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Easter 2C
April 24, 2022
John 20:19-31
INTRODUCTION:
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed, Alleluia!
This is the traditional greeting all throughout the Easter season, and so we will keep using it for each of the seven Sundays of Easter. In liturgical churches like ours, we understand Easter not to be one single Sunday, but rather, a week’s worth of Sundays! So we will celebrate the resurrection each of seven weeks – and yes, every Sunday after that, as well.
Our readings during this season also reflect this. During the Easter season we will hear from Acts rather than a Hebrew Bible (OT) reading. This is so that we can see and hear how the Early Church dealt with the news of the resurrection, how the news shaped their faith and their church, and so also how it shapes ours.
For the second reading we will be hearing from Revelation – a book that has a reputation of being sort of bizarre and troubling in its depiction of the end of the world, but really, it is a deeply symbolic book that paints a picture of hope in the midst of despair, famine, conflict, and war. The Book of Revelation shows us how God is present, not absent, how Christ is the self-giving Lamb, and how people are called repeatedly into a circle of praise and worship. All hopeful images, and all appropriate themes for the Easter season!
And finally, during these six remaining Sundays of Easter, we will hear from John’s Gospel. This 2nd Sunday of Easter, we always hear the story of Jesus appearing to his fearful disciples in the locked upper room, and breathing his peace upon them, and about how Thomas, who was gone that night, wanted the same close encounter with the Risen Lord. It is a story about how we, too, crave Christ’s peace, and an encounter with our Lord.
As you listen, listen as one who is still excited, mystified, and perhaps a little scared about this earth-shattering news of the resurrection. For this news is still all of these things, 2000 years later! Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our risen Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The month of April holds two important anniversaries for two modern giants of faith: Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination was April 4th, and April 9th marks the anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death. Martin Luther King, of course, was a pastor and activist who fought for civil rights during the 60s and upset a lot of important and powerful people in doing so. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also a pastor, an ethicist and a theologian during World War II, and was a part of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Though the attempt was unsuccessful, he was arrested for his part in this. Bonhoeffer’s work is often compared to that of Martin Luther King’s: both were compelled by their Christian faith to resist a racist regime, both found their gospel commitments led them to work outside of the conventional church, and both ultimately gave their lives for their respective resistance movements.
These two anniversaries may help us hear some of Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel reading a bit differently than we have before. First, three times in this reading, Jesus says, “Peace be with you.” I have usually read this as a word of comfort to the fearful disciples. But thinking this week about the work of King and Bonhoeffer, I’ve thought about those words differently, because while the end goal of peace might in fact be something resembling calm and reassurance, getting there can be anything but calm. Just ask King and Bonhoeffer, who were both martyred at age 39, because of their working for peace! Ask those trying to raise their voices and make people aware of their various plights, whether that is as a victim of a racist system, or a system that keeps people living in poverty, or someone speaking up about being harassed or abused or bullied, only to be told they are imagining it or lying. Ask someone in Ukraine, standing to defend their country from invasion. Ask anyone who spends every day working toward a more fair and just system how peaceful that work is (or isn’t!) while you’re doing it!
The irony of this exchange is that I suspect peace is exactly what the disciples were trying to find by locking themselves behind that door in the first place. We do that, don’t we – lock ourselves away from reality in an effort to get away from it all? If there is something out there that we don’t want to deal with, that we want to get away from, we just lock ourselves away behind the door where we can pretend that everything out there is not really happening. Maybe it is an actual locked room that we turn to, or maybe to some other coping mechanism like shopping or alcohol or our technology of choice. Maybe our locked room is adamant denial that a reality could exist that doesn’t fit with how we perceive the world to be, or how we wish the world was. However it looks, we try to find peace by locking ourselves away from a reality that does not bring us peace.
And so I wonder if, when Jesus offers those words, “Peace be with you,” he might be saying, “You’re not going to find true peace locked in here. True peace comes from faith and trust in me.”
But I also wonder, if in those words might also be a charge, to seek out that peace themselves, to be agents peace for the world. Because look at the very next thing Jesus says: “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” If Jesus truly meant to offer calming words, that seems like a tough line to chase it with, no? “Hey guys, calm down, everything is going to be fine. Because… I’m sending you out into the world that just had me killed. Good luck!” Yikes! That makes me feel the opposite of peaceful! But you see, the mission is not to feel peace now, but rather, to seek peace in the broken world – not the peace that comes from avoidance of a problem, but the peace that comes from confronting the brokenness of the world with the good news of the abundant life given to us by a God who so loves the world and loves each of us who are in it. “As the Father sent me, so I send you,” he says, to speak a word of life into a hurting world, to bring Christ’s life to those in need.
And that is not a charge that brings peace to the heart right away, because it is really hard. Martin Luther King lived every day in fear for his life, as he spoke the hope he found in the gospel to the oppressive reality of racism that plagued his community and the country he loved.
But it is a charge that ultimately brings peace to the world God loves. And that is the role Jesus is giving to these disciples, now apostles, being sent out: to speak a word of life, and work for peace in this broken world.
Then, Jesus breathes into them and says, “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.” The word translated here as “retain” does not mean to “withhold” forgiveness, but rather, like, “hold fast.” It’s like, holding to account. It is like Christ refusing to turn a blind eye to human suffering and wrong-doing, refusing to “just let it go,” and thus enable bad behavior to continue. “Holding fast” to sin is Dietrich Bonhoeffer saying, “What Hitler is doing is wrong, and it needs to stop.” It is Martin Luther King proclaiming that God did not intend that human beings should be anything but free, that indeed all men and woman are created equal and must be treated as such. I imagine it as taking sin and sinful actions by the collar, looking it in the eye, and saying, “Listen, this is not okay, and it cannot continue!”
In other words, “retaining” or “holding fast” to sin is not refusing to forgive it. It is refusing to tolerate sin that would keep the world from living in the peace Christ died to bring to this world. And so, as a follow-up to, “Peace be with you,” Jesus charges the disciples to hold to account and confront wrong-doing whenever they see it, to keep sin and abuse from having their way.
That’s a tall order, too, a very difficult call for Jesus to extend to his followers. No wonder they were back in that same room the next week, with the doors still shut! In fact, I think many of Christ’s followers today are still in that same room with the door shut. Because being a disciple is hard, and it is even harder being an apostle, who goes out into the world and finds the places most in need of healing and speaks to those places a word of peace and life.
Of course, Jesus knows that. That’s why he also offers to his apostles that night – and to all believers since then – the gift of the Holy Spirit. Back before he died, he called this Spirit an “Advocate,” someone to go along with them and work with them and for them, helping them to do God’s work in the world. It’s that same Spirit that we celebrate coming on Pentecost at the end of the Easter season. It’s that same Spirit that we pray to come upon every child of God who is baptized (in fact, included in the baptismal promises are these words: “to work for justice and peace”). It’s that same Spirit that we pray to come into the bread and wine before we take communion. We are continually infused with this Spirit of peace, love and life, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, knowledge and joy.
We are not alone in this call, friends. God has given us all that we need to make those words, “Peace be with you,” truly come to be in this world. And even when we do lock ourselves away from the realities of the world that so desperately need a word of hope and life, Jesus comes to us – repeatedly! – to once again give us the strength to pursue his work. The question is, will we open the door, like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and so many others, and go do it?
Let us pray… Risen Christ, you come into our locked rooms when we are scared and would rather avoid the pain of the world, and you breathe your Holy Spirit into us. Empower us by this Spirit, that we might bring your words, “Peace be with you,” into the parts of God’s beloved world that need to hear it the most. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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