Christ versus the scaremongers
by Julian Mann, TCW:
WHEN Jesus’s first followers went into lockdown on the evening of the first Easter Sunday, the Lord did the very opposite of subjecting them to a campaign of fear.
The Book of Common Prayer’s Gospel reading for today, the first Sunday after Easter, describes Jesus’s disciples hiding in a locked room for fear of the 1st century Jewish religious leaders who had handed him over to the political power of the Romans to be crucified:
‘Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord.
‘Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained’ (John 20v19-23, King James Version).
The Apostle John, who was in the room, witnessed and experienced Jesus’s transformation of his disciples’ fear into joy with the visible physical evidence of his resurrection from the dead. When he showed them his hands through which Roman soldiers had driven the nails that had impaled him to the cross and his side into which a soldier had thrust a spear causing a flow of blood and water from Jesus’s body (John 19v34), the disciples knew that the Lord had risen.
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