Tomorrow’s Gospel passage has meant a lot to me for a long time. So much so that I found myself with a lot of small, scattered thoughts about how the Resurrection has key themes for mission. So much seemed relevant to the more ‘missional’ approach. So not three developed points but seven bullet points this week!
Introduction
in the house where I grew up there was a very small toilet next to a tiny
bathroom. The time came when Dad decided to knock them into one. I was about
thirteen and in bed with the ‘flu. My seven-year-old sister took great delight
in wielding a hammer alongside Dad as they brought down the wall and made one
room of more reasonable size.
It’s Resurrection evening, the disciples are behind locked
doors in fear, and the risen Jesus appears. He is recognisable but his body has
acquired new powers. He doesn’t need to break down the walls to get in, but this
story is about breaking down walls in other ways. In particular, it’s about
breaking down walls to release his followers in mission. What walls does he
break down? What does he bring in their place so that frightened and
unbelieving disciples might share in his Father’s mission?
1. Peace
The disciples are imprisoned behind a wall of fear. Their trouble-making
teacher has been executed and now the authorities are surely going to round
them up. Despite the women going to the tomb that morning, followed by Peter
and John, fear still holds them prisoner. To them, Jesus appears and says, ‘Peace
be with you’ (verse 19).
The risen Christ brings peace to fearful followers, because
if he is alive then what can ultimately defeat them? Opponents may come with
dire threats and even take blood, but if the disciples of Jesus believe in the
Resurrection then whatever happens to them, death is defeated and fellowship
with Christ is permanent and eternal.
Is it not common for fear to choke our participation in mission?
We fear what friends will say if we talk about our faith. We fear trying
something in case it fails. But the risen Christ says, ‘Peace be with you’ to
us, too. Granted, it can take a long time for his truth to calm our racing
pulse and lower our blood pressure, but he says it nevertheless. It is possible we shall be ridiculed for
speaking about God and Jesus and it may be that we try some community action
that doesn’t come off, but human mockery and failure are met by the peace of
Christ. And in any case, we may not fail! Or we might be part of a sowing
process. The wall of fear is there to stop us taking missionary risks, but the
risen Christ says, ‘Peace be with you – so go on, take some chances in faith!’
2. Joy
The second wall after fear is despair: the disciples’ dreams of the last three
years have been violently dashed. But Jesus shows them his hands and his side –
yes, it is him! ‘Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord’ (verse
20).
I can never hear that verse without thinking of a favourite
story. While I was a student at Trinity
College, Bristol we had a visit one week from the Bishop of the Arctic. He would come to
the college every few years, apparently to recruit missionaries. The first
Christian missionaries to the Arctic had come from our college.
He told a story in his sermon about those first
missionaries. They were translating the New Testament into the Inuit tongue
when they came to this verse. But the language had no word for ‘joy’. One day a
missionary went out with one of the Inuit hunters and his dogs. Upon their return,
the dogs were given some meat to eat and the missionary thought, ‘Now there’s a
picture of joy. I’ll ask what the word is to describe the dogs.’ As a result,
that first Inuit New Testament translated John 20:20 as, ‘Then the disciples
wagged their tails when they saw the Lord’!
And the risen Christ replaces our despair with a wagging of
our tails – with joy! The despair of death can envelope us. Church decline takes
its toll on us. Recent forecasts suggest the extinction of the Methodist Church by 2030. But suppose
that’s not quite how things should be seen in the light of the Resurrection? Maybe
it’s more like a Canada-based thinker on the contemporary scene called Alan Roxburgh has recently
put it:
Those who say the church
is dying in the West are mistaking the phenomenon of transition for death.
They’re not the same! We may say the church we have known and experienced for
the last 150 years or so no longer has legitimacy as the sign, witness,
instrument and foretaste of the kingdom. But that’s very different from saying
the church is dying. We shouldn’t confuse the two. The church in the West isn’t
dying and it won’t because God keeps turning up in all these places we so
easily give up on because we see them as hopelessly out of tune with the times
or just not getting what needs to take place. The stories emerging in these
places are harbingers of God’s emerging life in old churches.
Maybe the risen Christ
wants to meet us so that we can make the transition from the old dying ways of
church to new expressions of his resurrection life that defy society’s
expectations of us. Maybe if we lay down our obsession with institutions, programmes
and all the things that are church as we have known her for most of our lives
and set out instead to meet our risen Lord then surely we shall be bearers of
his life for the world.
3. Purpose
Next,
Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father
has sent me, so I send you.’ (verse 21)
A culture of death, dominated by fear and despair, is one
that makes you wonder whether there is anything worth doing. What purpose is there,
for which we might live or die? But the risen Christ gives his disciples a
purpose: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ Here is purpose: it is to
continue the Father’s mission that Jesus began. They don’t have to invent
anything from scratch; they are simply to do what Jesus did.
And yes, I know that sounds a lot easier to say than to do. But
the template is there, in the life and ministry of Jesus. We don’t have to
worry about techniques, we don’t have to invent new programmes, we merely have
to take Jesus as our lodestar for mission. Look at what he said and did. Then put
that into operation. Bring good news to the poor, grace to sinners, healing to
those in pain. And that means, as I’ve emphasised before, looking hard at what
we presently do to see whether it contributes towards a missionary end or
whether it just makes us feel good. Our call is not to be in the church but to
be the church in the world, for that is the purpose to which the risen Christ
commissions us.
4. Power
This stuff is all very well – peace to overcome the fear that paralyses
mission, joy to deal with crippling despair, purpose instead of aimlessness or
an inward-looking death – but we still may feel unable to rise to the
challenge. For that problem, Jesus has another word:
When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,
‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’ (verse 22)
You can have all the arguments you like about this verse,
especially about how it relates to Pentecost that came seven weeks later, but
maybe John is just telescoping into the end of his Gospel a summary of
important things he wasn’t going to cover in detail. What we know for sure is
that Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to his disciples for the missionary task. If
our purpose is to continue the mission of the Father for which Jesus was
incarnated, then we do mission in the Jesus way. And Jesus, for all his divine
status as the Son of God, also functioned (in the words of Jack Deere) as ‘a
man in the power of the Spirit’.
And that surely means we need to make the journey from
Easter to Pentecost, as the Easter season itself does. I have a theory that for
many Christians Easter Day is our favourite. It gets us over the misery and
violence of Good Friday, but we never make the journey to Pentecost, because we’re
afraid of all that emotional Holy Spirit stuff. But the Holy Spirit is the
missionary Spirit, and to be a missionary people requires the Spirit just as
Jesus needed did at his baptism. If we are troubled, then one worthwhile
question is this: does Jesus ever give bad gifts?
5. Authority
If there’s one thing the disciples in the locked upper room don’t feel they
have it’s authority. They are weak and vulnerable, waiting for the secret
police to break down the doors and take them away for questioning, torture and
execution. But for mission Jesus bestows authority upon them:
‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if
you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’ (verse 23)
Again, we have a difficult verse
here – and I suggest it doesn’t mean a priestly power to forgive sins or
otherwise at formal confession, because that is God’s prerogative (cf. Mark
2:7, Acts 8:22) – but at heart I think this too is one to give us missionary
shape. This is about the Gospel message.
And I believe it’s about the
Gospel message in both word and deed. It’s Gospel word in the power of the
Cross, where people find release through the death of Christ. It’s the Gospel
deed as we practise forgiveness. It’s no accident I just spoke of people
finding ‘release’ at the Cross, because that is what forgiveness is: we release
people, that is, we set them free from all obligations to us. We don’t ‘hold’ them under obligation to us because
of their sinful acts against us. Forgiveness is missionary: it proclaims and
demonstrates the Gospel.
6. Patience
What a mistake we make in singling out ‘doubting Thomas’ from the other
disciples – as if they had been full of faith before meeting the risen Christ!
At least Thomas is honest when his friends tell him, ‘We have seen the Lord,’
and he replies, ‘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’
(verse 25). But there is no record of him being berated.
And Jesus seems to bide his
time, too. He waits for that next time when Thomas is with the disciples, and
at that point meets with him and leads him to his confession of faith: ‘My Lord
and my God!’ (verse 28).
The missionary endeavour is as
much about process as about crisis; it’s about patience as well as about crunch
decisions. People take time to become followers of Jesus Christ. We may fail to
notice that, because the experience of previous generations was of a shorter
apparent gap between first contact with the Gospel and a commitment to Christ. But
those experiences came from times when people had a greater familiarity with
Christianity and the Bible than today. Now we need to be in for the long haul
with people. There will be patience in the building of relationships, and
indeed we won’t simply be making relationships just to make ‘God fodder’ of
people. No longer can we entertain the idea that we’ll muster up the courage to
bring people to one church meeting or evangelistic event and if it doesn’t
click into place spiritually for them there it’s curtains. Patience is a gift
for mission today.
7. Inclusiveness
A little detail I’ve overlooked before – I’ve never seen the significance of
this until now:
‘A week later his disciples were again in the house, and
Thomas was with them.’ (verse 26a)
Thomas was with them. The doubting man was not excluded
because he had questions tinged with blunt honesty. He was still included. Perhaps
it was because the others were still conscious of how they had felt only a week
earlier. They remembered their own doubts. Such remembering enabled them to
continue to include Thomas.
In a way, this links with what I have just said about
patience. For Thomas, the group of disciples was clearly a safe space where he
could air his questions and doubts. It has become increasingly important in
missionary approaches in recent years to create these safe spaces. So whatever
you think of the Alpha Course, one of its undoubted strengths is that people in
the small discussion groups are allowed freedom to say whatever they think of
the week’s topic, and the group leaders are under orders not just to shut them
down with a standard Christian response. The approach of the cell church movement
has been to introduce people to the Christian community via the small group,
where – amongst other things – there is open discussion.
Conclusion
Thomas, allegedly the great doubter, but I think the great questioner, ends up
with a personal audience with the risen Christ, and a much greater blessing
than he might have expected. Yet Jesus promises a larger blessing than that to those
who come afterwards:
‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are
those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ (verse 29)
What blessings might be in the offing if we allow the risen
Christ to shape the way we share in the Father’s mission with him? What if his
peace enables us to break free of fear? If he gives us joy that conquers
despair? If his resurrection fills us with the purpose of sharing in that
mission? If he gives us Holy Spirit power to be his witnesses? If the authority
the risen Christ gives us is not the type that lords it over people but brings
forgiveness in word and deed? If we share his patience with doubters and
include them while they are on the journey to Christ, sharing our journey at
the same time? What if
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