John 20:19-31

Easter 2 – Year B

John 20:19-31

Shifting gears from Mark and its abrupt ending with three women running away, scared and silent, we turn to John's storyline following a triumphant Jesus who was above his own crucifixion.

Rather than meeting the disciples in Galilee as per Mark, here Jesus preemptively visits ten fearful men hiding behind closed doors.

Since they didn't hear it from a messenger, as the Marys and Salome did in Mark, Jesus is his own messenger, his own heavenly host, announcing peace in a most dramatic fashion.

Even though this passage is traditionally thought of as about Doubting or Absent Thomas, we might consider it on John's terms – it is about Jesus, Peace, Forgiveness, and Sign-Stories (preludes to commissioning or putting the disciples back in the game) of real and eternal life, not the skittery, temporary picture they had been living out of (literally, living out of).

Jumping from Mark's completely incomplete story to John's neat wrap gives a moment of disorientation. Hopefully, with our corpus callosum intact, we can see both these stories and rub them together for sparks adding to our benefit rather than have them be mutually exclusive.

On a day after Sabbath, Mark roils the deep before a creating and John moves with breath over the dark and creation not only lingers but goes on again. [Here is the music that inspired this paragraph – one of my all-time favorites and so I think it is worth four-and-a-half minutes of your time.]