As preached by Brother Luke
Holy Wisdom Church
Sermon 155: Col 1:13b-20; Ac 2:22-36; Jn 20:19-31 [15Ap18]
Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus was forever acting to break down barriers: societal, religious, cultural, and personal. He confronted taboos about women’s natural menstruation cycles being unclean, opposed the belief that touching an ill person made one ritually unclean, challenged the prejudice against foreigners, questioned over burdensome laws about Sabbath work and rest, invited people to recognize who one’s neighbor really is, and denied the accepted wisdom that retaliation was the necessary response when abused or attacked. Those are only examples of the barriers formed by the religious and cultural mores of his time that Jesus broke. Although these religious customs and traditions were understood to be things that pleased God and were intended to bring people closer to God, they often had the opposite effect. So, we see barriers may not always be physical, but of course, sometimes they are.
In today’s gospel reading the barrier between Jesus and his disciples is initially formed by Jesus’s death on the cross which left the disciples dejected, believing that with his death, the great vision of the Good News had died with him. So, the disciples are hunkered down in a room behind locked doors for fear of the authorities who might very well seek to arrest these followers of Jesus in order to bring this fledgling movement to an abrupt end. This lock-down image of the disciples in that room certainly has its scriptural pedigree. As the prophet Isaiah says: “Go to your room and close the door. Stay there for a while until the time of wrath is gone” [Is 26:20]. But the barrier intended to keep the authorities out does not keep Jesus out. Jesus was not finished with his disciples. They had a mission to embark on and Jesus was going to make sure that they moved forward with that mission.
In John’s telling of this story, he twice refers to the locked doors. Jesus’s two appearances with the disciples in this scene intentionally includes the image of the locked door. The locked door is something Jesus passes through, his mission unimpeded. But the barrier to Jesus mission includes something more personal than a locked door. It is more than the dejection felt by the disciples. It is more than the fear of the dangers lurking all around them. It is Thomas’s locked heart.
Sometimes the toughest and most impregnable barriers are those we erect around ourselves. In today’s gospel, it is Thomas who has placed a barrier between himself and Jesus by declaring that he will not believe unless he sees and touches the marks of the crucifixion on Jesus’s body. So, Jesus, without rancor or criticism, simply responds by showing himself to Thomas and telling him to put his hands in the holes in his hands and side. Once done, he then tells Thomas to no longer be unbelieving. And Thomas is transformed from cold doubter to a fiery evangelist carrying Christ’s message as far as India. Jesus took Thomas’s stubborn refusal to believe and turned it into a powerful missionary force.
What is the message for us? Might we also have erected barriers born of the same defensiveness that kept Thomas estranged from God? In addition to that physical safe place where we might seek shelter from what is raging around us, we can also build up a bulwark of other defenses which in a psychological sense are also intended as a barrier between us and others, including that most important other: God. The English language makes it easy to see this. Simply add the word self as a prefix to a list of words and the image becomes unmistakable: self-importance, self-indulgence, self-sufficiency, self-satisfaction, self-absorption, self-assurance, self-protection, and so forth. Jesus is ready to break down barriers we erect and guide us from selfish to selfless.
And that closed-door image may not always be a barrier between us and God. Behind closed doors, we too may experience contact with the divine presence, as did the disciples. As scripture says: When you pray, go to your inner room, close the door and pray to your father in secret. And your father, who sees in secret will repay you. [Mt 6:6]
Christ is Risen!
