John 20:19-31 (NRSVUE)
19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 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.”
26 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.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 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.”
30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31 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.
The Word of the Lord.
Congregation response: Thanks be to God.
Germany, New Year’s Eve, 1942. War is raging. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is writing, perhaps by the fireside, reflecting on the ten years since the Nazis came to power in Germany. “Have there ever been people in history who had so little ground under their feet?” he wonders. Bonhoeffer here expresses what the theologian Paul Tillich would later refer to as The Shaking of the Foundations.
Bonhoeffer senses that they find themselves in a crisis where every available alternative appears equally unbearable. All options are bad, even senseless, offering little hope for a better world. Where do we find strength, he wonders, when there is no clear path forward? When every choice leads to destruction? When the foundations aren’t just shaking – they’re gone? And yet, somehow, they must still act. Still trust. Still hope.
Bonhoeffer’s reflections echo the experience of the disciples of Jesus in the days after the crucifixion. On that first Sunday evening after the horrific death of their Lord, they are huddling together behind locked doors in a room in Jerusalem, fearing for their lives. Just a few days ago they had walked the streets of this city with Him. They had watched Him ride into Jerusalem on a donkey while crowds shouted “Hosanna!” They had celebrated Passover with Him. They had heard Him speak about love, service, and the kingdom of God.
And then, everything fell apart.
They watched Him be arrested in the darkness of Gethsemane. They saw Him being dragged before the authorities. Peter, usually so bold and impulsive, got so scared that he even denied knowing Him. And on Friday, they witnessed the unthinkable: their Teacher, their Lord, their Messiah, was tortured to death on a cross, hanging between two criminals, and buried in a borrowed tomb.
Jesus, their hope, was plucked away.
Now it’s Sunday evening. Most of them are locked in that upper room—not just afraid, but shattered. They fear the authorities will come for them next.
Perhaps mingled with that fear is anger at the injustice of it all. Perhaps even anger at God: how could God allow this to happen? Maybe even some anger at Jesus for abandoning them.
And confusion. For did Mary Magdalene not tell them earlier that day of an empty tomb, of seeing Jesus alive? It’s one thing to lose hope. It’s another to have false hope dangled before you.
And underneath the fear, the anger, the confusion lies grief. Raw, devastating grief. Their leader, the Man they had followed, the Man they had loved, the Man they had devoted their lives to, is dead. Their messianic hope dashed. The future they had imagined, collapsed.
Like Bonhoeffer they find themselves in a crisis in which there are no good options for action. How to move on? Should they stay in hiding? What if that is the wrong choice, the locked room becoming their prison, or the very place where the authorities will corner them? Try to escape, perhaps only to be captured in the streets and ending up on crosses themselves? And even if they manage to escape, do they go back to their old lives, fishing, farming, tax collecting, working in their homes and gardens? How does one even do that? How is normal possible when the Messiah is dead, hope and meaning in life lost? Would going back to “normal” mean admitting that it was all a lie? That the very foundation of their faith is not only shaking, but gone?
Perhaps, like Bonhoeffer many centuries later, they too asked: “Have there ever been people in history who had so little ground under their feet?”
It is into this moment of despair and into this space in which his absence is most keenly felt, that Jesus enters suddenly.
Jesus didn’t knock. He didn’t wait for an invitation. He didn’t need the doors to be unlocked. He simply comes and stands among them.
It’s hard to imagine the shock. One moment, despair, the next surprise, perhaps a new kind of fear, perhaps joy. One moment, the absence of the Lord, the next moment he is there, standing right there in the room with them.
The first words out of His mouth? “Peace be with you.”
This is not just a “hello.” This is a greeting that cuts through everything burning in that room—the fear, the anger, the desolation, the hopelessness. Jesus is meeting them in the moment, as if he is saying: Despite the terrible things of these past days, I am here, I am still here. You are not alone, you have not been abandoned, hope is not lost.
He does not explain. He simply stands there, in their midst, in the midst of their fear and anger and sheer lostness, and wishes them peace.
And then Jesus does something crucial: He shows them his hands and side.
The wounds are still there. He doesn’t hide them. He doesn’t pretend the suffering didn’t happen. Instead, He shows them what Bonhoeffer would later refer to as the costliness of grace.
In showing them his wounds, Jesus is starting to reshape them, starting to reshape their feelings of loss and anger and hopelessness, starting to teach them what Bonhoeffer called the Greatness of his heart. What Jesus is teaching is taught not through words, but through vulnerability, through showing his wounds, through showing the true cost of loving human beings in their brokenness.
What Jesus is teaching here are not lessons in moral perfection or intellectual prowess, but the nature of true hope, of true community, of true togetherness in the room after the crucifixion. This is not a room for people who get it all right, for people who have no fear or anger or disappointment, but for people whose fear and anger and disappointment are transformed by the living presence of God in Christ. And this transformation shapes a community that shares in the freedom of Christ and his redeeming love, that finds its identity in that freedom to pursue the lost, to include the fearful, to embrace the runaway, to console the sad, to love fiercely even where there are wounds. That’s Christ’s greatness of heart. Not sentiment. Not comfort. But the willingness to bear the wounds of love.
And then Jesus breathes on them. No explanation, no words precede this action. Just breath. And then the words: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Jesus is, in a certain sense, not just breathing on them, but for them. Fear and despair leave you gasping for breath, at best you are able to take short, shallow breaths. In breathing on and for them, Jesus changes the scene. In receiving his Spirit, his breath, they can breathe again. Inhale. Exhale.
This is the breath that created life in the beginning, the wind of God that had hovered over the waters at the creation of the world, the very air that makes life possible, the breath of God that turned Adam into a human. And now it’s the breath that restores what seemed impossible: the future itself. Not as a distant promise. But something God is holding open right now, refusing to abandon the future to death and darkness.
Many centuries later, in the darkness of December 1942, Dietrich Bonhoeffer would once again ponder what it is that sustains people when all seems lost. Not optimism—that’s too shallow. Not human courage—that runs out, as Peter could testify. What they needed, he said, was “a power to hold our heads high when all seems to have come to naught, a power to tolerate setbacks, a power that never abandons the future to the opponent but lays claim to it.”
That is what Jesus breathes into them. Not simply energy for a task. Not fuel for the mission. But the power to see that the future is not dead. That God has not surrendered tomorrow to the darkness. That possibility itself has been restored.
The Spirit doesn’t erase their anger. She doesn’t minimize their grief. But She overcomes the paralysis. Because when God claims the future and invites you to claim it with Him, you are no longer locked in a room filled with despair. A door is opened, a way forward becomes visible—not because you’ve figured it out, but because God is holding it open.
Not only does Jesus come to those in the locked room. He also comes back to the one who was not there the first time. He pursues Thomas. He goes straight to Thomas. “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.”
That is when Thomas knows, and confesses: “My Lord and my God!”
This isn’t a private moment. Thomas speaks these words in the presence of the other disciples. He’s not alone anymore. The peace reached him, too. And his confession becomes part of the community’s witness—the one who was absent is now present, the one who doubted now proclaims faith.
It is in the presence of Jesus in the locked room, his pursuit of the lost and doubting one, his breath entering their lungs, that something new is born: hope in the darkness, and a new foundation for life. From that restored hope—from that encounter with God’s presence in the darkness – new possibilities arise. The raw power of their grief-wrapped anger can become something else now, something constructive, a new way of being in the world despite its dark corners and times of despair. With the Spirit of Christ breathing in and through them, their despair does not so much evaporate as it is transformed into what Bonhoeffer called “greatness of heart”—an active, fierce love that refuses to leave anyone behind.
It is the breath of God, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, that transforms a group of frightened, broken, angry people into a community of grace—a community that will pursue those who are absent, include those who are afraid, and make life worthwhile for a broken world. They are not heroes wearing capes, but they are a community that would change the world. Not by their own power or will or resilience, but through an encounter with God who breathes hope into lungs too scarred to breathe it themselves, with God who refuses to abandon the future, but who claims it and invites us to claim it with Him.
So Jesus looks at them and says, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” Not someday when you feel ready. Not after you’ve figured it all out. Now. In your fear. In your inadequacy.
In his reflections on a decade of Nazi rule, as Bonhoeffer ponders the meaning of it all, he reminds us that we are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians it means that we are to take part in Christ’s greatness of heart, in proceeding towards the future not from fear but from Christ’s freeing and redeeming love for all who suffer, for whose sake Christ suffered.
This greatness of heart is what becomes possible when Christ Himself inhabits us through His Spirit, when our very lungs are filled with the breath of God. The same Christ whose presence transmuted the disciples’ anger into fierce love now gives them—gives us—the capacity to see suffering and move toward it, not away from it.
When Christ inhabits us through His Spirit, something becomes possible that wasn’t possible before. Not just strength or resolve, but a new way of seeing. “We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and the reviled,” writes Bonhoeffer on that dark 1942 day. After all, as the disciples knew all too well in those difficult days after the crucifixion, wasn’t Christ himself one of the suspects, the maltreated, the oppressed, the reviled? Christ teaches us to see the world through the eyes of those who suffer—to recognize the one who’s been left outside the room, the sick person in the hospital bed, the grieving neighbor, the one locked in their own fear. When Christ breathes His Spirit into you, you become able to bear His presence to them.
Those first followers of Jesus were hardly an inspiring bunch. They had no social power. They had followed a man who was publicly executed by the state, and were at risk of dying the same kind of death. But when Jesus appears in their midst and breathes new air into their lungs, the fearful disciples start to lift their heads as their hearts are starting to be transformed by God’s Spirit to contain the greatness of Christ’s heart.
Perhaps that’s precisely why Jesus sends them. Because they’ve learned something the comfortable never learn. They know what the world is like when everything falls apart. But they also know that God has not abandoned this world, and they, and we, as the disciples of Christ, can and indeed must live in this world with the breath of Christ in our lungs and the greatness of his heart beating in us. That is what it means to be a Christian. It’s not about a fake hope for a faraway future, but about living in the midst of this world and its brokenness with the experience and the knowledge that God has not abandoned us, that death and injustice do not have the last word, that we are not alone. It is this Spirit, this heart, this hope that we are called to show to the world around us.
This is not necessarily a matter of grand gestures or impressive displays, but of ordinary acts of love that show that greatness of Christ’s heart, the same heart that would not abandon the frightened disciples, not even cowardly Peter or doubting Thomas. The disciples go into the world vulnerable, afraid, marked by suffering—and that’s exactly why they can bear Christ’s presence to others. Because they’ve learned what the world looks like from below. And from that vantage point, they can see what really matters: the absent one outside the room, the grieving neighbor, the sick person everyone else has forgotten. Through these ordinary, vulnerable people, Jesus continues His work in the world—doing justice to life, refusing to abandon anyone, bearing His presence into the places where people suffer, grieve, and fear.
Amen.
