“Peace be with you. As the father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he said this, he breathed upon them and said to them: “Receive the Holy Spirit…”…Thomas, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. When the disciples said: ‘We have seen the Lord’, Thomas answered: ‘Unless I see the holes that the nails made in his hands…and unless I can put my hand into his side, I refuse to believe.’ ” John 20: 19-31
This gospel-reading for this Second Sunday of Easter gives us more than enough to digest. To begin with, it is the conclusion of the Gospel John wrote. Chapter 21 is rightly labelled the appendix or epilogue, for it was written by somebody else and added on to what John the Evangelist wrote. The principal challenge of today’s gospel is that it consists of two discrete stories, both of which require close attention.
Our reading opens with an account of Jesus’ first post-resurrection appearance to the gathered disciples. John described them as locked away in fear of becoming the next victims of the Jews who had murdered Jesus. In John, words are not wasted, and details are of vital importance. John noted that Jesus turned up in the tightly locked room “on the evening of the first day of the week”. His chronology echoes the Hebrew way of marking the start of a new week, as it was calculated in the creation story at the start of the Book of Genesis: “God said: ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. God saw that light was good, and God divided light from darkness. God called light ‘day’, and darkness God called ‘night’. Evening came and morning came: the first day.” (Genesis 1: 3-5) The Hebrew people considered that a new day began at sunset. From this, we can conclude that in John’s mind, the day of Jesus’ resurrection was the very first day of a new creation. Through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the world and all its people had been recreated anew. Of particular interest for us is the fact that our liturgical calendar still calculates the Saturday Vigil celebration of Eucharist as marking the start of the new week.
John went on to highlight that the purpose of Jesus’ visitation was not only to give the disciples hope and joy and to free them from the fear which bound them, but to both invite and direct them to continue the very same mission that God had entrusted to him. And the key word that the Risen Jesus used was ‘forgiveness’ – the word he repeatedly used whenever he cured people from whatever held them bound or disabled – “Go now, your sins are forgiven…”. And isn’t it true that, whenever we forgive and are forgiven, we come to be at peace within ourselves and with others and more unified with one another? The more the people of our world reach out in forgiveness and reconciliation to one another, the more successful will they be at creating genuine and lasting peace. The essence of living in imitation of Jesus is to imitate the mission entrusted to him by God – to be, like him, agents of peace and reconciliation.
The second part of today’s gospel-reading puts the focus on Thomas to whom John referred as having the nick name of “the Twin”. John noted that he was known as “the Twin” back in Chapter 11 of his Gospel when Thomas rashly urged his companions to humour Jesus by going with him to die with Lazarus: “Then Thomas – known as the Twin- said to the other disciples: ‘Let us go, too, and die with him’ (John 11: 16). John called Thomas “the Twin” a second time in today’s gospel-reading, but this time to point out that this man is the twin to every one of us.
To begin with, we have to understand that the name Thomas comes from Aramaic and means “twin”. The nick name Didymus, which John the Evangelist attributed to Thomas, is Greek for “twin”. When Thomas was told that the women had reported that the Risen Jesus had appeared to them, he was not prepared to accept their testimony or the testimony of anyone else. He wanted direct evidence himself. And in today’s gospel-reading, Thomas expressed his expectations very graphically by stating that he wanted to touch the scars he expected to see on Jesus’ resurrected body. However, when Jesus appeared again, this time right in front of Thomas, John makes no mention of Thomas putting his demands into action.
In that context, we have to recall what the Risen Jesus had said to Mary Magdalen when he appeared to her and urged her to stop clinging to him. (See John 20:17: “Don’t cling to me, for I have nor yet ascended to the Father.”) Jesus was asserting that his transcended body was different from the body he had when he walked the earth.
When Thomas encountered the Risen Jesus, he (Thomas) was so swept away by Jesus’ greeting of peace and love that he hardly heard his invitation to touch his scars. So overwhelmed was he by that experience that all Thomas could say were words that identified Jesus for who he really is: “My Lord and my God!”. There could not have been a better end to John’s Gospel than that.
But there is one remaining sentence. In responding to Thomas, Jesus answered: “You believe because you can see me. Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20: 29). That’s where we fit in as twins of Thomas. We have not seen the Risen Jesus, but to us he offers peace and entrusts us to take his peace to our world. Therein lies our share in the mission entrusted to him by God, the mission which the Risen Jesus, in turn, entrusts to us. Blessed are we whenever we put that mission into action, when we trust that the Spirit of God will empower us to be instruments of God’s peace to our world. It is then that we are Thomas’ twins in action.