Throughout John, Jesus has been talking about things of heaven and of the Spirit. He tells Nicodemus that to see the Kingdom of God a person must be born again, which is a complete (and painful) transformation of the senses and heart. Heaven is where the Father’s perfect will is done, and we pray that it may also be done on earth.
Heaven is hard to depict in a painting. The cliched approach is to copy the sky blue, fluffy clouds, and golden sun of the heavens above. To me, a closer image of heaven is the peaceful sanctuary inside a cathedral, where sunlight from heaven illuminates the darkness and paints the stone with colors. But these are just old sepia photos taking one angle of a 3D technicolor reality. When heaven comes to earth in the resurrected body of Jesus, things get much more interesting, and weirder.
Now that Jesus at the cross has sealed together heaven and earth, his body (offered as a living offering) is transformed. Jesus interacts with the things of earth – he is no ghost – yet his transformed body is driven by a spirit-driven, heavenly life. This physical (or metaphysical) change is unprecedented, so that Jesus is often recognized only partially, and only when he wants. The will of the Father is done in heaven, and in the resurrected body of Christ, the will of the Son is done on earth.
“Something has been altered, decisively,” N.T. Wright says. “Something has been achieved. … He comes and goes as though he belongs both in our world and in a different world, one which intersects with ours at various points but doesn’t use the same geography.” This other heavenly reality is not less solid than ours, but MORE, like C.S. Lewis depicted heaven in The Great Divorce. The power that runs this heavenly reality is not an alien power but the One that made both heaven and earth. The alien power that distorted and alienated the world from God was OURS, the power given to us, used wrongly.
The Hebrew prophets disclosed this other side of reality with similar interesting and weird images. Isaiah saw the heavenly throne room filled with the train of the Lord’s robe. Ezekiel saw glowing, spinning wheels over the Chebar Canal in Babylon. Jesus is different, not less solid but more. He showed us this reality of heaven in the same body that was wounded and scarred for us. He was earthly enough to be overlooked, but heavenly enough to be constantly surprising, never quite what you expected. In Karl Barth’s words, paraphrased by Katherine Sonderegger, Jesus showed us “the reality of the Other Side in the language and terms of the near side,” with “a concrete otherness.”
When Jesus appears to the disciples, the first message he brings from the Other Side is “Shalom,” “Peace.” I translate it because he says it twice. The last time any of the disciples had seen Jesus, they had either scattered from him or denied him, leaving him alone. In John 16:33 Jesus said that even when left alone, he is not alone, which is his last word for the disciples before his closing prayer. His first word upon his return speaks forgiveness before they can react. It is the very definition of a free gift. The peace of the Other Side is given before we ask.
Then Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, I also send you.” (20:21 DBH) He’s saying that these 10 disciples are sent into the world as Israel renewed, with the same mission of hope for the nations. Jesus is drawing the disciples into the love between the Father and Son, so that they somehow participate in the complex interchanges of the Trinity. He prayed for this in John 17:21-26, and now that prayer is answered with a resounding “YES.”
The disciples are also sent into the world as Rome renewed. Jesus gives them the power to retain or forgive sins, which seems weird at first. But sins have a legal or judicial angle to them, and a judge would bind or loose a person when declaring innocent or guilty. Jesus is saying the disciples will act as judges, accomplishing two actions parallel to Pilate’s stated power to release or to crucify (John 19:10). Jesus is giving the disciples a higher power, to forgive or retain. And if the disciples are like their Heavenly Father, they will forgive a multitude of sins.
But how are these 10 ordinary people going to do this work, the work of both New Israel and New Rome? To answer this, Jesus does something weird – he breathes on them and says “Receive Holy Spirit.”
The Greek verb “breathed” is the exact same verb used in Genesis 2:7 at the creation of Adam, when YHWH “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” (KJV) This is the “new creation” Paul spoke of in 2 Corinthians 5:17.
And in “Holy Spirit,” once again, there’s that “pneuma” word, spirit/breath/wind all at once. “Pneuma” is in the center of “God-breathed” in 2 Timothy 3:16, the word “theo-pneu-stos,” also translated as “inspired by God.” Inspiration is a “pneumatic” event, an in-spirit-ation.
Notice that the resurrected body of Jesus can still breathe air! (In Luke he eats, too.) This physical breath, its earthly atoms striking the disciples, and the spoken word, its heavenly syllables conveying eternal meaning, gave the disciples what the Good Father gives to those who ask. (Luke 11:13)
The same lips that carried that breath/wind/spirit also spoke John 8:12: “I am the Light of the World.” These words are inspiration and illumination, which brings us back to my original image for heaven, a darkened cathedral filled with mystery and the colors of light.
Katherine Sonderegger sees light illuminating all of John’s words, in unexpected directions: “The whole of John’s Gospel shimmers with it, a play of light right on the surface: always Jesus appears to us in this Gospel as living and speaking at what we must call an odd angle to the scene at hand.” The light is Otherness, from outside, from heaven, but it is also something we can understand. God speaks to us through it.
Jesus’s resurrection is the first of many to come. His followers’ bodies will be like His, spirit-driven or “pneumatically” powered as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15. G.K. Chesterton spoke of the resurrection as an act of illumination as well as inspiration. He wrote, when his characters looked at a sunrise, that “All the colours were transparent. It seemed like a triumphant prophecy of some perfect world where everything being innocent will be intelligible; a world where even our bodies, so to speak, may be as of burning glass. Such a world is faintly though fiercely figured in the coloured windows of Christian architecture.”
If the resurrection is like the illumination of stained glass, then each of us has a distinct part, each is a pane of glass set in the rose window of God’s new creation, and each is illumined by the same light. God meets each of us in a different way, because each of us is a uniquely created and beloved child of His. The color you give, the voice you speak with, is uniquely placed in a context that depends on the other colors nearby.
Four beloved children of God wrote the four gospels, each of which shines with its own colors. John has the darkest and the brightest colors side by side. And within John’s gospel, the individual characters shine with their own bright colors. At the end of chapter 20, John shows how Jesus illumines Thomas specifically and individually, setting Thomas in the right place.
Thomas shines darkly at first. In John 11:16, on the road to Lazarus, Thomas is the one who said “Let us go as well, that we may die with him.” In John 14:5, Thomas complains that he doesn’t know the way, and Jesus replies, “I am the Way.” Then, Thomas withdraws from the other disciples, and misses Jesus’s Sunday evening appearance. Then he doesn’t believe his friends’ testimony and places a high bar on his own belief. He won’t even trust his eyes. Thomas will only believe if he can touch with his hands.
Yet, for all his doubt, Thomas continues to associate with the other 10 disciples. And that is enough to lead to revelation. After eight long days, Jesus appears and greets them a third time, “Shalom.” (20:26) Jesus offers himself to Thomas’s touch, but the text doesn’t say if Thomas follows through. Instead, Thomas answers with the highest theology in the gospel of John: “My Lord and my God!” Thomas is the first of many to directly call Jesus God.
Jesus responds with a Beatitude. You may be familiar with the Beatitudes from Matthew’s version, but John has only two. John’s first beatitude was spoken after Jesus washed feet and is about doing: “If you know these things, how blessed you are if you do them.” (13:17) John’s second beatitude was spoken to Thomas and is about seeing: “Blessed are those who do not see and who have faith.” (20:28)
Jesus presents himself to Thomas in all his concrete otherness, and Thomas proclaims Him Lord and God. But what about us? Like Thomas before that appearance, what we have to go on now is the word of others, and sense in each heart that deep calls to deep. Go ahead, set a high bar. But keep looking.
Suddenly, the Lord will appear like lightning — no one knows the day or the hour. May the Light of the World illuminate the darkest part of your heart, like he did Thomas, and may he who holds all things give you the good gifts for which you ask. The days will lengthen, imperceptibly, as you wait.
QUOTE: N.T.Wright, John for Everyone, Part Two (WJK Books), p. 145, 153.
Katherine Sonderegger Systematic Theology Volume 1, Part IV: The Omniscient One. §7a.
IMAGE: SUN RAYS PASSING THROUGH STAINED GLASS WINDOW by tobler green screen (YouTube)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mCz5R8DhMM
