Sermon For Sunday After Easter

When The Doors Are Locked

A Homily For The Sunday After Easter

John 20:19-31 (Csb)

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The Easter Vigil has ended. The alleluias have been sung. The lilies are still standing at the front of the nave, perhaps beginning to droop just slightly at the edges. And now we arrive at this Sunday, the octave of Easter, and the Church in her wisdom sets before us not a triumphant continuation of the celebration but something far more searching. She sets before us a room with locked doors.

That is where John takes us. The evening of the first day of the week, and the disciples are gathered behind locked doors. The Greek word John uses carries the sense of something fastened shut, bolted from within. They had heard the reports. Mary Magdalene had come to them with the news that she had seen the Lord. And yet here they are, behind locked doors, because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders.

This is the passage the Church appoints for the Sunday after Easter, and it is worth pausing over that fact. The liturgy does not rush us past the locked room. It does not say, well, the resurrection happened, so now everything is fine, move along. It sits us down inside the fear. It wants us to notice that the first disciples, the very people who had walked with Jesus, who had heard his voice, who had seen his signs, were still capable of being paralyzed by fear even after the resurrection had been announced to them. That is not a comfortable detail. It is, however, an honest one.

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The Central Claim

What this passage shows us is this: the risen Jesus does not wait for his people to compose themselves before he comes to them. He comes to them in the locked room, in the fear, in the doubt, and he brings peace, wounds, Spirit, and mission. That is the shape of this encounter, and it is worth following it carefully.

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Peace In The Locked Room

Jesus came, stood among them, and said to them, "Peace be with you." John tells us this twice in quick succession, once when Jesus first appears and once when he turns specifically to Thomas a week later. The repetition is deliberate. John is not padding the narrative. He is insisting that peace is the first word the risen Christ speaks to frightened people.

Now we should be careful here about what this peace is and what it is not. Jesus is not saying, do not worry, everything has worked out nicely. He is not offering the kind of reassurance that papers over genuine difficulty. The Hebrew word behind this greeting, shalom, carries the sense of wholeness, of right relationship restored, of a world set back on its proper foundations. And Jesus is speaking this word from the other side of death. He has passed through the worst that the world could do to him and he is standing in that room, whole. The peace he offers is not the absence of trouble. It is the presence of the one who has conquered the source of all trouble.

That distinction matters enormously for how we read the rest of the passage, and for how we preach it on the Sunday after Easter to people who may have come to this service carrying their own version of a locked room.

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The Wounds That Prove And Heal

After he speaks peace, Jesus shows them his hands and his side. John tells us that the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. The wounds are not incidental to that joy. They are the ground of it.

This is one of the most theologically dense moments in all of the resurrection narratives. The risen body of Jesus still bears the marks of the cross. He is not resurrected into a state that has left the suffering behind as though it never happened. The resurrection does not erase the wounds. It transforms them. They become the evidence that this is the same Jesus who died, not a substitute, not a vision, not a wish. And they become the ground on which Thomas, a week later, is invited to place his doubt.

Thomas had been absent the first evening. When the others told him they had seen the Lord, he said, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, put my finger into the mark of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will never believe." We tend to read this as stubbornness or faithlessness. But it is worth noticing that Thomas is asking for exactly what the other disciples had already received. He is not asking for less than they were given. He is asking for the same thing.

And Jesus gives it to him. A week later, the doors are locked again, and Jesus comes and stands among them again, and he turns to Thomas and says, "Put your finger here and look at my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Don't be faithless, but believe." We are not told whether Thomas actually touches the wounds. What we are told is what he says: "My Lord and my God." It is the highest confession of faith in the entire Gospel of John.

The wounds of Jesus are not a problem to be explained away. They are an invitation to faith. And the risen Christ does not rebuke Thomas for his doubt. He meets him in it. He offers himself as the answer to it. That is a pastoral word for anyone sitting in this congregation today who is somewhere between the locked room and the confession of Thomas.

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The Spirit And The Mission

But there is more happening in this passage than comfort and reassurance. Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit." The echo of Genesis is unmistakable. In the beginning, God breathed into the dust of the ground and the man became a living creature. Here, the risen Christ breathes on his frightened disciples and a new creation begins. This is John's account of what Luke will describe at Pentecost. The Spirit is given, and with the Spirit comes a commission.

"As the Father has sent me, I also send you." This is the shape of Christian mission in John's Gospel. It is not primarily a strategy or a program. It is a participation. The disciples are sent into the world in the same way that Jesus was sent into the world, which means with the same willingness to enter locked rooms, to bear wounds, to speak peace to frightened people.

And then Jesus says something that has troubled careful readers for centuries: "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." This is not a grant of arbitrary power over other people's souls. It is the natural consequence of the mission just described. Those who carry the gospel of the crucified and risen Christ into the world carry with them the announcement of forgiveness. Where that announcement is received, forgiveness happens. Where it is rejected, the rejection stands. The disciples are not being made judges. They are being made witnesses. And witnesses to the resurrection are, by definition, witnesses to the forgiveness that the resurrection secures.

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The Purpose Of The Text

John himself tells us why he wrote all of this down. Near the end of the passage, he steps back from the narrative and speaks directly to his readers: "Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."

This is a remarkable statement. John is telling us that the Gospel itself is a kind of locked room into which the risen Christ enters. The words on the page are the means by which Jesus comes and stands among us and shows us his hands and his side. The text is not a substitute for the encounter. It is the occasion of it.

That is why the Church reads this passage on the Sunday after Easter, year after year, in congregation after congregation. Because there will always be people in the room who have heard the announcement of the resurrection and are still, somehow, behind locked doors. Still afraid. Still uncertain. Still needing to see the wounds.

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What This Means For Us

Let me say plainly what I think this passage is asking of us.

First, it is asking us to be honest about the locked rooms in our own lives. Fear does not disappear at the announcement of the resurrection. Doubt does not dissolve the moment we say we believe. The disciples are our evidence for that. The risen Christ does not demand that we have resolved our fear before he will come to us. He comes to us in it.

Second, it is asking us to receive the peace that Jesus offers as something more than a feeling. It is a word spoken by the one who has passed through death and come out the other side. It is a word with weight and history and wounds behind it. When we say the peace of the Lord be with you in this liturgy, we are not exchanging pleasantries. We are passing on what Jesus gave to frightened people in a locked room.

Third, it is asking us to take seriously the mission that comes with the Spirit. We are sent as Jesus was sent. That means into the world as it actually is, not as we wish it were. It means carrying the announcement of forgiveness to people who need it, which is everyone. It means being willing to be present in other people's locked rooms.

And fourth, for those who are somewhere in the position of Thomas today, who have heard the gospel but are not yet sure, who want to believe but find themselves held back by honest doubt, this passage is for you in a particular way. Jesus does not turn away from Thomas. He turns toward him. He offers himself as the answer to the very doubt Thomas named. The invitation stands: come and see the wounds. Come and believe. Come and find life in his name.

We are about to come to the Table, where the risen Christ will again make himself known in the breaking of the bread. The doors of this place are open. The peace has been spoken. The Spirit has been given. The mission continues.

Receive him. And go.

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Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible (CSB). Holman Bible Publishers, 2017.

The Book of Common Prayer. The Episcopal Church, 1979. Particularly the liturgy of Holy Eucharist and the Easter season collects.

Raymond E. Brown. The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI. Anchor Bible Commentary. Doubleday, 1970.

N. T. Wright. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press, 2003.

C. K. Barrett. The Gospel According to St. John: An Introduction with Commentary. Westminster Press, 1978.

Rowan Williams. Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel. Pilgrim Press, 2002.