Sermon For Divine Mercy Sunday

Wounds That Open Into Life

On the evening of that first day of the week, the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked because they feared the Jews. Jesus came, stood among them, and said to them, "Peace be with you." Having said this, he showed them his hands and his side. So the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. Just as the Father has sent me, I also am sending you." After saying this, he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone's sins, they are forgiven them; if you retain anyone's sins, they are retained."

John 20:19-23

Let me begin by naming what is actually happening in that room.

The doors are locked. The disciples are not gathered in worship or in hopeful expectation. They are huddled together behind a barred door, held there by fear, by grief, by the particular shame of men who had fled when their Lord was arrested, who had watched from a distance when he died. They are not a church yet. They are a collection of frightened, guilty people who do not know what to do next.

And into that room, through that locked door, the risen Christ comes and stands among them.

He does not come with a word of rebuke. He does not begin with a list of their failures, though he knows every one of them. The first word out of his mouth is peace. Shalom. Not peace as the world gives it, as a kind of temporary absence of conflict, but the ancient Hebrew word that carries within it the fullness of wellbeing, the restoration of what was broken, the wholeness that comes when a person is rightly related to God and to one another. He says it twice in the space of three verses, and that repetition is not an accident. The evangelist wants us to feel the weight of it. Peace be with you. Peace be with you.

And then he shows them his hands and his side.

This is the center of the passage, and it is worth pausing here long enough to let it settle. The risen Lord does not appear with wounds erased. He appears with wounds transformed. The marks of the nails, the gash from the soldier's spear, they are still there. They are recognizable. Thomas, who was absent that first evening and who refused to believe the testimony of the others, says plainly that unless he sees the mark of the nails and places his finger into them, he will not believe. And when Jesus returns a week later, he invites Thomas to do exactly that. He says, "Put your finger here and look at my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Don't be faithless, but believe."

The wounds are not incidental to the resurrection. They are the proof of it. More than that, they are the grammar of it. The resurrection is not a fresh start in the sense of wiping the slate clean and pretending the cross never happened. It is the vindication of the cross. It is God the Father saying, in the most dramatic possible terms, that the death of his Son was not a defeat but an act of redemption, and that the mercy poured out there is real, and permanent, and available.

This is where the letter to the Ephesians meets us with such force. Paul writes, "But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses." Two words carry the whole of the gospel in that sentence. But God. We were dead, Paul says. Not sick, not struggling, not in need of a little moral improvement. Dead. And then but God. The mercy of God is not a response to something we did or earned or deserved. It is the prior act of a God who, as Paul says, is rich in mercy. Not merely merciful. Rich in it. Overflowing with it. Mercy that is not rationed or begrudging but lavish and free.

And the instrument of that mercy is the cross and the empty tomb together. The wounds Thomas touched were the wounds that had purchased his peace, and ours.

Now I want to be honest about something the text does not let us avoid. Thomas is often handled rather harshly in Christian preaching. He gets called Doubting Thomas as though doubt were simply a character flaw to be corrected and moved past. But look at what Jesus actually does with Thomas. He does not shame him. He does not say, you should have believed the others. He comes back, a week later, specifically for Thomas. He offers his wounds to be touched. He meets Thomas exactly where Thomas is, in his doubt, in his demand for evidence, and he says, "Don't be faithless, but believe."

The mercy of the risen Christ is not reserved for those who already have their faith perfectly assembled. It reaches into locked rooms. It reaches into doubt. It reaches into the particular grief of someone who wanted to believe but could not quite manage it on the testimony of others alone. The risen Lord is not offended by the questions of a searching heart. He is present to them.

And Thomas's response, when he encounters the risen Christ, is one of the most compressed and magnificent confessions in all of Scripture. He says, "My Lord and my God." Not merely a teacher. Not merely a prophet restored to life. Lord and God. The full weight of divine identity placed on the man standing before him with nail-marked hands. John has been building toward this confession since the first verse of his Gospel, where he wrote that the Word was God, and now here at the end, a human being looks at the risen Jesus and says it plainly. My Lord and my God.

Jesus responds with a word that reaches beyond that room and beyond that moment. He says, "Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." That is us. We are the ones Jesus is speaking about. We have not seen the wounds with our physical eyes. We have not placed our fingers in the marks of the nails. And yet here we are, gathered in his name, and he pronounces a blessing on us. Not a consolation prize for missing the original event, but a genuine beatitude, a declaration of the favor of God resting on those who come to faith through the witness of others, through the Scripture, through the preaching of the Church, through the sacraments, through the quiet work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart.

Which brings us to the mission that flows from this mercy.

Jesus says, "Just as the Father has sent me, I also am sending you." And then he breathes on them. This is a deliberate echo of the creation account in Genesis, where God breathes into the nostrils of the man he has formed from the dust and he becomes a living creature. The risen Christ breathes on his gathered, frightened disciples and something new begins. They are not merely forgiven people. They are sent people. They are people through whom the mercy of God is now to move into the world.

The authority to forgive sins, which Jesus entrusts to the disciples here, has been understood differently across the Christian traditions, and this is not the place to adjudicate those differences. But what is clear across every reading of this text is that the Church is not gathered simply for its own comfort or its own preservation. The doors that were locked in fear are meant to be opened. The peace that the risen Christ spoke into that room is meant to travel. The disciples who received the breath of the Spirit are sent, as Jesus himself was sent, into a world that does not yet know what has happened, into a world that is still operating as though death has the final word.

Paul says in Ephesians that we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do. The mercy we have received is not a private possession. It is a commission. We are made alive not only for our own sake but so that the life of Christ might be visible in us, so that the peace he spoke into that locked room might be carried by us into the rooms where fear still reigns, into the relationships where forgiveness has not yet been spoken, into the lives of people who are still, as the disciples were that first evening, behind locked doors.

This is what it means to live in the mercy of the risen Christ. It is not a sentimental feeling. It is not a vague spiritual warmth. It is the concrete, costly, daily work of people who have been met by the Lord in their own fear and guilt and doubt, and who have heard him say peace, and who now go and say it to others. Not because they have it all together. Not because their faith is without question. But because the one who bears the wounds is also the one who breathes the Spirit, and he has sent us.

Thomas came to faith through encounter. We come to faith through testimony and through the sacraments and through the gathered life of the Church. In a few moments we will come to this Table, where the risen Christ is present to us under the forms of bread and wine. We do not touch the wounds with our fingers. But we receive the body broken and the blood poured out, and we are fed by the same mercy that met Thomas in his doubt and the disciples in their fear.

And then we go. Through the doors. Into the world. Carrying peace.

The wounds of the risen Christ are not a reminder of what once was. They are the open gates of mercy, and they remain open. For the doubting. For the frightened. For the guilty. For the searching. For everyone who has not yet heard a voice say, peace be with you, and meant it with the full weight of eternity behind the words.

My Lord and my God. That confession is ours to make. And having made it, we are sent.

Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Holman Bible Publishers, 2017.

The Book of Common Prayer. Church Publishing, 1979. Especially the rites of Holy Eucharist and the Collect for the Second Sunday of Easter.

Raymond E. Brown. The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI. Anchor Bible Commentary. Doubleday, 1970.

F. F. Bruce. The Epistle to the Ephesians. Revell, 1961.

N. T. Wright. John for Everyone, Part Two. Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.