Luke 24:36-43 & John 20:19-31 - My Thoughts

LUKE 24:36-43 & JOHN 20:19-31

It’s important for us as we start to keep making sure that we understand the time references. As the passages in John 20 and Luke 24 open, what’s happening is still taking place on the day of resurrection. I know I keep coming back to that but it’s vital for us to remember if we want to really be able to get into the minds of the disciples. For us, time is moving on. This coming Sunday is the fourth Sunday of Easter; Easter seems as if it was a long time ago. For the disciples – it’s the same day. Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Jesus was on the morning of the day of resurrection, the encounter Cleopas had with the risen Jesus was mid to late afternoon on the day of resurrection. These events seem to be taking place on the evening of the day of resurrection. It’s still only a few hours after the empty tomb was discovered and after reports of the resurrection started to circulate. So the heads of the disciples are still spinning, so to speak. This is all brand new to them. They still don’t really know what to make of it. If I’m right and the passages from Luke and John are describing the same events then it’s also important to realize from Luke that it’s at this gathering that the disciples first heard from Cleopas about what had happened. They just simply don’t know what to make of this, and given everything that has happened in just the previous 48 hours (Jesus’ arrest, trial, crucifixion, death and now his reported resurrection) their response is natural – they’re afraid, and it’s John who tells us that they had actually locked themselves away because they were afraid. We don’t know where this passage takes place. It only tells us that the disciples were together. We also don’t know how many disciples were present. Judas was gone, obviously and Thomas was absent. Cleopas was present – as well as his traveling companion from the Road to Emmaus story. There also seem to have been 6 women named in the various Gospels as those who had been at the empty tomb. So if my math is correct there might have been 18 people present at this encounter. (10 of the original Twelve, Cleopas and his companion and 6 other women.)

John makes clear that this group is gathered together behind locked doors because they are afraid – and John specifically notes that they afraid of “the Jews.” This is a very common pejorative that John uses throughout his Gospel – he makes many negative references to “the Jews.” That had unfortunately had the effect of promoting anti-semitism among Christians over the years. That was not John’s intent. It’s important to have some historical context to understand why John makes these very offensive-sounding references to “the Jews.” John’s Gospel was written in either the late 1^st or early 2^nd century. There’s a lot of water under the bridge, so to speak, between Christians and Jews at this point. Most importantly was what happened in about the mid 80’s of the 1^st century. There was a Jewish Council known as the Synod of Jamnia. The Synod of Jamnia essentially declared if a Jew believed that Jesus was the Messiah, they existed outside mainstream Judaism – essentially it declared Jewish Christians (or Christian Jews, however you want to put it) to be heretical in the eyes of Jewish religious authorities. In spite of what some claim there’s really no strong evidence that Christians were ever formally “expelled” from the temple – in fact by the time of Jamnia the second temple had already been destroyed by the Romans. But Jamnia did result in Christians being expelled from many synagogues (Jewish “congregations.”) The result was that Christians in Jerusalem had a lot of their social and cultural life taken from them. The author of John’s Gospel was almost certainly a Jewish Christian and would have been affected by the consequences of Jamnia. The other three Gospels were likely written before Jamnia. So John’s references to “the Jews” were probably references not to all Jewish people but to those who had played  apart in Jamnia and to the leaders of synagogues who had expelled Christians. It’s why, today, when we read these passages we often interpret the verses that reference the Jews and read them as “the Jewish leaders” or “the Jewish authorities.” That’s the group John is lashing out at with his references to “the Jews.”

Luke and John provide very similar descriptions of the scene of the first appearance of Jesus to his gathered disciples. The one primary difference is that Luke includes a reference to Jesus eating a piece of broiled fish. I want us to think about that before we skip ahead to the story of “Doubting Thomas.” Luke tells us that “after Jesus had appeared to this group, and after he had showed them his hands and his feet (his wounds left over from the crucifixion) “they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement.” It was too good to be true, you might say. It’s hard to know what was in their minds after the events of the last couple of days. Did they think they were imagining this? Did they think it was a spiritual vision? Did they think Jesus was a ghost of some sort? What Luke seems to make clear is that they weren’t convinced that whatever it was that they were seeing was the resurrected Jesus. So Jesus has to convince them – and what better way to convince them than by eating a piece of fish. Visions and ghosts and hallucinations do not eat fish. We often think of Thomas as the one who had to be convinced that Jesus was really there – but the others had to be convinced as well. We often miss that because we tend to read the Thomas story with what comes before it in John – and John doesn’t report any doubts among the disciples at the first encounter. That comes from Luke, and we often don’t connect Thomas with the Luke story, but it must be the same story. In both it’s the night of the resurrection and the disciples are gathered together and Jesus appears to them. It has to be the same story simply told from two different perspectives. Luke tells us of the doubts of the group but doesn’t mention Thomas. John tells us about Thomas but doesn’t mention the doubts of the group. It’s kind of like two witnesses to the same events nevertheless focusing on different details and missing other details. John does include the detail about Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit on to his disciples. The idea of the Holy Spirit being “breathed” on to the disciples is important imagery, and it fits the Greek word for Spirit, which is “pneuma” – meaning breath or wind; things that are invisible but that we feel and that can impact us. If someone blows on you or if the wind blows on you, you do notice it. I dealt with the image in a sermon a couple of Sundays ago, but thinking of it as I put this passage into tension with Luke’s version of the same events, I wonder if this is not John’s version of the doubts of the group of disciples being overcome – Jesus breathes the Spirit into them; fills them; empowers them; convinces them. I’m not sure about that, but it’s possible.

And now we can move to some thoughts about “Doubting Thomas.” Of all Jesus’ resurrection appearances, “Doubting Thomas” is probably the most famous. “Doubting Thomas” has entered the vernacular. If you don’t believe something that seems clear you’re called a “Doubting Thomas.” I wonder about the image we get of Thomas from the way we usually think of the passage. We tend to have a negative view of Thomas because he doubted – and yet, when we take this passage in the context of Luke’s description of the same night, we discover that Thomas wasn’t alone in his doubts – he just wasn’t there when Jesus ate the fish! Combining Luke’s version of the story with John’s perhaps tells us something about doubt – maybe doubt is inevitable in a life of faith; maybe it’s even necessary to a life of faith. Years ago the theologian Paul Tillich wrote that “doubt is not the opposite of faith, it is one element of faith.” More recently, the novelist Anne Lamott whose books often deal with Christian themes, wrote that “the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty.” I’ve seen people suggest that if you’re absolutely “certain” about something then you have no faith because you don’t need faith – and if you’re “certain” about God then you’ve essentially turned God into your slave and taken away God’s freedom (in your own life) to be “I am what I am.” Doubt pushes us to constantly engage with the God who is “I am what I am” rather than to assume we know everything about that God. So, although Thomas is often perceived in a negative sort of way, I wonder if there isn’t a different way of looking at him – as one who legitimately doubts and questions what others take for granted and whose doubts and questions actually in the end lead him to a deeper faith. Thinking about the different accounts, the other disciples apparently needed to see Jesus eat a piece of fish before they could believe it was really him; Thomas asks to touch Jesus’ wounds – but according to the story in the end he doesn’t need to. Jesus showed his wounds to Thomas, and invited him to touch them, but in the end, Thomas didn’t. The offer to touch the wounds and the sight of them were impact enough, and Thomas simply exclaims without ever touching them “My Lord and my God!” Jesus response to that is to say “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Keep in mind when John’s Gospel was written. It’s very late. The disciples John is describing are probably dead by now; most of those who actually experienced Jesus either before or after the resurrection are probably dead by now. There’s a whole generation of believers who believe even though they’ve never seen Jesus. In the earliest Christian community there had been a serious belief that the “end times” (as we call them) were upon them; that Jesus would be returning soon. That this generation was dying off must have been causing some confusion and concern among newer Christians, and John seems to be offering encouragement here to his own audience – to these Christians who existed at the time the Gospel was written and who would come to faith after – even up to our time. We have not seen and yet we believe. We are as blessed as those who walked, talked and ate with Jesus.

Verses 30 & 31 end the passage: “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” That seems like the end of the Gospel, so it’s a bit of a surprise that we then immediately get confronted with Chapter 21 – which we’ll look at next week. But the way Chapter 20 ends probably tells us that Chapter 21 was an edit; a later addition to the Gospel.