Study Format:
1. What did you hear Jesus offering to you? To us? To the world?
2. What kind of resistance to Jesus did you hear?
3. What will you have to learn to resist or renounce in order to receive what Jesus is offering?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• In v. 19, the gathered group is referred to as “the disciples” (mathetai). Unlike the synoptic Gospels closed notion of “the Twelve” (the Eleven, at this point, the Twelve minus Judas), John’s Gospel has a much more open-ended concept of discipleship. This gathering probably includes Jesus’ core group, but there is no reason to limit it to them. The writer uses the disciples as a stand-in for the faith community in general, not an indicator of apostolic leadership.
• V. 19 also links this resurrection appearance of Jesus with the previous one of Mary in the garden, by starting “When it was evening on that day.” This cues us in to while the disciples have heard Mary’s report, they have not comprehended the meaning of her words.
• The doors were locked “for fear of the Jews.” Always important to remember that Jesus and all the disciples are Jewish, so it is not a blanket “the Jews” the disciples feared. In the context of the story, there were certainly plenty of people the disciples were afraid of, the Roman occupiers, Pilate, or the Jewish leadership who collaborated with Rome for Jesus’ crucifixion. In the context of the audience for whom the Gospel was written, the writer of John’s Gospel wanted to help his community see in the disciples their own experience of conflict with the local Jewish authorities.
• In v. 19, Jesus’ initial greeting, “Peace be with you,” has two meanings. First, this is a traditional greeting of the time (cf. Rom 1:7; 1 Cor 1:3; 2 Cor 1:3; Gal 1:3). It also fulfills Jesus’ promise to his disciples during the Farewell Discourse, to give them his peace (14:27a, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”)
• In v. 20, Jesus showed the disciples the marks of his crucifixion in his hands and his side. The resurrected Jesus is still the crucified one.
• The disciples’ joy (v. 20b, “Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord”) is a fulfillment of another of Jesus’ promises in the Farewell Discourse (16:20, 22, “Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will mourn and have pain, but your pain will turn into joy…So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”)
• In v. 22, when Jesus breathed on the disciples, the word for breath, emphysao is only found here and nowhere else in the New Testament. In Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures (like the ones John’s community would have read) emphysao is the word used in Genesis when God breathed over the waters at creation and in Ezekiel when God breathed life into dry bones. Jesus breathing on them is a sign of the new life they now have through the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit as the breath that sustains life.
• V. 23 about forgiving and retaining sins is both complex to interpret and uses unusual language for the Fourth Gospel. This is the only usage of the verbs “to forgive” (aphiemi) and “to retain” (krateo). Theories on the origin and purpose of this verse abounds. What is important to remember is that the disciples in John’s Gospel are not a fixed group of twelve who become the apostolic leadership of the church. Rather the disciples are a stand-in for the whole Christian community. So this is not a directive for the role of clergy in forgiving and retaining sins, but forgiveness of sins is to be the work of the whole community. This communal work comes from the gift of the Holy Spirit and the command by Jesus that we are sent as he was sent by the Father. Also, in John’s Gospel, sin is not a moral or behavioral problem, like it is in the synoptic Gospels, rather sin is a theological failing. Sin in John’s Gospel is not doing or saying the wrong thing, sin is being blind to the revelation of God in Jesus (cf. John 9 and the man born blind, the Pharisees thought the sin in the story was Jesus healing on the Sabbath, but Jesus revealed that the true sin was the Pharisees not recognizing the healing of the man born blind as a revelation of God). So the work the community is being sent out to do is to continue revealing God to the world.
• In v. 24-29, Thomas acts as a parallel of the disciples’ earlier experience. Just as Mary said, “I have seen the Lord,” the disciples said, “We have seen the Lord.” Thomas asked for the same thing Jesus had given the other disciples when he “showed them his hands and his side” (v. 20).
• The word “doubt” is always associated with this story, but it’s really a bad translation. V. 27b “do not doubt but believe.” The words here are apistos and pistos, the opposite of the same word. So a better translation is “Do not be unbelieving but be believing.” Doubt, skepticism, is not the opposite of belief, unbelief is the opposite of belief. The disciples doubted until Jesus showed them his hands and his side.
• Jesus met the demands Thomas set for belief (“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.”) There is no mention of Thomas actually reaching out and physically touching Jesus. The move for Thomas from unbelief to belief was not touching Jesus, but Jesus offering himself to Thomas. Jesus’ response to Thomas (“Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”) has been read by some scholars as shaming Thomas, but that doesn’t make sense. Jesus was giving Thomas what he needed for faith, as Jesus had done so many other times in the Gospel (4:10-26, conversation with the woman at the well; 5:6-9, healing the sick man at the pool of Beth-zatha; 9:35-38, talking to the man born blind after the Pharisees drove the man out; 11:1-42, Martha and Mary after the death of their brother).
• “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (v. 29) is about expanding the community of believers beyond those who were physically present to see Jesus. In John’s Gospel seeing has been the first step to believing (cf. 1:46b “Philip said to [Nathanael], ‘Come and see.’”). This is a promise to future generations that “seeing” Jesus is not restricted to physical sight (cf. John 9, where the man born blind “saw” and the seeing Pharisees could not “see”).
• The point of how belief comes to later generations is drilled in further in v. 30-31. V. 31 “that you may come to believe” (or “continue to believe” in the NIV translation. Manuscripts are divided if pisteuo is in the aorist subjunctive “come to believe” or the present subjunctive “continue to believe”). The Gospel is a document for the purpose of revealing Jesus which brings and sustains belief.
Why we call the Second Sunday of Easter “Low Sunday”
It is NOT because attendance is low on the Sunday after Easter (in fact, at Trinity we had a lot of people traveling on Easter this year, so our attendance may well be higher this Sunday than it was on Easter). It is called Low Sunday to distinguish it from the pomp and circumstance of Easter Sunday, sometimes called High Sunday. Another theory is it adopted from Close Sunday, marking the close of Easter week. Low Sunday is the end of what is called the Octave of Easter, the eight day period running from Easter Sunday through the following Sunday. In the ancient church, and still in some very traditional Catholic congregations, people baptized at the Easter Vigil would wear white robes on Easter (High Sunday) and then would wear them for the last time on Low Sunday, before taking them off and joining the congregation. Another theory is the term Low Sunday derived from Laud Sunday, laud being the Latin word for “praise.” So, there you go, Low Sunday, having nothing to do with attendance.
Works Sourced:
O’Day, Gail. “The Gospel of John.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
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