward with Thomas.

Not with Peter's confession, not the beloved disciples, not Mary's.

Thomas.

Doubting Thomas, the one we've been so quick to label and dismiss, he opens his mouth and utters the most theologically correct and complete statement in all of the Gospel of John.

He says, My Lord and my God.

The first person in the Gospel of John to call Jesus God is Thomas.

Not just a teacher, not just rabbi, not son of man, not just a man who was dead and is now alive, but Lord and God, one with the Father, word made flesh, recognized at last for who he truly is.

The man we call doubting Thomas delivers the climax.

And I wonder how many Thomases in our lives we have neglected or refused to learn from or listen to because their faith didn't look like ours.

Their experiences with church or with Jesus stuff didn't rhyme with our experience, and so we didn't figure they were worth listening to.

Now Jesus does say something after all this that's often read as a mild rebuke.

He says, Have you believed because you have seen me?

Blessed are those who have not seen and have yet come to believe.

And I want to just complicate a little bit how we hear that in English when we read the word blessed.

The word translated blessed is the Greek makarios.

And we talked about the uh the Beatitudes a little while back.

And that word, blessed, is the same one at the beginning of the Beatitudes, makarios.

And makarios doesn't have all the same connotations that the English blessed implies.

It doesn't mean especially favored by God.

It doesn't mean uh spiritually superior or uniquely gifted.

It means something closer to happy or content, uh, undisturbed.

It's the word Jesus uses in these Beatitudes to describe those who are living the good life.

They were doing it right.

And in Jesus' time, they happened to be poor.

They happened to be persecuted, but they were doing it right.

Perhaps a better translation of what John quotes as Jesus saying here would be lucky are those, lucky are those who haven't seen and yet believe.

It doesn't mean they're better.

It just means they've had it a little easier, if anything.

Jesus is observing, he's describing a faith that doesn't require evidence to get there.

That faith, it has an easier road.

It travels lighter.

Surely it is a gift.

I'm not minimizing that.

It is good.

But Jesus isn't holding it up as the only way or as the gold standard.

He's just noting what's true.

If anything, the gospel's author places this quote from Jesus right here as a balm and an encouragement to his own early Christian community, reminding them of their own gift of faith, even though they had never met Jesus personally.

In this same way, at least.

And so what's true also is this Thomas's path, the one that desired that same embodied encounter as the other disciples, patiently sitting with his uncertainty for a week, and then encountering the risen Christ and being transformed by that encounter, that is a legitimate way to come to faith.

It's not a lesser way.

It's not a cautionary tale.

Thomas is not a warning.

Thomas is a witness for all of those, all of us who have hard questions to ask of the Bible and of God and of all this mess.

Thomas is there to help us see that that is also a way to get that experience of Jesus, even if it's not as fun or as easy or as lucky.

So where does that leave us?

I guess today I want you to remember the real Thomas.

Maybe next time someone says, Oh, y'all talked about doubting Thomas, you can say, No, we talked about courageous Thomas.

Not a caricature, not a cautionary tale, but Thomas, the follower of Christ.

The one who walked toward death with Christ when everyone else wanted to back away.

And the one who sat with his uncertainty for a whole week because he trusted his Lord would come to him.

And he just kept showing up anyway, the one whose hungry, honest, and unresolved faith became the very vessel through which the gospel's deepest truth was spoken.

My Lord and my God.

That ache in you is not a sign of weak faith.

That may be the very Spirit's ache put in you, God drawing you to God's self.

That ache might be the sign of a faith growing deeper than it's ever been.

Roots pushing down through the dry ground, searching for the water they haven't found yet, but refusing to stop seeking.

Thomas didn't give up.

He didn't walk away.

He stayed in the room.

He kept showing up to be with his people, even when he didn't share their experience.

And when the moment came when Christ came through another locked door and went straight to him, Thomas was there to receive it.

God can handle your questions, God is not threatened by any of your doubts.

All truth is God's truth.

And so if Thomas teaches us anything, it is that the God who breathed creation into being, the God who walked out of a tomb on the third day, the God who passed through locked doors, that God is more than capable of showing up for you too.

Even if it might not be exactly where you hoped and when you had hoped.

That God wants to show up for you too.

So keep asking.

Keep waiting and keep showing up.

Your encounter might be closer than you think, for we are all Easter people and we don't do it alone.

Each of us in our own place and with our own way, we do it together as a community.

And as Easter people, we trust that the story isn't over yet.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.