Peace Be With You The Luminous Podcast

Peace Be With You | Rev. Chad E. JarnaginJohn 20:19-31 (NRSV)Jesus Appears to the Disciples19 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.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”Jesus and Thomas24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”The Purpose of This Book30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.Easter Sunday was last Sunday, but Easter isn’t over, it has just begun. Eastertide or the Great 50 Days of Easter goes until Pentecost. We’ll follow the gospels during this time together. It is always interesting to walk through this time looking at the disciples and how they responded to the resurrection of Jesus. For obvious reasons, it was unlike anything any of them had ever experiencedTrauma changes us… for worse at first… but over time, as we begin to heal and reframe, restore, and reshape our new realities, we will realize that the trauma that was once painful and horrifying… slowly begins to reveal something new, something good, beautiful, and healthy. Along the process is disbelief… hurt, doubt… maybe dread… anxiety. But eventually, our root system begins to work again… life begins to flow and even flourish once more. What are Jesus’ first words to them, as usual? “Peace be with you”… as if to say, guys, settle down, this is really happening… don’t run, don’t freak out… it is me… again, “peace be with you”… It’s interesting to think of our human condition in the light of this passage… in the light of our own realities. We can’t just push through our trauma… we have to patiently and intentionally navigate it. To begin to heal, we must receive the peace being offered to us… as Christ offered his friends when he magically appeared to them for the first time after his burial. “The resurrection is not an alien power breaking into God’s world,” but that it reveals a deeper reality that has always been there, a spiritual reality. We do not see it because we are totally consumed by seeing with our nearsighted eyes and the eye of the mind… instead of with a spirit-sightedness. We need to open up in ourselves and in one another the eye of the soul. “We fix our eyes not on what is seen,” writes St. Paul, “but on what is unseen.” (2 Corinthians 4:18). 
NT Wright said something like, “the message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and… we are invited to belong.”
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