When 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.” After he said 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.” When he had 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; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So 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.”
John 20:19-31
A 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.” 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? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But 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.
My sermon from the 2nd Sunday of Easter (April 24, 2022) on John 20:19-31.
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On the Sunday after every Easter, our lectionary – the three year cycle of Bible readings we use in worship – gives us a story about Jesus and Thomas. It takes place immediately after some women found Jesus’ tomb empty. At that moment, Mary Magdalene saw someone nearby who she thought was the gardener. Yet when they called her by name, she realized Jesus was right in front of her. Mary then rushed back to the other disciples to share with them what she had experienced. She saw them as a community of people, some who had been with Jesus since the beginning, who were sad and scared and mourning what might have been. They assumed when Jesus was killed, his story was over. But Mary stood among them to share that their story would continue.
So later that day, as the sun set, some of the disciples gathered together. We don’t know exactly where they were but it must have been a place where they could eat, drink, and talk. Our reading doesn’t tell exactly what they did but I like to imagine they didn’t spend their entire time together in silence. There was still too much to share as they tried to integrate Jesus’ story with their own. That space would have been full of words and silences and pauses and interruptions and disagreements because this Jesus thing was brand new. They had much to wonder about yet their situation was still dangerous. The community didn’t know what would happen next so those in that space locked the front doors. We have to be mindful that, in context, John’s language here isn’t as precise as it should be. This community who followed Jesus were Jews so it doesn’t really make sense to say they were afraid of themselves. Instead, what they were worried about were those with power and that’s why I named authorities when I read this passage out loud a few minutes ago. It’s important to remember that by the time John wrote these words 60 years after the resurrection, a lot of spiritual and communal trauma had led to the Jesus movement being split from the Jewish community. These emotions and even anger let John uncritically and sometimes dangerously use the phrase “the Jews” as shorthand for those who disagreed with Jesus. As we try to place ourselves within the story of what that first Easter evening was like, we need to be mindful of how such language can infringe on our own spiritual imagination. Our biases, whether intentional or not, can cause us to interpret scripture with an antisemitic lens. Instead of doing that, we need to choose to see who was really in that space. But that’s also a bit difficult because the only disciple named in this passage wasn’t even there that first Easter evening.
Now I have a personal affinity to Thomas because, like him, I know what it’s like to be called “the twin.” For those who don’t know, I have an identical twin brother. When he comes to visit, it’s always fun seeing people in church look at him and wonder why the pastor is sitting in the pews rather than up by the altar. Growing up, we were typically identified as a unit and some of the people in our community used our names interchangeably. I knew that when someone called me by my brother’s name, that didn’t mean they were actually looking for them. Rather, they saw our distinctiveness as twins as being the primary thing they needed to know about us. Instead of learning our names or asking what we called ourselves, they called us whatever they wanted. I’ve often wondered if Thomas had a similar experience since John’s gospel calls him “the twin” almost every time he appears in the book. In John chapter 11, 20, and 21, we learn he’s known as the twin. That repetition is a bit weird but it gets even more odd once you realize what the word Thomas actually means. Thomas is derived from either the Hebrew or Armaric word for “twin.” So that means, when Thomas shows up in John, the page basically reads that “twin twin said this” or “twin twin wasn’t with them.” That makes me wonder if we even know his real name since his twinness is all we hear. And if we don’t know his name, that would mean that John didn’t record the names of any disciple who was present on that first Easter evening or who gathered again one week later. All we see in this passage is a community of people gathered together without any one specific story of the risen Jesus bringing them together.
And I wonder if that’s the point because it reveals a little bit of what the Christian community should be all about. The people in that space weren’t only those who had seen Jesus in the garden or who had heard him say their name. It didn’t only consist of people who saw the empty tomb or who first heard Mary preach the very first Christian sermon. And that community wasn’t even only those gathered in that space because the twin wasn’t even there. The community around Jesus, then, is always more than our personal story. Your experience of faith is not the litmus test for your neighbor’s experience of God or vice versa. We get to be a community full of everyone’s stories where even the faithful and the not so faithful gather for worship. We get to be the kind of church where folks who’ve seen Jesus in a vivid way and who haven’t commune at the rail together. We, either in the sanctuary or in our homes, pray with one another regardless of our physical location or even if we think these prayers will do any good at all. We, as people in this community, get to ask questions, to wonder, to doubt, to tell the truth about who we are, and seek out a peace that transforms what we can become. Together, we learn how to share our story and for others to truly know us as we want to be known. We don’t do this because we’re awesome or perfect or because we’ll always get this community-thing right. We are this because of the one name in this passage that John made sure to write down. The Christian community is a reflection of who Jesus is – the Son of God who was resurrected from the grave yet still carries the fullness of his story. The wounds from the Cross are still with him but they no longer limit who he is. Instead, they show how God opened God’s-self to us and how we, as individuals and as a community, can be opened too. When the twin wondered if the Jesus others saw was the Jesus he knew, the wider community didn’t kick him out. He wasn’t denied entry the following week just because he didn’t believe what happened before. In fact, there’s nothing in our text that implies the community wasn’t what it was supposed to be even though it contained many different kinds of people with many different kinds of experiences of God. The community could, and should, hold everyone because Jesus holds everyone too. As faithful followers of Jesus, our community should only be limited by Jesus himself. And the limit he shows of who we are meant to be is reflected in the limitless love He has for all.
Amen.