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When God Breaks In

John 20:1-18

April 12, 2026

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The Rev. Norman Seli is a pastor in Toronto, Ontario. He once described an interesting sight he would watch from his window in these terms:  “Around the corner from my house we have a day care center. They are responsible for one of the true signs of spring:  Now that the snow has abated, the children go out for walks. About 12 to 16 of them at a time, all holding onto a special ropes, with little grips on either side of the length. The children grab hold and out they come for their daily walk... all in pairs. We call them the ‘Baby Chain Gang.’

 

“I’m not sure what happens if you let go of the rope. I imagine that you don’t get to go on the next walk.... Whatever the inducement, these children hold on to the rope for dear life. Have you ever felt like that? Hanging on for dear life?” 

 

Isn’t that more or less what we see in the disciples at the beginning of our gospel lesson today? It is only a few days after Jesus’ crucifixion and they are still reeling emotionally in spite of the early reports they’ve heard about the resurrection. 

 

Those stories seemed to be far too good to be true, so they clung tightly to each other, not really knowing what else to do. When we read the gospels, we see how many times Jesus tried to prepare the disciples for his coming death. And each of those times was followed by a promise of a resurrection. Jesus’ advanced preparation of the disciples seems as clear to us as a cloudless summer day.

 

But one of the consist themes of the New Testament is how the disciples simply couldn’t wrap their minds around either part of Jesus’ prophecy. They thought that surely the Messiah couldn’t be put to death, so the idea of a resurrection probably didn’t even make it to the level of their conscious memories.

 

Jesus’ arrest was enough to blow away all their preconceptions about who Jesus was and what the Messiah would do. In spite of Jesus’ repeated warnings, his execution — when it actually happened — was all too devastatingly real. 

 

As a result, each of the 12 disciples in his own way was shattered, as were all of his other followers like Mary Magdalene and Joanna. However, mere days later, Jesus suddenly appears in the midst of the disciples, even though they were cowering inside a locked room with the shades pulled down and rags stuffed into every crack where light might threaten to shine through.

 

Surely if the resurrected Jesus could do that, the disciples had every reason to be afraid. Each of them had thoroughly failed him in his hour of need. 

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I bet they would have been barely able to look him in the eye if he had walked into the room in the usual way. But since he miraculously materialized in a locked room, they had to be worried that he might respond like some kind of supernatural Rambo. Instead, he offers them free and unqualified forgiveness.

 

To quote Rev. Don Hoffman, “It’s amazing! Jesus is always surrounded by anxious people, and he never seems to get anxious himself. […] Jesus just stands there calmly, like he’s teaching cucumbers how to be cool. ‘Peace be with you. [...] No fear. Just peace.’” 

 

Then, Jesus does something that is consciously modeled after a part of the creation story in Genesis. There, at the beginning of all things, God forms a person out of the soil, kneels down and breathes his own spirit into it so that it has life and has a spark of God within it. 

 

Here, the resurrected Jesus breathes his spirit onto the disciples so that they will always have a portion of his spirit within them. Understanding that is essential to understanding what Jesus does next, when he says, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

 

This is one of the most wildly misunderstood sayings in all the sad and sordid history of biblical misinterpretation. At various times in history, the church has used this passage to claim the authority to extend or refuse forgiveness. Eventually that assertion led to that explosion within the church we know as the Protestant Reformation.

 

Jesus’ words sound as if he is offering his followers a grant of royal authority. It seems as if he is saying, “I’m giving you the right to judge which sins to forgive and which to punish.” But that’s not what’s really happening here.

 

Jesus isn’t transferring a privilege; instead, he’s sending the disciples out on a mission. In essence, he’s saying, “You have seen me forgiving people and you have experienced that forgiveness for yourselves. Receive my spirit of forgiveness deep into your souls and then go out and share that spirit with the world. For if you do not share forgiveness, no one else will.”

 

When we just can’t bring ourselves to extend forgiveness — the effects of those sins will continue to haunt us and perhaps others, even though we may have been the ones who were sinned against. Jesus is attempting to offer us an escape hatch and, more than that, he’s attempting to offer us the opportunity to help in the task of remaking the world in the image of grace. That sounds like a wonderful thing, but in fact, it can be very hard. 

 

Let me give you an example. The Rev. Bruce Prewer has a friend named Allan, who was touring England on his own. His favorite activity was to visit small village churches, which he described as being “steeped in generations of the joy and sorrow of ordinary Christians.” One of the churches he visited was empty except for one man, who was kneeling and weeping in the back of the sanctuary. 

 

When the man let out a heavy sigh, Allan put his hand gently on the man’s shoulder and said:  “My friend, you seem to be doing it tough. Can I be of any assistance?” To which the stranger, recognizing genuine compassion, blurted out his story. 

 

Ten years earlier when he was in his late teens, he had committed a crime, was arrested, tried and sentenced. He had been free for nine months. But he still fell terribly ashamed and came (not on Sunday with others) but alone during each week, to pray for the Lord’s help.

 

Allan replied:  “But God forgives you. Forgives you utterly. You know that, don’t you? You don’t need to pray alone, you should be here on Sunday with other Christians.” The stranger commenced to sob again, and then whispered:  “Yes, I know God forgives me, but the people in my church and village do not. Until they do, I am trapped with a feeling of ongoing disgrace. I cannot face them on Sunday. That is why I come here alone to pray during the week.” That’s what Jesus means when he says that if we forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven, but if we don’t they aren’t. 

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Rev. Prewer ends that story by saying, “This brings me to a salient point:  when we lock ourselves into unforgiveness, ungrace as I like to call it, we have indeed manacled ourselves. Ungrace makes us the prisoners, as well as those we whom refuse to forgive. Ungrace is a fearful bondage. It takes the zest out of life and creates sourness, it chains us to the past, it poisons the springs of spontaneous joy within us. There are none so [half alive] as those who are trapped in ungrace.” However, Jesus’ spirit gives us the power to extend that life-giving grace and transform even dire circumstances. 

 

In fact, Jesus’ spirit blows the hinges off the disciples’ locked door and sends them out into the world to transform it into God’s image. Oh, I know there are a few steps they have to go through before that happens. Jesus has to meet first with our stunt double Thomas, who had somehow missed that initial resurrection party, so Jesus can answer his doubts.

 

Then the Holy Spirit has to come onto all the disciples on Pentecost. But the tone has been set, the roller blinds have been sprung up and the windows and doors flung open. Jesus blows the disciples out of their fearful, huddled crouches and into the world like a child blowing on dandelion seeds, causing them to float gently on the breeze. But their impact would be far more powerful than that.

 

Don Hoffman explains that phenomenon in an interesting way. He says, “Locked doors and high anxiety produce disunity. We even begin to distrust the people we’re locked in with. Or the locked-out Thomases distrust the cautious insiders. Being scattered to the four winds produces unity. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I’ve seen it happen. Jesus wants to hold us together by scattering us.

 

“So Jesus tells us the church can’t have any insiders. He unlocks the door and kicks us all out. ‘Go play in the street. Get to know the other kids. Just as the Father sent me, so I am sending you. With my breath tickling your ears. With my peace surrounding your life. With my unity holding you together, no matter how different you are. I am sending you. 

 

“‘Leave your anxieties behind. Be the church. Be light and salt to the world. Be united. Forgive sins. Become outsiders. Speak with my voice. Carry the Spirit!’”

 

The act of building a world based on forgiveness and grace sounds hopelessly idealistic on the face of it. However, it turns out to be quite practical and pragmatic. God has designed us humans beings in such a way that we are hard-wired for grace even when it may not feel that way to us. And Jesus has charged us — along with those first disciples — to use that gift to share his spirit of grace. 

 

Joe Parrish puts it this way, “[…] we have to change the world for the better, otherwise it will continue to change for the worse. If we see injustice, we need to act to remedy injustice and create justice. If we see the weak being taken advantage of, then we have to speak on their behalf. If we find the world is seeking to exclude the last, the least, and the lost, then it becomes our responsibility as followers of Jesus Christ to include the last, the least, and the lost, and bring them to an experience of the kingdom of God as God’s Son saw it. If there are none to speak for righteousness, then we must be the ones to both speak for righteousness and live it ourselves.”

 

As disciples of Jesus, we are called to follow his lead in everything, including the forgiveness he extended to his executioners as he was dying on the cross. So we are required to extend compassion and love to wrongdoers, even when we ourselves are those wrongdoers. 

 

The act of extending grace has a way of mesmerizing onlookers because it tugs at our souls and opens us up to a vision of a world where hatred and violence are met with love and mercy. That’s something which is, at times, doesn’t seem humanly possible, but that’s why Jesus gave us the gift of the Holy Spirit to do this difficult task. With God’s help, all things are possible. Amen. 

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Jim McCrea

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