The joy of Easter feels muted this year – news bulletins remind us, how could we forget, that people are being bereaved constantly and are living in fear of death and injury, starvation and arrest.
A significant proportion of the world’s population in the Middle East, in Ukraine, and in Africa, wherever there is warfare and totalitarian regimes, is in mourning: for lost family, lost homes and communities, lost hope for the future. But still Easter arrives with its promises of a new relationship with God, with Easter joy at humanity’s new status. But in the face of such danger and loss it is hard to recognise the new future. The disciples must have felt like this too in the time after the resurrection.
The disciples are huddled behind locked doors for fear of the Jews, but also because they are afraid about everything that has happened. Not only had they seen their Lord crucified, they were now being told that he had, indeed, risen from the dead, or at least that the tomb is empty.
The disciples are hiding. Perhaps in a sense they are also hiding from God, rather like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. Perhaps God has got a little too close.
The last thing they did before the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane was to flee and deny knowing Christ, even though each of them had said they would be willing to die for Jesus.
They are still not willing to die for him, they are hiding and they are terrified. Mary Magdalene has told them first that someone has taken away his body and that she doesn’t know where they have put him, and then that she has seen the Lord, but this makes no sense to them either. It is into this context that the Risen Lord appears to them.
The first thing he says to them is “Peace be with you.”
Not why did you all run away, or where were you?
With great understatement, John tells us “Then were they glad when they saw the Lord!”
Not only are they delighted that he has risen from the dead, I think they are also relieved and delighted that they are forgiven, they are understood.
Jesus says “Peace be with you” again and then he gives them the great commission.
He says, “I send you” to a group of frightened men in a locked room, who have no understanding of what has happened to Jesus. There is no further training, no more preparation time, you’re ready now. Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you”. It’s a bit like, pick up your bed and walk.
Then we get another little reminder of Genesis. How does God bring life into Adam when he is created from clay? He breathes on him. Only God the Creator can give life to something that is dead.
Because the disciples in that locked room are, in a sense, dead and lifeless.
They are dead in their denial of Jesus; they are dead in their sorrow and sin.
Jesus breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit”.
It’s worth noting here that in both Greek and Hebrew the word for God’s spirit can also mean breath or wind. So Jesus, who until a little while ago, was dead, breathes life, the Holy Spirit, back into the weak, frightened, failing disciples.
Jesus knows exactly what we need. He knew that the disciples needed to hear and see and touch, in this first appearance in the locked room he shows the disciples his hands and his side, to demonstrate that he is not a ghost but real and can be touched.
Thomas isn’t there and so when he is told what has happened he fears that the others have been seeing things, hallucinating; Thomas, forever known as “Doubting”, makes a perfectly reasonable statement that he wants to touch Jesus in the very spot where the nails went in so that he can be sure it’s the same Jesus – he’s not a ghost and he doesn’t just look like Jesus.
These are the same questions we all might have, are we seeing things, grief can do strange things to our minds. Is this wishful thinking? Jesus, when he appears to them again, once more reminds them with his “peace be with you” that they are forgiven and have received the Holy spirit, then immediately Christ knows what Thomas needs and offers him the chance to touch the place where the nails were in his hands and feel where the spear pierced his side.
I like to think that Thomas, in a split second, realises how crass his unbelief has been. Of course it is Jesus, who else could it be, who else would appear to them in a locked room, forgive them for abandoning him and breathe on them the Holy Spirit?
Without pause for thought, Thomas responds with the first full profession of faith in the divinity of the Risen Christ when he says simply, “My Lord and My God”.
Jesus knows what we need too. He knows we need tangible links to that most precious body and blood broken for us to give us a new relationship with the Father. So, he has given us Holy Communion – a reminder each week as we gather together that Jesus is real.
We can touch and taste and receive him in the bread and the wine.
He speaks directly to us at the end of this encounter, he comes to us in our fearful, inadequate, failing state and says, “Peace be with you, as the Father has sent me, so I send you, receive the Holy Spirit, you are blessed because you believe in me”.
Each time we encounter Christ in the Eucharist he gives us the same blessing that his disciples received and the same great commission.
He sends us into the world with all its power games and cruelty, politics and suffering, its Gazas, its Ukraines, its holocausts and its abused children. He sends us back into the world to do his work and to witness to Him. Because no matter how ill-prepared we might think we are, however weak and fearful, He is with us always and He has overcome death for us and to make us part of a new creation. He walks alongside us, always.
Amen.
