EASTER EVENING

Jn 20:19-23

The incident which John reports as taking place on the evening of Easter Day is peculiar to him. It seems wrong to try to construct some 'harmony' of the four evangelists' testimony about the resurrection from their four narratives, for each has his own particular points to make in selecting as well as in telling his stories. John is concerned, as has been said, with establishing the identity of the person of Jesus who was crucified with that of the one who is the ever-present Lord of the Church, and to point out to the Church what the nature of belief in such a Lord may be. The present story helps to lay the foundation for the final stage of his disclosure about belie£

On Easter evening the disciples had met together behind locked doors. They were fearful of what the Jews might do to them now that the Passover was almost over. Into the midst of this assembly of fearful men Jesus came, Without door being opened or knock being heard. He greeted them with the conventional Jewish greeting 'Peace to you'. But with his coming in this way the greeting was more than conventional. It was as if he had come to a group of English disciples on such a day, and said "Good evening" and the Englishmen would at once have known that the words could never have the same merely conventional meaning again. So the greeting 'Peace' came to be part of Christian social life, as well as a permanent part of its liturgical practice. Upon saying the greeting Jesus showed the disciples his hands, presumably with the wound prints, and his side, with the spear wound visible. So was his unquestioned and unquestionable identity established; and it was an occasion of great joy. Then Jesus began to speak once more. Again he said to them surely now in much more than a formal greeting: 'Peace to you.' Then he gave them a commission such as they had not had before, and which left it quite plain that their mission in the world was now to be his, and his theirs.

'Receive the Holy Spirit', he began. John has prepared his reader well for this. He had said that the Spirit was not given previously because Jesus had not been, glorified (7:39). But now the Spirit is given; therefore Jesus is now glorified. He is no longer, as in the morning 'not yet ascended'; he has now 'gone to the Father', he has finally received from the Father the glory which was his with the Father from the foundation of the world. He can now bestow the Spirit, and does. It is a vain operation to try to harmonize this account with the report Luke gives in Acts of the Day of Pentecost, or Whitsun. Both authors set the gift of the Spirit in a certain historiographical scheme, and it is to miss the points of their respective narratives to debase them into simple chronological puzzles. John is trying to say that the Holy Spirit speaks to the minds and hearts of men about God, but only in terms of the whole life and work, the death, resurrection and return to the Father of him who was the Son of the Father incarnate Jesus of Nazareth. Naturally the Spirit is given as soon as Jesus returns to the Father; and when John reports that the Spirit is given, it is perverse to suppose, as Bernard (I.C.C.). does, that what he calls 'the ascension' did not happen for at least a week after the resurrection. All that Jesus said to the disciples on the first Easter evening, according to John's narrative, presupposes that he has returned to the Father, to share his pristine glory.

Pristine glory: the gift of the Spirit. These two things are closely linked in the scriptures of the Old Testament. It was the Spirit that first brooded on the face of the waters before creation began (Gen. 1:1); and it was through the breathing of the Spirit (breath) in man's nostrils that man was made 'a living being' (Gen. 2:7). Jesus does more than simply announce that the Spirit is given, he actually dispenses it by breathing on the disciples, as God breathed upon the first man. So the new creation has begun, and the very possibility of its beginning has lain in the readiness of the only begotten Son to become incarnate and to live, suffer and die for the sins of men.

Jesus went on to say: 'As the Father has sent me, even so I send you', After the new Adam has been corporately created, he takes over the work of the new Adam who had come in the flesh and died upon the cross. Here in John is the great commissioning of the Church, parallel to the great commission in Matthew 28:19: 'Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.'

Jesus next says: 'If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven;, if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.' There are five comments to be made on this strange and profound saying. First, that it does not, and surely cannot, take away from the fact that it is God alone who can forgive sins. That remains his prerogative. Hence it must be pointed out with some emphasis that the authority to act in the forgiveness of sins is governed by and conditional upon the gift of the Spirit, and the acceptance of the Lord's commission to share his mission. Only those who have received the Spirit and accepted the mission from the glorified Lord have this privilege and authority given to them. Second, the authority to forgive sins is made to whatever company was assembled that night. Thomas is a known absentee; no one can know who was present or absent apart from that. The use of the word 'disciples' suggests that there were more there than the members of the 'Twelve', but even that point, though probable, could not be pressed with any certainty. Perhaps the best service the commentator can render at this point is to remind those who would use it for supporting certain claims in the realm of church order and discipline that, whatever the merits of certain church orders, they cannot be supported by an appeal to this text. It is as precarious to argue that it limits power to forgive sins to the apostles as to argue that it must extend it to the whole Church. Jesus is said to have given this power to those present on Easter evening. More than that it is hard to say.

Third, it is useful and important to observe that though this particular saying of the risen Lord is confined to John's narrative, there are other sayings in other gospels before and after the resurrection which are not unlike it. Luke states that Jesus told a mixed company of the Eleven and others, together with the two who met him on the way to Emmaus: 'Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations' (Luke 24:46, 47). Mark's gospel, in the longer ending, has the passage: 'Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned' (Mark 16:15, 16). Matthew echoes one part of Mark's injunction: 'Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them' (Matt. 28:19). But Matthew gives a saying very similar to this in the story of the earthly ministry, in two contexts. In one it is addressed to Peter alone: 'I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven' (Matt. 16:19); in the other it is spoken to 'the disciples': 'Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven' (Matt. 18:18) There is no doubt from the context that the reference is to forgiving sins, or withholding forgiveness. But though this sounds stern and harsh, it is simply the result of the preaching of the gospel, which either brings men to repent as they hear of the ready and costly forgiveness of God, or leaves, them unresponsive to the offer of forgiveness which is the gospel, and so they are left in their sins.

Fourth, the exercise of this authority is really carrying on the same work that Jesus himself had had to do. He could give sight to the, man born blind, and bring him to the point of offering worship where worship was due; but he could not perform that same office for those Jews who, questioned his claims and excommunicated the man who had been blind. Such persons heard the final word 'If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say "We see", your guilt remains' (9:41). It is the essence of love that it can be rejected; and if God is to love sinners into repentance so that they receive his forgiveness prepared for them, it must be that they are free to reject the divine offer. That is the mystery of man's freedom, and God's free pardon and love.

Fifth, since the authority to forgive sins is given under the gift of the Spirit, it is instructive to refer back to the functions of the Spirit, as Jesus had earlier described them. He said: 'When he comes he will convince the world of sin, and of righteousness and of judgement' (16:8 ff ) It will be seen what this means for the present text. The sin which the Spirit brings home to men is that disposition of the human heart which found its terrible climax in the crucifixion of the Son of man. Sin is not the committing of social or even religious peccadilloes, but the sharing in such a life as leads to the rejection and the crucifixion of the Son of Man. Man can be authoritatively assured that God will offer effectual forgiveness of such sin. If men accept, pardon is theirs, but if they refuse, clearly their sin remains.

It is worth asking one futile question: Is John right in telling his readers that on the very evening of Easter Day there took place the act which initiated, at any rate in one sense, the new creation; the gift of the Spirit which Luke, in Acts, states came fifty days later; the great commissioning of the Church to continue the mission of Lord, which Matthew reports in a way which makes it quite certainly not take place on the evening of Easter Day? The answer to the question is precisely that it is futile. John has used his own historiographical tools to indicate what the gift of the Spirit, the fact of the new creation, and the mission of the Church really are, and what they properly mean. He is not engaged in making corrective chronological notes upon false chronology in other forms of the Christian: tradition. He is working out, in his own way, the locations of events that bring to them their fulness of meaning. It is impossible to know what John himself would say to such a question as has been put; but the signs are that he would think it a quite improper and a quite misleading one. Were he asked what he meant by placing the great commission, the new creation and the gift of the Spirit together with the pardoning authority of the Church all on the evening of Easter Day, he would in all probability say that each was so inextricably bound up with the moment of the glorification of the Lord that no other place could possibly display their meaning half so well. And if we think in terms of his own writing, that remains unanswerably true.

19
On the evening of that day: By Jewish reckoning the second day of the week has started by this time. John is thus not using the Jewish demarcation of the day, which went from 6 p.m. to 6 p.m.

'the doors being shut:' This makes it quite plain that the entry of Jesus was abnormal and miraculous. It is a safe assumption that the disciples were discussing the events of the day, as reported by Peter, the beloved disciple and Mary Magdalene.

'Peace be with you': This greeting came with triple force: It was the ordinary greeting, which could now be resumed between Jesus and his friends. It was one of the last words spoken by Jesus before the crucifixion (14:27). And now it came to frightened disciples from the one who had himself conquered the death they still feared.

20
he showed them his hands and his side: John reveals no knowledge of any wounds on the feet, though Luke does (Luke 24 39). Crucifixion could be carried out by tying the feet to the cross, or nailing them there.

'As the Father has sent me, even so I send you': Even so may not convey with full emphasis the closeness of the similarity of the 'sending' of the disciples by Jesus and the 'sending' of Jesus by the Father. Henceforth their mission would be 'from above', however much ithad to be 'down below' on, the earth, showing all the signs of a human devising.

22
he breathed on them: As Yahweh had breathed into the nostrils'of man at his first creation to make him a 'living soul'. Paul's word to the Christians in Corinth is relevant here: 'The first Adain became a living being, the last Adam. became a life-giving Spirit' (i Cor. 15 45). The very same verb used here for 'breathe' is used in Genesis 27 in the Greek translation of the Hebrew text (Septuagint). So John's gospel ends with an announcement of the new creation, as it also began.

'Receive the Holy Spirit': One small indication that John may have had the eucharist in mind as he wrote this section is that the word used for receive' is the same word translated 'take' in the account of the Last Supper and the institution of the eucharist (Mark 14:22; Matt. 26:26; Luke 22:17).

EASTER OCTAVE

vv24-29

The story with which John concludes his account of the last and greatest 'sign' in the gospel is rightly conceived as part of the sign. A sign is never sheer miracle standing on its own, to be judged miraculous or not according to man's changing powers of explaining occurrences in his world: it is always a demonstration of the loving, saving, merciful yet judging concern of God for his children, itself incomplete unless and until it wins the appropriate response from men. The resurrection might stand as a miracle about which men could argue fiercely as to its possibility, even were it not reported as a sign and it is as such a 'de-signified' reality that much discussion of it has taken place. John is never in danger of falling into this mistake, and those who read his gospel must be careful to understand the nature and consequences of his testimony!

It is worth recalling that when Luke speaks of the 'sign' to be displayed at the birth of Christ, he does so as he describes how angels (supernatural insights) say to the Bethlehem shepherds: 'This will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger' (Luke 2.2). Yet his story of the 'sign' does not end with the shepherds simply 'seeing' the sign with the natural eye, but in their own acceptance of what they saw as a sign that a saviour had been born. It can be stated that the spreading of the news of the birth of the saviour was, and remains part of the sign, part of the event that constitutes Christmas. Similarly with John's account of Easter. The 'sign' of the empty tomb and of the appearance of the glorified Lord to his disciples are not simple statements of miracle that can be properly discussed quite objectively. The glorification of the Lord is not something which just happens to him; the whole of the Lord's Prayer in John has made it abundantly clear that the Lord's glory in large measure consists in the effective testimony of men to his great nature and saving work. The story of Thomas, which John now unfolds, deals with the perpetual situation in which the Church must find herself as she bears witness to the great sign in which Jesus of Nazareth was both crucified and glorified.

The evangelist provides a necessary and important introduction to the story. Thomas was not present when the glorified Lord appeared to the disciples on Easter evening. Neither, of course, were the first readers of the gospel; nor the readers of this commentary! In this way John indicates that his story is for every one who was not present, as well as for those who were present when Jesus first returned after his glorification to visit his own. When Thomas heard the testimony of his fellow-disciples he replied with understandable scepticism and pardonable candour: 'Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.' No modern critic or sceptic could have made a sceptical comment more successfully. Yet with John it is necessary to see that nothing less than such a critique can possibly afford an adequate starting place for the Church if it is to meet each generation of men with a convincing word about the story of Jesus.

Eight days after Easter Day, i.e. on the Sunday after Easter, the disciples had gathered together again, Thomas being present. It is interesting to recall what John has already told his readers about Thomas. It was Thomas who, when the disciples generally were trying to persuade Jesus not to return to Bethany at the time of Lazarus' fatal sickness, exclaimed with perhaps more impulsiveness than prudence: 'Let us also go with him, that we may die with him' (11:16). It was Thomas also who, at the Last Supper, interrupted the discourse given by the Lord to say to him: 'Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?' His was a nature evidently impulsive, loyal, discerning, yet not capable of much sustained thought. When Jesus appeared to the disciples on this second occasion, he seemed. to have come primarily to meet Thomas, and to meet him (as in ch. 21 he meets Peter) in the full presence of his fellow-disciples. The Lord met the company with his new-old greeting: 'Peace be with you', and then turned specifically to Thomas. 'put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.' So at last Thomas was able to have all the proofs he had desired. Now was his chance to demonstrate that 'seeing was believing'. Yet he did not take it. To the almost impossibly generous invitation to the good sceptical mind he responded with something as far removed from scepticism as anything in scripture, with the words: 'My Lord and my God.' The words 'My Lord' would have sufficed to show that Thomas was now as satisfied as any other of the disciples that Jesus had returned to them; in adding the words and my God he is taking a step beyond the intra-human relationship between disciple and Rabbi into a new one where a man is brought into the presence of his God. And this, of course, is the crown of the Johannine gospel.

It is quite plain from John's narrative that Thomas did not accept the invitation to touch the Lord's hands or feel his side. He had learnt in the mere 'seeing' of the glorified Lord that sense and sight were not the sufficient things he had supposed. In a strangely paradoxical way he had found through seeing that seeing was not believing. And this makes Thomas the link, as it were, between the first apostolic belief in and confession of Jesus Christ as Son of God and the believer of every age who makes the same confession of faith. The modern believer, like Thomas, may well at times think: 'If only I could touch the wound prints on his hands, or see the spear mark in his side, then I could know for sure.' But were he to be put into a situation where these physical experiences became possible, he would know at once that all his sophistication would rise to make him as sceptical about sight and touch as about sheer belief. Belief, that is to say, is not the inevitable concomitant of sight as such; it is, as John and the whole New Testament make plain, always the work of the Holy Spirit.

The comment of Jesus upon Thomas' confession makes all this plain. 'Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe'. Did Thomas believe because he had seen Jesus, even Jesus in his glorified appearance? It is doubtful, whether Thomas himself drew so hard a distinction between touch and sight as to warrant an affirmative answer to the question. But even if an affirmative answer be given, the further question must be asked as to what constitutes belief, particularly in the distinctive Johannine sense. It is not simple belief that Jesus who was crucified had been raised from the dead and could therefore visit his disciples again. That would be belief in a miracle of resuscitation, or even of resurrection; it would not of itself constitute belief in Jesus Christ as he who is one with the Father. It would justify Thomas saying 'My Lord', but it could hardly justify him in saying 'My God'. Jesus had said 'He who sees me sees him who sent me' and it is this paradoxical vision that underlies the conception of sight here. Physical sight is of physical objects; and even were the resurrection experiences to be classified as visions, they would still for this purpose count as physical, i.e. seen with or through the physical eye located in the physical body. But the eye with which a man 'sees' the one who sent Jesus Christ into the world is not located in any physical body as a sense organ, and its functioning can therefore take place both in association with physical seeing, as in the case of the beloved disciple, Mary Magdalene, the disciples on Easter evening and now Thomas on the octave of Easter; but it can also, even there, be recognized as distinct from physical sight, and this is made clear in the story of Thomas, who stands for all ages as the link between the experience of the apostles and that of the later Church, making plain to all believers that there was no advantage to the apostles in 'seeing'; not really, because physical seeing can be as seriously questioned as any other experience of sense; not really, because the vision of Jesus as the Word of God incarnate is the gift of the Spirit both to those who 'see' certain things, and to those who do not. The blessedness of belief is thus really to those who believe, not to those who see. This is the universal beatitude with which John closes his gospel. It includes Thomas as well as contemporary man; and contemporary man as well as Thomas.

24
Thomas, one of the twelve: A title used at 6:71. It may still serve, even after the defection of Judas, to refer to the intimate apostolic band.

25
'We have seen the Lord': The same phrase (though in the plural) as Mary Magdalene had used. All the gospels report some measure of scepticism about the resurrection (Mark 16:13; Matt. 28:17; Luke 24:22ff, 38, 41). John has his own way of meeting the inevitable scepticism of human nature, so dependent upon knowledge through the senses.

'place my hand in his side': Some commentators have supposed that this implies that Thomas was present at the crucifixion, or at least at the fraction of the legs that followed it. But no such inference is inevitable, even should it be (undemonstrably) true! Thomas could have heard of the incident from an eyewitness, certainly by the time that the disciples told him of their visitation from the glorified Lord.

26
Eight days later: This indicates that the disciples stayed in Jerusalem for the whole of the Passover at which Jesus died.

27
he said to Thomas: It is this phrase which makes the narrative sound as if Jesus came specifically to manifest himself to Thomas, and to put right, once and for all, the issue as between sight (and other senses) and belief.

'do not be faithless, but believing': This could well be rendered: 'Don't become an unbeliever, but become a believer.'

28
'My Lord and my God': With these words the evangelist has brought his gospel full circle. In the beginning the divine Word had been proclaimed as God (1:1); now that profound truth is confessed as the only possible word to be uttered about him who had been incarnate and humbled, but now is risen and glorified. And the word is uttered by Thomas: 'My Lord and my God'. Christianity is fact, not metaphysic.

29
'Have you believed because you have seen me?': The word believe, thus used absolutely, cannot but mean full belief in Jesus as Christ and Son of God (20:31). That belief, as Thomas was bound to see, could not be guaranteed even by the sight of the Lord's glorified body, but only by the operation of the promised Spirit in the heart. Thomas, as has been claimed above, is the link between the apostles and the present-day believer. He belongs to both groups, for belief has the same real basis for both.