Easter 2, Year B
Acts 4:32-35
Psalm 133
1 John 1:1-2:2
John 20:19-31
"Alleluia, Christ is risen! Now what? Today marks the second Sunday of Easter, a season spanning fifty days between Easter Sunday and Pentecost and commemorating the time that the resurrected Christ remained on earth before his Ascension. Today is sometimes called “Low Sunday”—I’ll give you a moment to look around and guess why that might be. It is also sometimes called “Thomas Sunday,” after the subject of the Gospel account we always read on this Sunday. But to me, most of all, it is “Now What? Sunday.”
First, let’s consider how these past few weeks have felt to us as churchgoers. Wrested from the sometimes-complacent solemnity of the Lenten season, we are thrust into a week of high drama. We have processions, we have foot-washing, we have long, intense readings about Jesus’ final days, we have flowers and bells and a different-looking altar space every time we visit. For those planning it all, it can feel like a gigantic wave coming closer and closer to swallowing us up. Do we have enough food for the luncheon? Will we have too much? Will the great ladybug invasion be over by Easter, or will we have to frantically sweep up that morning? Will it rain on our Palm Sunday procession? Do we have the bulletins and the music? How do we time the foot-washing to get the water at just the right temperature? Have we booked a priest yet? And how the heck do you force Easter lilies to bloom on schedule? Now that wave has washed over us all and left us standing, albeit a bit wobbly, and our minds have cleared enough to ask, “Now what?”
Those last few days of what we call Holy Week were an altogether different experience for the disciples, facing what we in great understatement might call “real-world problems.” They faced betrayal in their ranks—their teacher and leader was sold out to the authorities by Judas, the one they trusted so much that he handled all their financial affairs. They watched Jesus get mocked by the same people who had welcomed him to Jerusalem as a king mere days earlier. A few watched as he was tortured and murdered following a sham trial. The others fled into hiding, terrified that they would be hunted down to suffer a similar fate. When they asked, “Now what?” it was a question tinged with an existential fear we can scarcely imagine.
The absolute last thing they probably expected to come next was this: “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’” Now I cannot express what my shock would be if a dear friend appeared in my living room through a locked door to greet me. I also cannot comprehend the added magnitude of that shock if that friend was one I’d known to have been dead and buried for three days. John writes, “Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” I don’t doubt that they did indeed rejoice, but I think for narrative purposes John may have omitted the immediate reaction the disciples must have had, which is recounted in a different setting in Luke 24: “While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost.” Jesus then proceeds to show them his wounds and invites them to touch them and to know that he is who he claims. But then Luke says something which I think is very important for us to hear: “Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering.”
Jesus is not upset by this. How could he be? He knows us better than we know ourselves and understands that our minds need time to process when the unfathomable manifests before us. John’s narrative of Jesus’ first appearance before the disciples is unique in singling out Thomas as the skeptic. John sets him up as the antagonist in this account to better contrast him with the “believing disciples” so that he can clearly articulate the virtue of believing without seeing. The reputation of “Doubting Thomas” has since become entrenched, when in fact, if this account is read alongside Luke 28, we see that Thomas was quicker to believe than some others. He only needs to see Christ to proclaim, “My Lord and my God!”
Reading this passage as a sort of competition of faithfulness is not necessarily its most constructive application for us as modern-day believers. Jesus himself tells us that faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains. We read instructions throughout the Epistles to lift one another up in faith. We are also cautioned at several points in scripture about the dangers of rushing into blind belief, or belief without understanding, which makes our hearts susceptible to false teachings.
Instead of focusing on the various reactions to Jesus—terror, amazement, obstinance, joy—let us instead consider how Jesus approaches those he interacts with after his resurrection. To those seeking him, visiting the tomb and discovering it empty, angels are sent in triumphant radiance to proclaim that he is not there, that he has risen and fulfilled his promise. To his disciples, terrified and hiding behind locked doors, Jesus comes in peace, still bearing his wounds as evidence that it was indeed him, not some elaborate trick. On the road to Emmaus, Jesus disguises himself so that he may first converse with his traveling companions, who invite him to stay with them when evening falls. As they have supper together, Jesus “took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight.”
This is the “Now what?” The resurrection is the fulfillment of a promise, but it is not the completion of the story. Jesus goes out and meets people where they are. He discerns their need with patience and understanding and he meets it. Jesus, in effect, evangelizes his own Good News to the first witnesses, so that they might go out and do the same by the power of the Holy Spirit.
One peculiarity of our lectionary during Easter is that the first lesson every Sunday of the season comes from the Acts of the Apostles. It might seem oddly out of place at first glance. After all, Luke writes in Acts 1 that this book is an account of the things that took place after the Gospels, after the resurrection and the commissioning of the disciples. The first thing recounted in Acts is Christ’s ascension into heaven.
But Acts is a testament to the impact of Christ’s direct ministry to the disciples. Would the disciples have unlocked the door and preached the resurrection had Christ never come to them and said, “Peace be with you?” If no one met the women at the tomb and they simply found it empty, would they have believed it a resurrection or a grave robbery? If Christ had not broken bread with the men headed to Emmaus, would they have recognized the disguised man before them as their Lord?
In Acts, the disciples, emboldened and empowered by the Holy Spirit, proclaim the Gospel in words and works every bit as unorthodox as those of Jesus, and they resonate. In today’s lesson, we read about how the first believers organized themselves as a nascent church. They don’t start by building a house of prayer, or by organizing rites and rubrics for their worship, or even by establishing a hierarchy of people in charge. There is nothing wrong with doing any of these things, but they are not the priority and should exist only to tend to the spiritual and temporal needs of God’s people. The Kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus Christ is a radically different society than any other made by human hands, and in its purest form should shine with a light that blinds against the darkness of this world.
At the very end of Acts, Luke writes about Paul’s mission trip to Rome. “He lived there two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.” Imagine that. Paul, formerly Saul, a zealous persecutor of Christians, the very sort disciples sought to protect themselves against by locking the door, now proclaims Christ with all boldness. Not only that, but he also evangelizes at the very heart of the empire responsible for killing Christ, which would in time become the beating heart of the Church in the West for hundreds of years. The Book of Acts may have a final chapter, but like the resurrection it is a story that has no end, leaving us instead with an unspoken question to live out in our lives: We have seen Christ triumph over entropy and death, now what? Amen."