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:
John 20:19-23
• 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.
Acts 2:1-21
• The coming of the Holy Spirit in Acts chapter 2 is an event whose place in our liturgical and theological imaginations vastly outweighs its place in scripture. This account appears only in the book of Acts, and only in verses 1-4. While the Gospel of John tells of Jesus giving the Holy Spirit, and Paul recounted the Lord appearing to 500 people (1 Cor 15:6), perhaps in the form of his “life-giving Spirit” (1 Cor 15:45), the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost is unique to Luke. Wall posits the shortness of the account is to move the reader more quickly from the coming of the Spirit to the Spirit’s effect on the community’s mission in the world, the point of Luke’s writing of the book of Acts.
• V. 1 starts, “they were all together in one place.” Pentecost is a word used by Greek-speaking Jews to describe the “Feast of Weeks” (Shavuot) a harvest festival celebrated fifty days after Passover (Exod 23:16; 34:22; Lev 23:15-21; Num 28:26; Deut 16:9-12). This also helps explain the presence of “devout Jews from every nation under heaven” (v. 5) in Jerusalem, because this was one of three festivals where Jews were expected to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
• The vivid description of the coming of the Holy Spirit, “like a violent wind” and “tongues of fire” help to build the effect of the Spirit’s power on the gathered community. The passage does not claim the Spirit is fire or wind, but that the Spirit is a perceptible force, and so too is its effect on the community.
Works Sourced:
O’Day, Gail. “The Gospel of John.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Wall, Robert W. “The Acts of the Apostles.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume X. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002.
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