It’s the second week of the Easter season in the lectionary calendar. On Easter Sunday we embarked on the Johannine version of the resurrection narrative, starting with Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the risen Jesus. He appears to the rest of his disciples, then returns again when Thomas joins the group. In the next chapter, the lectionary reading relays yet another time Jesus appears to his disciples, this time as they were out catching fish—in a retreat to their known ways of life.

Jesus’ resurrection appearances are frequent.

Jesus, true to his own teachings, abides with the community in the aftermath of the cross.

For those who felt a cognitive dissonance amid the triumphant celebrations of Easter, you are not alone. Because for some the claims of Easter and reality seem so distant, I am glad for what these post-resurrection passages offer. And for some of us, with the privilege of being comfortable with the neat resolution that the resurrection has come to perform, pausing here with today’s text can be important in these times of political turmoil, war, suffering, uncertainty, and grief.

The disciples, even with Mary’s first Easter sermon witnessing to a sighting of their Lord, huddled behind locked doors, their bodies tense, afraid.

The text says they were afraid of the Jews. It is worth noting here that the intra-Jewish conflicts between an originally Jewish Johannine community which produced this gospel, was taken both out of context and proportion by later Gentile Christians and others in power. The trauma of a small sect would be weaponized to scapegoat an entire religion, to result in some of the worst horrors of history, ultimately including the Holocaust.

So we will sidestep the Johannine community’s wording here, the Jews. And we will understand that these Jewish disciples of the publicly executed Jew, Jesus, like too many communities before and after, were intimately aware of the violence that powerful elites mete out in the name of God.

And as such, fear gripped their bodies, as they tried to repress the raw and jarring memories of their world falling apart. Their friend, teacher, was executed most brutality. They witnessed his public shaming, physical torture and social debasement.

Fear. Grief. Shame. Anger. Anger. Grief. Fear. Shame.

Peace be with you. Hands open, standing among them, a familiar voice, a familiar sight. And a second time, Peace be with you.

Amid the gut-wrenching riptide, Jesus gives them directions to the shoreline. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. An orientation, purpose, a focal point. Who knows how he got there, and what the science was, but what is important is that he breathed on them. A gift.

Receive the Holy Spirit. And power. To liberate people from chokeholds, and the freedom to let people choose for themselves.

When all this happened, Thomas, one of the twelve disciples, was not there.

We may recall Thomas from earlier in the gospel, chapter 11, when he declared, “Let us also go, that we may die with him,” when it was clear that Jesus returning to Judea to raise up Lazarus who would be a gateway to more scrutiny by the powerful. Thomas the outspoken seeker. At the last supper in chapter 14, when Jesus instructs the disciples that he is going ahead and prepare a place for them, Thomas responds, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

This Thomas is sure of what he saw. No false hope for him. Even when the disciples gather to tell him that they have seen the Lord, Thomas insists. Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and put my hand in his side, I will not believe. Thomas saw what he saw.

A week later, Jesus appears again, this time, when Thomas has joined the group. A week later, the disciples are in the same state with Thomas. We can infer because again, the doors were shut, and they were in the house.

And again, Jesus came. Stood among them, saying, “Peace be with you.”

Jesus attends to Thomas. Put your finger here, see my hands. Reach out your hand, put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.

A new light dawns on Thomas. My Lord and my God!
Interpretations of Jesus’ response to Thomas’s exclamation rendered Thomas a skeptic, a doubter, and even an example of an unfaithful disciple.

Jesus says, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Yet I invite us to reconsider this scene through a lens that takes the trauma of this community seriously. How can Thomas help us think about the reality of differing responses in the aftermath of trauma?

Trauma has become a familiar term for many. Although it has come to refer to a breadth of various events at various scales, at the core it is an overwhelming experience of violence that produces ongoing effects in the present. In individuals trauma can rewire and override physical functioning so that reactions to triggers may blur a sense of time. The violence persists beyond a single moment.

A risen Jesus who bears the wounds of trauma returns to his friends. He approaches in peace. Three times, and we know the symbolism of three—a completeness, sufficiency— three times Jesus envelops community in peace.

He validates a traumatized Thomas, and this disciple’s needs for surviving. Thomas indicated a need to process the reality of these new developments through physical touch. If Thomas can access a sense of safety, a reconnection, and it requires embodied methods to re-establish trust, well, Jesus came back to do that. In the aftermath of trauma, when resurrection is abstract and absurd, Jesus shows up and abides. Sometimes, peculiarly enough, the vine finds and reattaches itself to the fallen branches.

Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

Jesus also leaves the door open for others who may heal and receive the presence of God in different ways, without touch.

When the bottom dropped out, Jesus still abides. In the vacuum of locked doors. Jesus reminds the disciples of who they were, a sent community, a called community, and a sent and called community with power.

This is different from a linear development, a linear process of healing. May we focus on the fits and starts, the returning, and the returning, the patient, steady, peaceful, returning of Jesus, going from one devastated disciple to another. Like a shepherd looking for the one, Jesus greets Mary, Thomas, Peter, with a word, a touch, some food. Fits and starts, even when disciples are back where they started a week later, back behind locked doors, no questions asked, just peace. Just abiding. Just presence.

In the dread of dawn, the paralyzing evenings, the sweat of daily labor, no matter when, Jesus the vine, the shepherd, the firstborn of this strange beginning, wounds still marking his body, haunts places of death. He comes with breath. A new breath, yet another breath, and yet again a breath, for you and for me.