We come to the next words of Jesus in John’s gospel. It is evening time. The disciples are all together in one place, but behind locked doors for fear of the Jewish leaders.
19 On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!”20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.
John 20:19-23
21 Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” 22 And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”
Jesus comes with a message of peace. We’ve seen this before in Luke’s account. The disciples are overjoyed when they see Jesus. Then John tells us about Jesus’s sending of his disciples and empowering of them.
Jesus says “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you”. The rest of John’s gospel gives us a good idea of what that means. Jesus comes from the Father, to show us what the God who no one has seen looks like. John 1 tells us that he comes from the Father, full of grace and truth. He comes to make God known to us. In the rest of John’s gospel we see what that is like.
Jesus brings healing, he brings life, he explains who he is, and what God is like. That is what the Father sent him to do. That is what Jesus sends his disciples to do. Jesus’s disciples are to show Jesus to people who haven’t seen him. They are to tell what he is like, they are to bring his peace and healing to a broken world.
That is the commission. It covers telling others, it covers helping others in natural and supernatural ways, and it covers confronting those who are holding others back from hearing the good news and experiencing the love of God. Christians can end up complicating that, and having anguished debates about priority of those different things.
Yet Jesus’s calling is more straightforward than that – it is to get on with showing him to a world that needs him so desperately. That will likely mean involvement in all sorts of different things, with each of us playing our role according to the gifts God has given us and the situations he has placed us in.
This commission may seem a tall order. How can we possibly show Christ to others? How can we live like this? So Jesus breathes on his disciples and says “receive the Holy Spirit”. This is a kind of anticipation of what they will receive at Pentecost. They will receive the Spirit to enable them to show Jesus to the world.
Disciples today receive the Spirit to show Jesus to the world. Jesus’s next words are a little more tricky to get to the bottom of. What does it mean, for example, that if the disciples forgive anyone’s sins then that person is forgiven. Those words have been used to justify a hierarchy of priests and a church with power to forgive – or to leave unforgiven. Yet it seems unlikely that Jesus is here instituting the beginning of an elaborate priesthood.
But it does sound like he is giving them the power to do what only God can do. Only God can forgive sins in a general sense – we can all forgive those who sin against us, but we cannot forgive sins that have nothing to do with us. Why does Jesus put it like this? Perhaps he is highlighting that in going out with the message of Jesus the disciples are giving people the means by which they can be forgiven? Perhaps he is saying that disciples can declare God’s forgiveness over people?
Perhaps because disciples are the only way people will see Jesus, the welcome the disciples give is a welcome that displays Jesus’s welcome. Not that disciples can pick and choose whose sins to forgive. But maybe their welcome of those who come in repentance to Jesus acts as the visible sign that Jesus has forgiven those people? That seems the most likely interpretation of Jesus’s words, and reminds those of us who trust in Jesus of the huge responsibility on us to show Jesus in a visible and tangible way to those around, and not to cause them to stumble.
24 Now Thomas (also known as Didymus[a]), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”
John 20:24-27
But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
26 A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
One of the 12 is missing – and goes down in history as ‘doubting’ Thomas. Which seems slightly unfair – how many of us would have believed in his shoes?
The term ‘doubting’ is also not quite right. It is more straightforward in the Greek – we could literally translate ‘do not be unbelieving but believe’. Doubt is a separate issue that has to do with uncertainties about what we believe. Thomas’s position here is more straightforward, it is simply that he does not believe Jesus had risen, and that he needs to see in order to believe. But when he does receive the evidence he needs his response is immediate – and he doesn’t actually need to touch Jesus’s scars.
28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
John 20:28-29
29 Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Thomas’s reaction is instant ‘my lord, and my God’. Not only does recognise Jesus is risen, he also confesses that Jesus is his Lord, and his God. The question that leaves us with is: will we? Jesus pronounces a blessing on those of us who do believe without seeing. It isn;t that we take a leap in the dark, but rather that we assess the evidence that convinced sceptics like Thomas and make up our minds about Jesus.
For us all though, there comes a time when we need to evaluate the evidence we have and choose what we make of it. Will we believe the eyewitnesses? Will we trust their testimony? Or will we not?
If we do then we too should confess Jesus as our Lord and God, and receive the eternal life that begins now and goes on forever. The life that Jesus has after his resurrection is a foretaste of the life that can be ours – at least that is the promise of John’s gospel.
The encouragement from Thomas is that Jesus does not condemn our scepticism – instead he encourages us to press on in our search for answers so that we too can recognise him for who he really is and enter life in all its fullness.
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