Bible Text: St John 20:19-31 | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christian Preus
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
He is risen. When He first rose from the dead and came to His disciples after His resurrection, Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Why does He breathe on them?
We know why He comes to them. He loves them. Sinners who abandoned Him, Peter who denied Him, He loves them and He wants to show them and tell them: He forgives it all and nothing is going to keep Him from them anymore.
He shows them first by walking through closed doors. I always have my catechism students attempt to do this. Walk through a closed door. The boys love to volunteer. And then I ask them, and I ask you, why is it that you can’t, but Jesus can? And the answer is because Jesus is God. And you’re not. That’s always a good thing to keep in mind when you think about Jesus. He’s God. And a good thing to keep in mind about yourself. You’re not. He can do with His body whatever He wants. If He wants to pass through closed doors to get to His disciples, He can do that. He did. He created the laws of physics. They don’t rule Him. He rules them. If He wants to pass through closed doors to get to you, He can. And He does. He comes with His body and with His blood to His Christians, and no doors or locks or physical laws, no devil or spiritual powers, not death or life, or things present or things to come, can keep Jesus from doing what He wants with His resurrected body. And He wants to give it to you.
Then, second, He shows them the power of His resurrection by speaking that word, Peace, to them. Now that word “peace” is the normal greeting for the Jews – shalom, it’s how they said “hi,” but this is no normal greeting. “Peace” takes on new meaning, bodily meaning, spiritual meaning, everlasting meaning, when the resurrected Lord speaks these words to those men. They’re afraid. Afraid of their sins (they abandoned Jesus), afraid of death, because the Jewish leaders killed Jesus and they might be next. They’re afraid, so Jesus says, “Peace.” And this is very important for us to remember. Jesus comes to sinners who are afraid – afraid of death, afraid of offending God, afraid because of their sins. It’s them precisely that Jesus comes to. Not to people who have no fears, no worries. So lay your worries out to Him and your sins and your fears, because He comes to speak Peace to you.
Then, third, He shows them His hands and His side. And again, we intuitively know why. He’s showing them the flesh and blood reason, the concrete basis, why that word, “Peace,” comes out of His mouth. There is peace between God and you because of those wounds. What can separate you from God? St. Paul asks. Your sins? Jesus bore them. The Devil? Jesus crushed his head. Death? Jesus died and now He lives and death is annihilated. That’s what those wounds show. He’s written you on His hands.
Then finally He breathes on them. Why? It seems the odd thing out. In all Jesus does that night. Why breathe on them? But it’s not. Jesus is showing them how much they are worth to Him. What is the worth of man? I remember my third grade teacher asking this question, and she actually wanted a dollar amount. What would my parents pay if they needed to? Kinda creepy, actually. My grandpa had just died and I thought I heard my mom and dad saying that grandpa had left them 50,000 dollars. So I figured that’s about what my parents would pay for me, that’s what I was worth. But that’s of course very silly. Not all the money in the world can possibly begin to measure the worth that a father and mother place on their child. And it is far greater when it comes to God.
When we talk about a man’s worth, we are talking about the worth God places on him. And that brings us back to what Jesus did, the Son of God, did, when He first created us. Genesis chapter 2, “God formed man from the ground and He breathed into him the breath of life and man became a living being.” That’s the worth of every single human being: we come from God. He breathed His Spirit into us. He formed us in our mothers wombs. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. If someone wants to stress the value of human life, what does he say? He says, we were created in God’s image. Why should we defend the lives of the unborn? They were created in God’s image. Why should we be careful to protect civilians in wartime? Because they were created in God’s image. Why should we care for the poor and the sick and the physically disabled and the mentally troubled? Because God made them in His image. That’s what we say and it’s true. What does it mean? It means God made us for Himself, to know Him, love Him, live with Him forever. That’s our value.
When God first placed that value on us, when He made man in His own image, He says those words, “And God formed man from the ground and He breathed into him the breath of life and man became a living being.”
That’s exactly the same word (in Greek), down to the letter, that we find in John 20, when Jesus breathed on His disciples. That’s why He breathed on them. He is mimicking what He did when He first gave us our worth.
Because God did make us for Himself, He did make us to love Him, He did make us to know Him, and we didn’t. The very thing that made us valuable, we lost. We were supposed to love God forever, live with Him forever, know Him perfectly, His goodness, His beauty. Death was supposed to be that evil word we never heard, sin and pain and sadness, unknown.
We participate in worthlessness when we participate in sin. We deny our worth. It separates us from God. Every selfish thought and prideful word and desperate, unbelieving feeling. All mankind fell in Adam’s fall, and that fall was away from God, away from His image, away from the worth He put on us.
So Jesus breathes on His disciples. He gives the image back. He shows them with that breath their worth. They’re worth the blood of God. They’re worth His love. They’re worth everything, because He loves them, and this IS His love, that He redeems them by His own suffering and death.
Here is the recreation. The resurrection of Jesus has cosmic consequences. It changes the relationship between God and His creation. God is not angry, not offended, not distant or separated. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” Whatever worth we lost by our sins Jesus restores and whatever consequences we should have suffered, Jesus has already taken.
That’s why Jesus breathed on His disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This wasn’t the onetime gift of the Spirit we see on Pentecost. There are no flames of fire on their heads, no speaking in different languages, no mighty rush of wind, no signs that come and then go away. Many signs Jesus did that weren’t recorded, but this one was. Because His giving of the Spirit here is permanent. It remains till He comes again. Because the power of the Spirit is in those words that Jesus died to speak, “If you forgive anyone their sins, they are forgiven.”
You know why that’s true? Why it must be true? Because when the pastor forgives you your sins, he is simply stating a reality, that is beyond me, beyond you, that is true in heaven and on earth, true before God Himself, and has been true since Jesus said, It is finished – God is reconciled. That’s written on His hands and His side. The hands that formed you in your mothers womb are pierced for you. And that’s your worth. That’s what you receive when you hear your sins forgiven, when you receive the body and blood of Jesus, you receive again the image of God, the right to know God and love Him and pray to Him and live before Him and with Him forever and ever. You receive the worth that no man and nothing can take from you.
You know God. So you can look at that mountain and say, “My God, the God who hung on a cross for me, who loves me so much that He died for me, He made that mountain, and all the beauty of all the world, for me to enjoy from His hand, and when I die, He’ll give me still more, because He loves me.” You can look death in the face and not fear, because you’ll live forever, because Christ your life is risen. You can forget about every sin you’ve ever committed, because God has, they’re gone.
That’s the worth Jesus gives you when He forgives your sins in His churchAs the Father sent Him, so He sends pastors to proclaim the power of His resurrection: your sins are forgiven.
Alleluia. Christ is risen!