THE COMMISSION OF CHRIST

John 20: 19-23

It is most likely that the disciples continued to meet in the upper room where the Last Supper had been held. But they met in something very like terror. They were afraid; they knew the envenomed bitterness of the Jews; the Jews had compassed the death of Jesus, and the disciples were afraid that their turn might come next. So they were meeting in terror, listening fearfully for every step on the stair and for every knock at the door, lest the emissaries of the Sanhedrin should come to arrest them too. As they sat there, Jesus was suddenly in the midst of them. He gave them the normal everyday eastern greeting:

“Peace be to you.” It means far more than: “May you be saved from trouble.” It means: “May God give you every good thing.” Then Jesus gave the disciples the commission which the Church must never forget.

(i) He said that as God had sent Him forth, so He sent them forth. Here is what Westcott called “The Charter of the Church.” It means three things. (a) It means that Jesus Christ needs the Church. This means exactly the same thing as Paul later meant when he called the Church “the body of Christ” (Ephesians 1: 23; 1 Corinthians 12: 12). Jesus had come with a message for all men; now He was going back to His Father; that message could never be taken out to all men, unless the Church took it. The Church was to be a mouth to speak for Jesus, feet to run upon His errands, hands to do His work. The message of Christ was delivered into the hands of the Church. Jesus could never become the possession and the Saviour of the world unless the Church took His story out to all the world. Therefore, the first thing that this means is that Jesus is dependent on His Church. (b) It means that the Church needs Jesus. A person who is to be sent out needs someone to send him; he needs a message to take; he needs a power and an authority to back his message; he needs someone to whom he may turn when he is in doubt and in difficulty. The Church needs Jesus. Without Him she has no message, without Him she has no power; without Him she has no one to turn to when she is up against it; without Him she has nothing to enlighten her mind, to strengthen her arm, and to encourage her heart. So, then, this means that the Church is dependent on Jesus. (c) But there remains still another thing here. The sending out of the Church by Jesus is parallel to the sending out of Jesus by God. But no one can read the story of the Fourth Gospel without seeing that the relationship between Jesus and God was continually dependent on Jesus’ perfect obedience, perfect submission and perfect love. Jesus could only be God’s messenger because He rendered to God that perfect obedience and that perfect love. Therefore, it follows that the Church is only fit to be the messenger and the instrument of Christ when she perfectly loves Him and perfectly obeys Him. The Church must never be out to propagate her message; she must be out to propagate the message of Christ. She must never be out to follow her own man-made policies; she must be out to follow the will of Christ. The Church fails whenever she tries to solve some problem in her own wisdom and strength, and whenever she fails to seek the will and the guidance of Jesus Christ.

(iii) Jesus said to the disciples: “If you remit the sins of anyone, they are remitted; if you retain them, they are retained.” This is a saying whose true meaning we must be careful to understand. One thing is quite certain – no man can forgive any other man’s sins. But another thing is equally certain – it is the great privilege of the Church to convey the message and the announcement and the fact of God’s forgiveness to men. Now, suppose someone brings us a message from someone else, our assessment of the value of that message will depend on how well the bringer of the message knows the person who sent the message. If someone proposes to interpret someone else’s thought to us, we know that the value of his interpretation depends entirely on his closeness to the other person. The apostles had the best of all rights to bring Jesus’ message to men, because they knew Jesus best. If they knew that a person was really penitent, then they could with absolute certainty proclaim to him the forgiveness of Christ. But equally, if they knew that there was no penitence in a man’s heart, or that he was trading on the love and the mercy of God, they could tell him that until his heart was altered there was no forgiveness for him. This sentence does not mean that the power to forgive sins was ever entrusted to any man or to any men; it means that the power to proclaim that forgiveness was so entrusted; and it means that the power to warn that that forgiveness is not open to the impenitent was also entrusted to them. This sentence lays down the duty of the Church to convey forgiveness to the penitent in heart, and to warn the impenitent that they are forfeiting the mercy of God.

THE DOUBTER CONVINCED

John 20: 24-29

To Thomas the Cross was only what he had expected. When Jesus had proposed going to Bethany, when the news of the illness of Lazarus had come, Thomas’s reaction had been: “Let us also go, that we may die with Him” (John 11: 16). Thomas never lacked courage, but Thomas was the natural pessimist. There can never be any doubt that Thomas loved Jesus. He loved Him enough to go to Jerusalem to die with, Him when the other disciples had been hesitant and afraid. What Thomas had expected had happened, and when it came, for all that he had expected it, Thomas was broken-hearted. So broken-hearted was he that he could not meet the eyes of men; all that Thomas wanted was to be alone with his grief. King George the Fifth used to say that one of his rules of life was: “If I have to suffer, let me be like a well-bred animal, and let me go and suffer alone.” Thomas had to face his suffering and his sorrow alone. So it happened that, when Jesus came back again, Thomas was not there; and the news that Jesus had come back seemed to him far too good to be true, and he refused to believe it. Belligerent in his pessimism, he said that he would never believe that Jesus had risen from the dead until he had seen and handled the print of the nails in Jesus’ hands and thrust his hand into the wound the spear had made in Jesus’ side. (There is no mention of any wound-print in Jesus’ feet, because in crucifixion the feet were not nailed, but only loosely bound to the cross.)

So another week elapsed and Jesus came back again; and this time Thomas was there. And Jesus knew Thomas’s heart. He repeated Thomas’s own words, and invited Thomas to make the test that he had demanded. And Thomas’s heart ran out in love and devotion. and all he could say was: “My Lord and my God! “So Jesus said to him: “Thomas, you needed the eyes of sight to make you believe; but the days will come when men will see with the eye of faith, and will believe.”

In this story the character of Thomas stands out clear before us.

(i) Thomas made one mistake. He withdrew from the Christian fellowship. He sought loneliness rather than togetherness. And because he was not there with his fellow Christians he missed the first coming of Jesus. We miss a great deal when we separate ourselves from the Christian fellowship, and when we try to be alone. Things can happen to us within the fellowship of Christ’s Church which will not happen to us when we are alone. When sorrow comes to us, and when sadness envelops us, we often tend to shut ourselves up and to refuse to meet people. That is the very time when, in spite of our sorrow, we should seek the fellowship of Christ’s people, for it is there that we are likeliest of all to meet Him face to face.

“There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me than in half the creeds.”

There is more ultimate faith in the man who insists on being sure than in the man who glibly repeats things which he has never thought out, and which he does not really believe. It is a doubt like that which in the end arrives at certainty.

(iii) Thomas’s other great virtue was that when he was sure, he went the whole way. “My Lord and my God!” said Thomas. There was no halfway house about Thomas. Thomas was not airing his doubts just for the sake of mental acrobatics; Thomas doubted in order to become sure; and when he did become sure his surrender to certainty was complete. If a man fights his way through his doubts to the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord, he has attained to a certainty that the man who unthinkingly accepts things can never reach.

THOMAS IN THE AFTER DAYS

John 20: 24-29

We do not know for sure what happened to Thomas in the after days; but there is an apocryphal book called The Acts of Thomas which purports to give his history. It is of course only legend, but there may well be some history beneath the legend; and certainly in it Thomas is still true to character. Here is part of the. story which it tells.

After the death of Jesus the disciples divided up the world among them, so that each might go out to some country to preach the gospel. India fell by lot to Thomas. This much is certain that the Thomist Church in South India does trace its origin to Thomas. At first Thomas refused to go. He said that he was not strong enough for the long journey. He said: “I am an Hebrew man; how can 1 go amongst the Indians and preach the truth?” Jesus appeared to him by night and said: “Fear not, Thomas, go thou unto India and preach the word there, for my grace is with thee.” But Thomas still stubbornly refused. “Whither thou wouldest send me, send me,” he said, “but elsewhere, for unto the Indians I will not go.”

Now it so happened that there had come a certain merchant from India to Jerusalem called Abbanes. He had been sent by King Gundaphorus to find a skilled carpenter and to bring him back to India, and Thomas was a carpenter. Jesus came up to Abbanes in the market place and said to him: “Wouldest thou buy a carpenter?” Abbanes said: “Yes.” Jesus said: “1 have a slave that is a carpenter, and I desire to sell him,” and he pointed at Thomas in the distance. So they agreed on a price and Thomas was sold, and the agreement ran: “Jesus, the son of Joseph the carpenter, acknowledge that I have sold my slave, Thomas by name, unto thee Abbanes, a merchant of Gundaphorus, king of the Indians.” When the deed was drawn up Jesus found Thomas and took him to Abbanes. Abbanes said: “Is this your master?” Thomas said: “Indeed he Is.” Abbanes said: “I have bought thee from him.” And Thomas said nothing. But in the morning Thomas rose early and prayed, and after, his prayer he said to Jesus: “I will go whither thou wilt Lord Jesus; thy will be done.” It is the same old Thomas, slow to be sure, slow to surrender; but once his surrender is made, it is complete.

The story goes on to tell how Gundaphorus commanded Thomas to build a palace, and Thomas said that he was well able to do so. The king gave Thomas money in plenty to buy materials and to hire workmen, but Thomas gave it all away to the poor. Always he told the king that the palace was rising steadily. The king was suspicious. In the end he sent for Thomas: “Hast thou built me the palace?” he demanded. Thomas answered: “Yes.” “When, then, shall we go and see it?” asked the king. Thomas answered: “Thou canst not see it now, but when thou departest this life, then thou shalt see it.” At first the king was very angry and Thomas was in danger of his life; but, in the end the king too was won for Christ, and so Thomas brought Christianity to India.

There is something very lovable and very admirable about Thomas. Faith was never an easy thing for Thomas; obedience never came readily to him. Thomas was the man who had to be sure. Thomas was the man who had to count the cost. But once he was sure, and once he had counted the cost, Thomas was the man who went to the ultimate limit of faith and of obedience. A faith like Thomas’s faith is better than any glib profession; and an obedience like Thomas’s obedience is better than an easy acquiescence which agrees to do a thing without counting the cost, and which then goes back upon its word.

THE AIM OF THE GOSPEL

John 20: 30, 31

It is quite clear that as the gospel was originally planned, it comes to an end with this verse. Here we have the natural end, and Chapter 21, which follows, is to be regarded as an appendix and an afterthought.

There is no passage in the gospels which better sums up the aim of the writers of all the gospels than this passage does.

(i) It is quite clear that the gospels never set out to give, or claimed to give, a full account of the life of Jesus. They do not follow Him from day to day from hour to hour. The gospels are selective. They give us, not an exhaustive account of everything that Jesus said or did, but a selection of typical incidents which show what He was like and the kind of things He was always doing.

(ii) Further, it is quite clear that the gospels were not meant to be biographies of Jesus; they are meant to be appeals to take Jesus as Saviour, Master and Lord. Their aim was, not to give information, but to give life. Their aim is to paint such a picture of Jesus that the reader will be bound to see that the person who could speak and teach, and act and heal like this can be none other than the Messiah and the Son of God; and that in that belief he might find the secret of real life.

When we approach the gospels as history and biography, we approach them in the wrong spirit altogether. We must read them, not primarily as historians seeking historical information, but as men and women seeking God.