John 20:19-31
Resurrection Breath
Laura Collins
April 18, 2004
Every year, on the Sunday after Easter, doubting Thomas appears. Though many post-resurrection stories exist in our four gospels, this one is the lectionary reading every year on this Sunday. I suspect that this is because we are all Thomas. We are the ones who weren’t there to see Jesus show himself again after his death. We are the ones who cannot imagine any kind of reality where a dead man could walk again. Every year we are Thomas and so every year we need to hear this word again.
And yet, as I read this story again this year, it was not Thomas that interested me so much. He seems completely reasonable to me, his response to the other disciples makes perfect sense. What new can be said about him? He said what any of us might have said in the same place. “I watched Jesus die! I saw how they hammered his hands and feet to the cross. And now you tell me he came to see you? Right. When I see those wounds – and touch them for myself, then maybe I’ll decide you all aren’t delirious, after all.”
But what about that first visit, before Thomas arrived? What happened there? Some of the disciples were in a locked room, hiding out, afraid, confused, probably having no idea what to do next. If they left, would they be arrested? If they returned home, would they be mocked? How could everything have gone so wrong?
Then, into their barricaded lives walks Jesus. Now, John doesn’t explain how Jesus gets into the room. But he does point out that the doors were locked. I imagine that all these grief-stricken, fear-laden friends had a moment of complete confusion. Notice that nobody runs up and gives Jesus a hug. Nobody shouts out, “He’s here! Jesus is here!” The entry is met with stunned silence. Perhaps each person is afraid to speak, because nobody knows if they are hallucinating or if anybody else is experiencing what they are experiencing.
The greeting Jesus gives is the usual one: “Shalom. Peace be with you.”
Still nobody moves. Nobody speaks.
And so Jesus offers his hands, shows them his wounds, before they ask, as Thomas later would. Apparently, nobody knew what they were seeing and so Jesus had to offer some clue. The wounds on his hands suffice. Then, we learn, the rejoicing began.
But before the party can erupt, Jesus calms them down to get right to the point: “Peace. Listen. I’m here to tell you something. Just as God sent me, now I send you.” Then Jesus breathes on them. Whooo ....
The moment is reminiscent of the creation – a lump of clay is formed and then God breathes spirit into it. Whooo ...
It is the moment of Pentecost in John’s gospel. He tells of no later event where tongues of fire appear, but here on this Sunday night in a locked room, Jesus breathes out and the spirit that had been alive in him before his death, now inspired the disciples. Whooo ... “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Thomas wasn’t there for that moment of breath. That spirited, inspiring moment. And that made all the difference. Only with the Spirit do we understand the resurrection.
Let us talk for a moment about this most strange concept. Resurrection. Like reporters we may find ourselves asking all the questions: what, how, why? Volumes have been written trying to answer those questions. The gospels themselves are not entirely clear. Different gospel writers tell different stories of post-resurrection appearances. In many of them, Jesus suddenly appears or disappears, less like a human body than a vision. Things like walls and locked doors don’t impinge upon this risen Jesus, the way they would upon a normal body. A vision perhaps, but a vision so real, so tangible that groups of people are later able to say they saw and heard the same thing. And yet, in some of the stories, he eats food – ingesting it like a regular person. In most of the appearances, the people who had been with him day in and day out do not recognize him. Clearly, he has changed somehow.
It is nearly impossible for any of us to avoid these questions and yet, as fascinating as they may be, I’m not sure they lead us anywhere useful. The answer, it seems is in the text itself. “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Only with the spirit do we understand resurrection. Then, perhaps, we can move away from the whats and the hows to the whys.
With the coming of the spirit came a commission. “As God sent me, so I send you.” As long as the disciples were following Jesus, watching him, waiting for his Messianic moment, expecting him to do the hard work of bringing in the baselia of God – the kingdom or commonwealth of God, the Beloved Community – then they weren’t going. With Jesus gone, they now needed to go as well. But where? They had no idea, so they cowered behind locked doors. Now, with the spirit’s breath, they were sent – out, beyond the doors, beyond Jerusalem, beyond their previous understandings. Go!
They had a commission. A co-mission. A shared mission. A mission together. A community mission. A mission in community. In how to be community. In how to be human.
There was one key element of this mission that Jesus needed to spell out: forgiveness. The words flowed out of him together, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
The work of the Holy Spirit begins with forgiveness. Jesus here simply describes reality: when you don’t forgive, sins stick around. When you do, they don’t. This isn’t a mystical formulation, but simply a statement of the way the universe works. When we fail to forgive, the hurt of those sins continue to diminish us and others. When we forgive, healing results.
Jesus returned to send the disciples out to be a new community and he knew that the one thing they would need above all others in order to be community was forgiveness. Think about it. Think about your life. Think about your family. Relationships that live and grow and nurture and heal depend upon forgiveness.
Anyone in a long-term committed relationship knows this. Without forgiveness, you may continue to live together, but the relationship does not really thrive. Think about your parents – the things they did and didn’t do for you. As long as you stay stuck with those things, you don’t grow. We have to forgive them in order to become fully adult. When I lived with men coming out of prison after years of incarceration, trying to live together in a community of recovery, forgiveness came up daily. Every single day we had to learn together how to forgive and how to be forgiven.
Think about nations. Will Palestinians and Israelis ever be able to forgive each other for centuries of murder, hate, displacement and distrust? Why does the peace process stall again and again and again? Think about South Africa and the brave and amazing experiment in national forgiveness in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A perfect solution? Not at all. The players are all still human. The problems of the country can’t be solved with simple confessions. Nonetheless, what an astounding example of a different way to move forward out of a situation so volatile, so ripe for massacre and retaliation.
For weeks now I have been haunted by thoughts of the blood of Rwanda crying out – the soil stained with evil beyond imagining – and I have wondered, if enough of us pray, can that land be healed? Can forgiveness come to such a people, such a place so that the sins will not be carried from one generation to the next? Can the Holy Spirit intervene and bring healing?
This is the commission given by the Risen Christ. Go. And forgive.
This is a message, a lesson, a task so profound and so difficult, that is cannot be accomplished without the inspiration of the Spirit. Without the in-breathing of God’s own self into our defeated and fearful lives. And because we are who we are – human beings, embodied, incarnated, grounded in the senses, shaped from the earth – we need the breath not just of the creation – which is already ours at birth – but the spirit of the Human One – the one who walked this way with us and died this way, too.
Only by seeing such love in action – in a life of liberating love and healing grace – do we begin to get it. It is the very dying breath of the one who from a place of unthinkable suffering still said, “Forgive them. Forgive them. They don’t know. They don’t know what they’re doing. Forgive them.”
Because if you can do that, you can change the world.
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