John 20:19-23

Jesus Appears to His Disciples

19 On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

21 Again Jesus said, "Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." 22 And with that he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of anyone, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven."



Dig Deeper

One of the great goals that we had every year when I was a high school teacher was to get the students to write a research paper in both their English and Social Studies classes. Because I was a history teacher, that meant that the research paper was one of the things that I had to accomplish in class every year. The reality was that most of our students, at least the freshmen and first-year students to our school, simply did not have a clue of how to write a research paper. This meant that we had to start from the most basic elements and work our way up to a finished product, all the while supposedly teaching them history as well. One of the things that was always beneficial for the students was to see a finished product and go through it so that they could see what it was supposed to look like. Once we had done that, they would begin to work on their own product. They would never, however, simply take the paper that I had shown them and re-write that and then it turn it in as their own. That would have made little sense and not demanded anything of them. They would learn from and build on the concepts of the paper that we studied but they wouldn’t just repeat it back to me. In the end, they would wind up with something that looked much like the original paper but that was a new paper that dealt with the subject about which they had chosen to write.


It would be amazing enough if Jesus had come and lived a life that perfectly represented the will of the Father and did the work of the Father. Of course he did that, but he did more than that. He didn’t just come to model what God was like and then leave everyone, mouths agape, to marvel and wonder at it all. Jesus came to live that life and then to say, "here, now you go do that too." He called us to be for the world what he was for Israel, challenging them, calling them to repentance, showing them who the real God was and what He was doing through the new creation, and putting into reality the new family that Jesus began.


As we begin this passage, John is sure to stress again that this is the first day of the week. We are still dealing with the onset of the new creation. It is the opening day of the new reality in Christ. But the disciples are demonstrating anything but an understanding of that. They aren’t loudly declaring to the world that the new creation has come that Christ has defeated death. They’re not holding candlelight vigils by his tomb, waiting for him to appear to them. They don’t know what to make of the day’s events. Instead we find them likely in the same house where they had partaken of the last supper just days before, holed up in hiding. They apparently had bolted both the outside door and the door to the upper room as most houses would have had bolts on both doors. They don’t know what it is going on, but surely they understand that if rumors get out that Jesus’ tomb is empty, or worse yet that he is still alive, they are afraid what the response of the Jewish leaders might be.


The whole point of the locked doors was to keep anyone else out but that proved no obstacle. He suddenly appears in a room that likely contained a group of his disciples that included Mary, ten of the twelve (minus Thomas and Judas Iscariot), and several other disciples. His appearance could have easily caused them fear, so he issues a standard Jewish greeting, peace be with you, which would have let them know immediately that they had nothing to fear. From their, perspective, what could this be other than a ghost or Jesus’ spirit of some type. They were not ready to understand this yet as a physical resurrection, a permanent overcoming of death, so Jesus’ sets about to demonstrate the truth for them immediately. He shows them his hands which were pierced with nails affixing him to the cross (the words for hands would have referred to his hands but also included his wrists) and his side where the spear was thrust.


This tells us two important things about the resurrection body. The first is that Jesus had the same body that he had before death. It was somehow glorified and transformed and yet it retained the marks of victory that he had achieved on the cross. Jesus hinted at this truth when he challenged the Jewish leaders to "destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days." The same body that died would be the same one that was raised. The early church leader, Justin Martyr confirmed this belief saying that Christians "expect to receive our own bodies." The early church believed that Jesus was resurrected in his own (albeit glorified) body and so would they be, as another early church leader Irenaeus indicated when he wrote that those resurrected, "will have their own bodies, their own souls, and their own spirits, in which they had pleased God."


The second truth is that the resurrection body seems to have abilities to move through doors, appear, disappear, etc., that normal bodies do not. The simplest explanation of this is that the resurrection body appears to be equally at home in both the physical and the spiritual realms. Our bodies currently are only adapted to the physical realm. The resurrection body has no problem in the physical realm but it can also function perfectly well in the spiritual realm. It is a body built for the time when heaven and earth are brought together as one in the age to come (Eph. 1:10).


Having been reassured that they had nothing to fear and that it was indeed their Lord, the disciple were overjoyed. He had overcome death but before they can begin to ponder what that might mean, Jesus gives them a preview. They will receive the Holy Spirit but that won’t just give them a wonderful spiritual experience. It will enable and empower them to do for the world what Jesus had done for Israel. He came to do the work of the Father, something only the Son of God could do. Now he is commissioning them to partake in that work as part of the family. Not in the same way that Jesus had done but in a way that was inspired by what he had done. They were to share in the work. They have, incredibly, been brought into the unity of mission that was shared by the Father and the Son. They are sent to take part in that work.


Jesus is entrusting them through the power of the Spirit to carry the message and reality of the new creation to the world. He had modeled it, now it would be their turn. They were being formed into the new humanity, the apex of the new creation that would exercise God’s dominion throughout His creation. Just as God breathed the breath of life into man in Genesis 2:7, giving him the spark of life, so Jesus does as he creates this new community, this new body, once-for-all. In breathing on them and saying "receive the Holy Spirit," Jesus conceives the community that would be born through the power of the Spirit on Pentecost day, about fifty days later (Acts 2). They have been commissioned as the new community of Christ in anticipation of the event that will take place after his ascension. It is to this new humanity that Matthew records Jesus’ words to "go and make disciples," echoing the charge from God to Adam and Eve to "be fruitful and multiply."


Understanding all of this is to understand why Paul and the other New Testament writers rarely quoted Jesus. Some critics have gone so far as to claim that Paul knew nothing of the real person, the historical Jesus, but only knew of him as a "God" that he later created largely from his own imagination. As evidence of this they cite the fact that Paul rarely quotes Jesus, speaks little of his life, and addresses different issues than Jesus addressed. But that is the whole point. Jesus has sent his community to be sent as he was sent but not to do precisely what he did. They would build on his mission, not recreate it. Jesus came to bring the new creation to reality, his community was to go announce the kingdom and to live it in the world. To go around and do exactly what Jesus did and preach the same message that he preached would be an act of disloyalty and disobedience. He announced the kingdom and the new creation, we are to live it and invite the world into it. We are not to be Jesus, we are to be for the world what he was to Israel. We are to share in his work based on him as the foundation of what we do. He calls his community to create a building on the foundation of Christ, "For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. 3:11).


As part of this mission Jesus says of his new community, that if they forgive the sins of anyone, their sins are forgiven, but if they do not, they are not forgiven. Jesus is not, we should carefully note, bestowing some priestly ability to forgive sins of other human beings, something only God can do. If that were the case, then we would also have the ability to not forgive sins if we so chose. Jesus is, instead, using a common figure of speech which applied in the first century to someone being included or excluded in the synagogue community. The disciples were to witness by the word, life, and love of their new community concerning the new creation available through dying to self and entering into the life of Christ. Those who embraced this message would have their sins forgiven, while those who rejected it would not. Jesus is affirming, in other words, that his new community will have the power, through their mission and message, to call people to forgiveness. Entrance into Christ would come through entrance into his community. One cannot be separated from the other.



Devotional Thought

The immediate result of Jesus’ resurrection was his call to his body of believers to go out and announce his new creation and kingdom, to be his ambassadors. How much time and effort do you invest into that calling? Is it honestly the focal point of your time, your resources, and your attention? Do you constantly announce and/ or build God’s kingdom in your family or at your job?