John 20:19-31
So, who has any Easter candy left? Do you have any parts of a chocolate bunny still not totally devoured, a few stale jellybeans hiding under the plastic grass in the Easter basket? Or how about Easter meal leftovers? Any ham still hanging around, or whatever you did with all those decorated hard boiled eggs?
It’s now been a week since the glorious celebration of Jesus’ resurrection but probably for most of us there is little left to show that Easter occurred. Monday morning when we went back to work or to whatever is our normal Monday schedule, didn’t life look pretty much the same as it ever does? What difference has it made that we just finished celebrating the most life transforming thing God ever did? Two thousand years after Jesus first rose from the dead, in a world that has gotten a little too used to Easter, it can be tough to maintain the kind of excitement the disciples felt after that first amazing encounter with their risen Lord. 1
Yet I wonder if it was only excitement the disciples felt when they realized Jesus had somehow risen from the dead? What about devastation, as well? The most remarkable man they had ever known had been killed, yes and somehow raised, but still they were alone again. Another dream had died.
Then all of a sudden Jesus appears to the disciples a second time and no sooner did Jesus join them in that room where they had gathered, then he immediately gave them a job to do! On the spot, in the midst of their shock and amazement, Jesus commissions the disciples to be the church in the world. He fills them with his Holy Spirit, he tells them they are to go forth sharing his peace and he charges them to be about the work of forgiveness.
Now remember, it is only Easter evening. The disciples have rarely had time to shift their emotional state from shock and grief over Jesus’ death three days earlier, let alone deal with their own sense of guilt over their betrayal and abandonment. And now they are hit with surprise and delight that their Lord and teacher wasn’t really dead after all, even though they had no idea yet fully what that meant. Here is Jesus among them and without further ado he wants them to get busy but he still hasn’t explained a thing!
Obviously, no rest for the weary.
And while it’s true, in this account from John’s gospel, that Jesus doesn’t take time to help the disciples understand all that has happened, he also never once chides them for their faithlessness or doubt. Jesus doesn’t look back and criticize them for their falling asleep when he really needed their company in the Garden of Gethsemane; he doesn’t berate or condemn them for their denial and abandonment at the cross.
No, that’s all past, forgiven and forgotten. Jesus simply moves on, looks ahead and gives the disciples the vital job of carrying on his ministry of love and reconciliation.
And it’s significant that the one thing Jesus commands them to do is to share peace and forgiveness. He doesn’t tell the disciples to teach; he doesn’t have them move people to proper belief; instead it is all about their willingness to be in relationship, to be vulnerable to one another, to be willing to work on trust and openness, to be willing to be changed and affected by another which is what the heart of forgiveness is all about. All of Jesus’ life and message and ministry distilled in this one thing, forgiveness.
And then he models that way of being in relationship in his interaction with Thomas. When Thomas, having missed Jesus’ first visit with the disciples, insists on seeing Jesus in the flesh for himself, Jesus approaches Thomas on his second visit and says to him, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.”
As one commentator has written, “There is something incredibly vulnerable about this story from both sides. Thomas needs and wants touch; and Jesus is fully willing to give his breath and his body to be known.” To say it another way, Jesus having shown up ‘scars and all’, when he commissions the disciples to carry on his work, he does so by equipping them with his very self and says to the disciples as well as to us, “with my breath know that the love and grace of God flows through you as a ‘presence so enormous, so permeating, so thorough that it may be mistaken at times for absence, but it is that which gives you life.” 2
And it is life which is not meant to be without scars or blemish; nor without fault or mistake or regret. It is life with the full awareness that it was precisely his wounds Jesus encouraged Thomas to touch, and it was Jesus’ scars that led Thomas to faith. Likewise it is the pain and scarring of our world that you and I are invited to notice and touch. And it is we who Jesus commissions to embody his scars and wear his wounds in any and all of those places where the world needs to see and experience a love that bears all things, a presence that never dies.
At the end of his novel, A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone. But only some become strong in the broken places.”
Well, medically, Hemingway is correct about broken bones becoming stronger once they are fully healed than they originally were. And Hemingway is also right about the world breaking everyone. Who among us is ever immune from heartache and tragedy?
But where I differ from Hemingway is in his assertion that only some become strong. Because the wonder and miracle of Easter is that the power is there for all of us to become strong. The gift is here for anyone and everyone to receive and feel Jesus’ presence and life in all their needs and wounds and scars.
Except Jesus cannot be everywhere to let people touch him. He can’t be in all places for people to feel and know how compassionate God is. That is why Jesus commissions us to share his peace and extend his forgiveness. That is why his breath and Holy Spirit pulse through us. That’s why there is no rest for the weary.
Yes, it’s a week after Easter and the candy and ham are all but finished and the world doesn’t look much different.
But you and I know everything’s changed. So let’s get busy and get to work practicing forgiveness! Trusting that when we do get weary, we will find Jesus standing beside us, close enough to touch, breathing on us, filling us with peace and reviving us again and again and again. Amen.
- iucc, March 25, 2008 Quinn G. Caldwell
- Christian Century, March 25, 2008, pg. 20, Debbie Blue