John 20: 19-31  

On the evening of the first day of the week the disciples had barred the door against the Judeans (Jews). Yet, Jesus arrived and stood among them and said, "Shalom." Then he showed them his hand and his side. The disciples were filled with joy when they saw it was he. Jesus said to them again, "Shalom. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said that, he breathed on them and said, "Take some of the Unseen Force. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you do not release them from their sin debt, they remain in debt." Later when Thomas, known as the Twin, the one of the twelve who had not been present, said when told that his brothers had seen the Lord, "Unless I myself see the mark the nails made and the hole in his side, I refuse to believe you." Although the doors were once more shut and barred, Jesus appeared again, stood with them and said, "Shalom." Then to Thomas he said, "Come on, put your finger here and look at my hands; go ahead and place your hand in my side. Don't doubt what you see; believe it." Thomas replied, "My master; my God." Jesus wanted to know if Thomas believed because he had seen. "Those who have managed to believe without seeing are the ones who are fortunate." It is said that Jesus gave signs his disciples witnessed, which were more numerous than have been included in this document. But the ones that are reported are given that you may believe that Jesus is God's anointed One, and that, believing, you will have life in his name." (Translated, condensed and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.)

It is unfortunate that far fewer people show up for church during the weeks following Easter Day itself. The post-resurrection appearance stories that are read out give some needed texture and scope to the raw proclamation of the resurrection, which is heard over and over again on Easter. Since the four canonical gospels skirt the issue of a direct resurrection account, what else each includes about the aftermath is important -- not to finding ways to validate the stories, because that is impossible, but to gain some understanding of the gospelers' theological agenda. We see some of that agenda in the Johannine passage at hand.

It is helpful to remember that Luke and John had different ideas about what the church came to call "the holy spirit," often referred to in this series as "an unseen force." John places the advent of the spirit/force on that "evening of the first day of the week." Luke includes a roughly parallel version of John 20: 19-31 at 24: 36-42. Some commentators, seeing clearly its close parallel to the Johannine text, speculate that the two texts have a common source. The Lukan version does not reference the spirit/force except to depict Jesus as promising its coming in highly metaphorical phraseology at 24:49: "Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high." In different ways, both Luke and John connect the coming of the spirit/force with the forgiveness of sins -- Luke saying  that "repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations."

It is important to understand that the literal translation of the Johannine text is "receive a holy spirit" rather than the holy spirit, indicating that a doctrine of the spirit was a matter for Christians of a later generation to form more fully.

Are we to understand from John's depiction of the scene between the disciples and Jesus that the former, having been given the spirit, were thereby empowered to remit or retain the sins, i.e. consequences of others' wrongdoing? Or is it a statement of the merely obvious: that wrong is done to human beings by other human beings, and that the aggrieved party may or may not be disposed to forgive the wrong doing and its consequences. If so, they are remitted. If not, they are retained. Maybe the sense of the passage is this: a spirit/force/power conferred by one upon whom enormous wrongdoing was committed enables those upon whom it is conferred to forgive as he forgave, enabling Shalom.

When you envision the house in which the disciples are said to have taken refuge, what do you see? Try not to see the surviving 11 disciples. Try to see a late first century CE community of Jesus Jews afraid of what may be done to them by synagogue Jews. See further a eucharistic setting with members of the community gathered intentionally to "re-member" Jesus and do so as the president of the liturgy says, "Shalom." See (and hear) the community engage in a mutual sorting out of grievances, mindful of the "spirit/force/power" they believe they have received by virtue of their participation in a community gathered around the ethical teachings of a Jesus now dead and gone for more than 60 years. See a certain member or members of that community expressing reservations about the validity of their existence and purpose.

Imagine the church's first major disagreement between those who insisted the Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine and those who held that Jesus only "seemed" to be human. This was the "docetism" position -- from the Greek root δοκ�ω -- "to seem." That was akin to the position that John depicted Thomas the Twin as espousing: "Unless I myself see the mark the nails made and the hole in his side, I refuse to believe ..." Thomas wanted to see actual signs of humanity.

The problem for the earliest followers of Jesus was not persuading people that he had risen from the dead. Plenty of suffering and dying sons of the gods in antiquity were reputed to have experienced resurrection. The problem was where Jesus had gone, where he was. There was no possibility of habeas corpus. There was no body to have, only remains surely in such a state of desiccation that, if somehow located, could never be positively identified. If Jesus was crucified and died while thus hung up, his remains when cut down could have been consumed by wild dogs -- a terrible but apparently regular occurrence in those times. The solution to that problem came, over time, in imaginative stories of Jesus sightings, of which the Johannine passage at hand is one. Those stories represent the didactic method of "re-membering" Jesus. The liturgy provided a material method: "This is my Body ... This is my Blood."

Early on in the nascent church as its theologians were trying to establish an order of belief, a number of its adherents were saying that if Jesus was really what the evangelist John said he was, viz., that Jesus was really God, then Jesus could only have seemed to be human. There was not room for two opposing ideas to coexist in those first-century minds.

That difficulty was probably at the root of the story about Thomas' insistence on seeing Jesus' wounds. The sight of the wounds produced a galvanic reaction in Thomas as he went from doubt to belief in a nanosecond. Jesus no longer "seemed" to be human. He was or had been human.

Part of the church's problem in this early part of the Third Millennium is that it only seems to be a human institution dedicated to human need and aspiration. Many of its resources and so much of its energy are expended on the labors of construing abstract theological and liturgical niceties. It does not bear the wounds that would surely be sustained in the battle with the principalities and powers of the age. The church cannot, then, really be human. Indeed, it seems as if it is often disengaged from the human struggle. Thomas would not believe unless he saw the wounds. Who will take the church seriously if it has not such wounds?

It is too cheap a thing so quickly to shuck off the gloom that surrounds the story of Jesus' execution and to embrace the relief of Easter and its optimistic proclamation. There were wounds, we are told, and those wounds led to a death. All wounds do not always lead to death. But there is always that possibility. The person or the institution without wounds may die merely of old age. Not a bad way to go unless one has deliberately withdrawn from a battle worth joining, thus sparing oneself the wounds.

It is said that Jesus fought a battle with the Lord of Death on our human behalf, taking upon himself the burden of all that has been wrong with us from the beginning. It is said that Jesus ultimately won that battle by walking out of his grave, Lazarus-like, to the other side and on into immortality. But if he did, he did not leave his wounds behind.

Such wounds are the signs of love laying down its life in battle with the principalities and powers of any present age -- in our own, governments and corporations whose malign desires and crass greed would crush any who get in the way. The only real power that human beings possess to fight that good fight is the power of love in life laid down for others. The fight has but one strategy, and that is loving neighbor and enemy as self and respecting the dignity of every human being.