“…the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear…”

Today’s Gospel tells us that those who had followed Jesus had become prisoners. The disciples gathered behind locked doors on the evening of the first Easter Day are prisoners of fear and Thomas, who wasn’t present then, is a prisoner of what we would now call a very “left brain” way of thinking. He isn’t prepared to accept or to trust the testimony of others. He is only prepared to rely on the evidence of his five senses.

The disciples had good reasons to be afraid. Jesus had been executed and they believed that they, too, were wanted men and women, guilty by association with him. Prisoners of fear, they had literally locked themselves in. They had forgotten the commission that Jesus entrusted to them and they had not fully understood the news that Mary Magdalene had brought to them only that morning when she told them “I have seen the Lord.” 

The disciples were not only fearful for their lives. What they had known – the teaching of Jesus, which they had not fully understood, the realization in their midst of a new way of living, which they had admired but not always been able to emulate – all that seemed to have ended in disaster. A few years earlier they had been able to answer the call to follow Jesus, to embark on that new way of living. And now their confidence in the new order which Jesus had lived and taught had been shattered. 

But there was also, I would suggest, a third ingredient. They had let Jesus down. Peter had denied him three times. All but one of the twelve had forsaken him and fled. Only the beloved disciple had been a witness of his final hours. Alongside their fear was a burdensome sense of their own inadequacy, their guilt. A guilt so great that Mary Magdalene’s testimony that she had seen Jesus alive that morning was disturbing. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that the doors were locked not only against the hostile political and religious authorities, but also against the memory of the teacher whom they had abandoned. 

The Gospel writer has already given us one echo of the Hebrew scriptures in his account of Easter – Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus in a garden which recalls the Garden of Eden. Perhaps here he is giving us another – the disciples are in hiding, just as Adam and Eve tried to hide from God after eating the forbidden fruit. And there’s a third reminder of the book of Genesis to come. 

And then the Resurrection becomes a reality for them. Jesus appears and speaks the words of peace which heal their guilt, restore their sense of community with him and with one another and reaffirm them in their mission. The words of peace heal the guilt and heal the brokenness, and the Gospel writer makes this clear, for it is only after they are spoken that rejoicing becomes possible. 

“Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”

And the word then doesn’t just mean “that’s what happened next” but also “that’s what happened as a result.” The message of Jesus is “Nothing that has happened, nothing that you have done or failed to do has broken my relationship with you.”

This is what Easter says to us, says to our fearfulness and our sense of inadequacy for Easter is not just about the Resurrection of Jesus but also about the resurrection of us that it can bring about. And that is about much more than making us feel better in ourselves. It is not just freedom from fear and guilt, it is freedom to live in different and better way.

I hinted that today’s Gospel includes another reference to Genesis and that, of course, is the moment when Jesus breathes on the disciples and says “Receive the Holy Spirit”. And we are meant to be reminded of the story in Genesis of God breathing life into dirt and so creating Adam. Reminded, too, that life is more than biological, it is vocational. Jesus resurrected his disciples by liberating them from guilt and fear. He resurrected Thomas by liberating him from the “mind forg’d manacles” of a narrow, and deeply sceptical outlook. The Twelve were empowered for mission and the mission was to share the peace and forgiveness which they experienced in that locked room and also to share the confession of Thomas, who got to deliver the punch line of St John’s Gospel when he acknowledged Jesus as “My Lord and my God” – a message which, tradition tells us, he carried as far as India. 

And fearless is what the disciples became, as is made clear in today’s reading from Acts. The boldness and confidence of Peter and the others in the face of the tribunal which had demanded the death of Jesus is in sharp contrast with the fear that had driven them to lock themselves in. The Resurrection of Jesus and the consequent resurrection of his followers is on-going and active in a world that is fearful and defensive. 

That is a point that Pope Francis made in his final Easter homily. He was too weak to preach it himself but these words, written shortly before he died, speak eloquently to the power of the Resurrection.

“…our Easter faith, which opens us to the encounter with the risen Lord and prepares us to welcome him into our lives, is anything but a complacent settling into some sort of ‘religious reassurance.’ On the contrary, Easter spurs us to action…”