Second Sunday of Easter; 7 April 2024; Easter 2B (RCL); Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1:1 – 2:2; John 20:19-31.
This passage in John’s Gospel is one of the richest and most consequential in his Gospel, and I would argue, in the New Testament. The narrative portion of John’s Gospel begins (after the Prologue) with John the Baptist seeing Jesus walk by, and declaring, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” In the OT, there is no lamb that takes away sin. That office belongs to the goat on the Great Day of Atonement, so John is inventing a new category of sacrifice here. And we see Jesus die at the exact hour that the Passover lambs are being sacrificed in the Temple court, so the evangelist ties up part of that declaration by showing Jesus as the new Passover lamb. But no mention of sin in the crucifixion narrative.
As we’ve seen elsewhere, John likes to open a parenthesis and hold us in suspense until some later point in the Gospel when he will close it. The crucifixion at the hour of sacrifice closes the parenthesis that opened with, “Behold, the Lamb of God,” but we have to wait for Easter evening to find the closing of the parenthesis that opened with “who takes away the sin of the world.”
Throughout the Gospel, the evangelist has had Jesus talk about sin, but mostly the sin of “the Jews,” i.e., the synagogue which has excommunicated John’s little community. And, we’ve been told repeatedly that their sin remains. If we understand sin in terms of defilement, as it is understood in OT books like Leviticus and Numbers (the books dealing most directly with the nature of sacrifice), then the evangelist is telling us that they remain “outside the camp.”
In chapter 12, certain Greeks who had come to worship at the festival (Passover), approached Philip and asked to see Jesus. Philip and Andrew approached Jesus and told him that the Greeks wanted to see him. Jesus replied with the non-sequitur of all non-sequiturs, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it bears much fruit.” He ends the paragraph by saying, “When I am lifted from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.”
Greeks were considered defiled (sinful), and therefore outside the limits of the community that could sacrifice and partake of the passover lamb (see Paul’s corpus for the idea that Greeks were sinful). When the high priest entered the inner sanctum of the Temple on the Great Day of Atonement he sprinkled the blood of a goat on the mercy seat, and then on the people, thereby reestablishing kinship between God and the people, and within the congregation. In chapter 6, Jesus tells his hearers that in order to have life within them, they must not only eat the flesh of the Son of Man (a reference here to the passover lamb) but also drink his blood. The OT place an absolute prohibition on blood, which was the life of the animal. All blood belonged to God and must be poured out on the altar. The evangelist here is replacing the altar with the eucharistic community.
In the passage just before the one we hear this week, Mary enters the tomb, and sees two angels seated, one where Jesus’ head had been, and one where his feet had been. These are the two cherubim over the ark of the covenant, the mercy seat of the inner sanctum. Jesus’ empty tomb has replaced the inner sanctum. And then in this passage, Jesus breathes on his disciples, and says, “Receive Holy Spirit (Breath). If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” This is the role of the high priest.
It is now up to John’s community to decide whose sins are forgivable, and who therefore can be admitted to the passover meal, the eucharistic fellowship. Will they admit those Greeks who sought to see Jesus, who came to worship at the passover festival (from which they would have been excluded by virtue of being Greek)? The evangelist doesn’t answer the question, but leaves it to us, the readers of his Gospel, to provide the answer.
Thomas was not present when Jesus gave the disciples this authority, and he refuses to believe (he does not doubt, but refuses to believe — there’s a difference) until he sees and touches the wounds of Christ. Thomas probably serves as a representative of the Gnostic or gnosticizing communities of Christians, who devalued life “in the flesh.” Around 95 CE, the Emperor Domitian was insisting on being address as dominus et deus, Lord and God. Gnosticizing tendencies in Christianity would have taught that one could cross one’s fingers behind one’s back and address the Emperor this way to avoid persecution, because true spirituality was escape from this material world.
Thomas, as John portrays him, absolutely rejects such triumphalism. The resurrected Body of Christ must still bear its wounds, and without them, he will not believe it to be Christ’s Body. And once he has seen and touched the wounds, he addresses Jesus as dominus et deus, My Lord and My God, not Domitian. To be Christian may indeed involve suffering and persecution. Greeks may have their sins forgiven and join the eucharistic community which has replaced all the elements of the Temple, but they had best know the cost if they seek Jesus.