Apostles on Both Sides of the Door

April 16, 2023
St. John’s United Church of Christ, Union, Illinois

John 20:19-31[1]

There are times when the best idea is to stay behind closed doors. It’s safer there. Outside, you might catch a disease, get hit by a storm, or get shot. It is a dangerous world out there, both literally and figuratively. Our fears can drive us to seek shelter. When you’re faced with an actual pandemic, tornado, or active shooter, responding to our fear by seeking shelter is the right thing to do. Make sure everyone you’re responsible for has made it to safety. Stay inside; and wash your hands.

Responding to a tornado, a pandemic, and gun violence require different responses; but there are similarities. Once the storm has passed, it is time to assess the damage, check on our neighbors, and offer help where needed. In the pandemic we kept our doors shut, but we still needed to assess the damage, and the potential for long-term disruptions, and we still needed to check on our neighbors. After the terror is over, we look for the lost, check in with loved ones, and help others recover.

Sometimes our help is not needed, at least not yet. Tragedy and hardship can be slow moving. It is hard to wait, knowing your help will be needed, but right now it might aggravate the problem. Even worse, our urgency to help out diminishes with time, and a few months from now we’ll be distracted by other urgent matters and forget about the needs that remain from the last tragedy. We want to help right now! But we must discipline ourselves to conserve our supplies, our money, and our energy for when it will be most helpful.

When the danger is more of a metaphor, when the threat is not immanent, and the damage is harder to discern, it can be harder to know when and how to open the door or reach out to others. When we are safely behind the metaphorical locked door, we can attend to our personal needs, healing and wholeness only with those we trust, and ignore the troubles on the other side of the door.

The church, at times, has become closed to the outside world. The sacred and pure are reserved for a private group, and the rest of the world is profane, dirty, and hazardous. The public and, especially, the political world outside the door is off limits. We view with skepticism those who want the church to have a voice in the public sphere, especially when they’re not from our church. Beyond that door, however, are the social, economic, political, and civic realities that affect us all. And God did not call us together as a church to hide the gospel and hoard away the grace.

The doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked. Whether it was fear of the religious authorities who might come after them as associates of Jesus, or for fear that they might be accused of having stolen away with the body, John tells us the disciples met behind a door that was closed and locked. But the door did not keep out the risen Christ. Jesus enters in wherever we are, even when we’re hiding in fear, bringing peace.

Thomas had his doubts. We don’t know why Thomas doubted; perhaps, like most of us, he resisted easy answers to the hard questions of faith. Many of us have experienced the deep darkness of doubt, or struggled with the troubling silence of God. Most of us have managed to cling to our faith in the midst of such experiences. The hardship experienced during these intense periods of doubt and despair has been described as “the dark night of the soul.”[2] Even Mother Teresa of Calcutta struggled with doubt; she “felt so abandoned by God that she was unable to pray.”[3] Doubt is a natural part of faith.

We might ask the question, “Why did God let grandma die of the virus?” or “Where was God when the floods hit Fort Lauderdale?” Why didn’t our thoughts and prayers save the lives of those five people at the bank in Louisville, Kentucky? We doubt, and we wonder why the terrible things keep happening.

I get it. I have my doubts too. But I think we often get stuck looking for a miracle, a happy ending to everything, the perfect savior to make everything better. When we seek only the perfect, we don’t recognize what is there in the imperfect, the wounded, the possibility that God doesn’t always make the bad things go away. Sometimes God is right there with us, weeping with us, praying with us, sharing the pain and sorrow and hardship of life. Sometimes, when we search too hard for Jesus, we don’t notice that he’s already in the room, seeking us out, wherever we are, just as we are.

The other disciples didn’t argue with rational and empirical explanations. Thomas didn’t seek out Jesus to demand answers. Jesus entered the room, despite the locked doors, in order to reach Thomas. Jesus came to meet Thomas where he was, seeking him out when he had lost faith. It can be that way with us as well. When we are faced with difficult questions, and our hold on faith is tenuous, God will seek us out, enter through the locked doors that we have built around us, and offer us love and grace when all seems lost.

It may not look like Jesus. John tells us that the disciples didn’t recognize Jesus, not at first. It is likely that when Jesus comes to find us in our moments of despair, we will not recognize him either. How can we know when God arrives? Jesus gave two clues to Thomas. He spoke the words, “Peace be with you,” and then said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.”[4] When God comes to us in our times of doubt, we will recognize God’s presence when peace is offered, when the pain and sorrow of life is acknowledged, and when we realize that we have been sought out by that love which is stronger than death.

We may not recognize that God was with mom when she died, as the nurse held her hand, singing familiar songs to her as she let go of this world. We may not realize that God was not in the tornado, but in the voice of the store manager hustling everyone into the basement. We may not recognize the face, that it was God’s smile on the first-responder who helped us out from under the debris. We may not recognize the risen Christ, who appears like a regular person, wounded, weeping, sharing the experience of life with us.

John’s story doesn’t end with a private celebration locked away behind closed doors. The story continues with Jesus giving them a new name and a new task. They are no longer disciples, meaning followers. Now they are apostles, those who are sent into the world to carry on the mission. “As [God] has sent me, so I send you.”[5] The Apostles had the Holy Spirit breathed into them, and were sent out the door to bring peace and love, hope and healing to a world in turmoil.

We might rest content with what we have already accomplished, sharing the peace of Christ behind the closed door of the personal and private. But the world outside that door needs us. Disciples, apostles, followers of Jesus can’t just focus on ourselves. We are sent to others. Strengthened by the peace of Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we are sent into our community to help people in need or in distress, people who have lost loved ones to the virus, their homes to the storm, or their jobs to economic insecurity. We are sent over the phone, and through the internet to bring hope and solidarity to those struggling with isolation and fear. We are given the charge to bear the forgiving, transforming love of God into every sphere of human existence, the social, economic, political, and civic realities that dominate our lives.

The storm may not be over. The virus may not be contained. The threat of more gun violence persists. Our fears and doubts remain. Our questions may not yet have answers. But we are more than disciples. We, too, are apostles. We cannot simply attend to our personal well-being. We must be apostles on both sides of the door,[6] taking care of ourselves and our own, but also taking care of everyone else too. We share in the manifestation of the risen Christ who seeks us out wherever we are, and sends us out to heal the world. Amen.

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[1] The scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.  Used by permission.  All rights reserved.

[2] Attributed to St. John of the Cross, 16^th century Catholic mystic.

[3] Nicole Winfield, “Mother Teresa despaired that God had abandoned her” in Providence Journal, Sep. 3, 2016.
https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20160903/mother-teresa-despaired-that-god-had-abandoned-her.

[4] John 20:27.

[5] John 20:21.

[6] D. Cameron Murchison, Pastoral Perspective on John 20:19-31 in Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Vol. 2, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, General Editors (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), p. 404.