1 Peter 1:3–9; John 20:19–31

So I can’t help wondering: What did the risen Christ’s breath smell like?

On second thought, better not to ask. Someone would be bound to come up with a product and call it Resurrection Toothpaste, or Christ in Glory breath spray. For all I know, someone already has. The other day I discovered a candle you can order online that claims to fill up your house with the essence of the risen Lord. How do they know what he smells like, you ask? Psalm 45, verse 8: “All your robes are fragrant with myrrh and aloes and cassia.” His Essence, a bargain at just $18.95.

But fragrant robes are one thing. Breath, on the other hand… I mean, how intimate can you get? Think about it: How often do you offer to smell someone’s breath? or to let them smell yours? Hmm. Maybe that’s how I got this terrible cold.

The point was brought home to me once when a friend and I were helping out with a group of young Sunday school children. We had given each child a lump of potter’s clay, and to get them in the right frame of mind, we had read aloud that story from the Bible about how God made the first human being out of earth. I’ve always loved that story anyway—maybe because I could never resist a chance to play with clay. Still can’t. So we all worked quietly around the table for a few minutes, and then Stephanie said to the children, “Look, Kate is making a person, just like God did.”

I held up my little clay figure for them to see. It just fit in the palm of my hand. “What do you think?” I asked the children, determined to make this a meaningful religious activity. “Can I bring this person to life, the way God did?”

“NO!” they chorused.

“Why not?” I said, acting surprised.

“Because,” they told me, “You’re not God!”

“Does anyone remember what God did to bring the human person to life?” I asked them. No one did, apparently, so I demonstrated. Bending over my clay figure’s face, I breathed into it gently. “So you see?” I told them, in my best Sunday school manner. “We all have God’s breath in us.”

“Yes,” said the 5-year-old boy sitting next to me, “and we all have God’s GERMS.”

His mother would have been so proud.

The more I think about that response, the more profound it seems. After all, the very first thing the Bible tells us about ourselves is that, in some way unique to our kind, we have God in us. It says that the God whose breath first stirred over dark waters breathed something of the divine self into us at creation. Before anything else, and whatever we may look like to one another, we are God-infected beings. Carriers of divinity. Sometimes, on our best days, you can spot the tell-tale symptoms: a burst of generosity; compassion for a brother’s imperfections; mercy toward a sister who’s struggling; courage; the willingness to forgive… God’s germs. We’re born with them.

Of course, we forget that.

Which is what the other part of that old creation story is trying to tell us about—the part about eating the fruit, and being driven out of the garden. We forget, the story warns, when we listen to those voices tempting us to cross the boundaries set by God, promising us that we will “become like gods…” we forget that we’re already like God.

That forgetting, that losing touch with God, is death to the soul. Death as a terrifying absence of God—a nothingness with nothing at the end of it, a negation of being from which each of us rightly draws back in terror. Death was created by God to be a doorway into more life, not yawning emptiness. But apart from God, what life is there? We look at ourselves, and we see nakedness: weakness and fragility, compromise and mediocrity. We feel the chill of mortality, and it terrifies us. It’s a potent fear—one that, without our awareness, can easily become a wedge driven between us and God, who is life and who gives life and who will never take life away.

Just as all of us carry the germs of God within us, so all of us are infected with this fear of death. It’s a shadow we all live under. Try as we might to drive it from our minds, it remains, drawing lines we dare not cross, putting up fences to keep out enemies, telling us the lie that passage through the doorway of death is of all possible outcomes the most to be feared. What else, I have been wondering, would cause an otherwise religious family to enlist their governor, the congress, the president, and finally the Supreme Court itself to maintain artificial life support for a daughter who had long since passed into the twilight between life and life, and who was waiting only for the freedom to go forward?

Our gospel story today begins in fear, and ends in joy.

It is evening, and the disciples are in hiding. It has been a day of strange occurrences—the tomb of Jesus found open and empty; Mary Magdalene declaring that she has seen the Lord and even spoken with him. The disciples have no idea what to think. Jesus is dead: There were any number of witnesses. But the empty tomb has made them uneasy, and Mary’s inexplicable joy has left them bewildered. They have locked the door, John says, for fear of Jesus’ enemies. But is that all they’re trying to keep out? Not the fragments of their dreams about Jesus as Messiah, the righteous conqueror? Not the faint hope that Mary’s story has stirred up? Not their shame for fleeing when the soldiers came for him, or their fear of what he might say to them, or do to them, if they ever, by some impossible turn of events, had to meet him again face to face?

And then, suddenly, there he is. Slipping past the locked doors of death, past the locked doors of their fears and shame, past the locked doors of what is possible and what can be believed. “Peace,” he says. He shows them his hands, his side. “Peace be with you.”

And the walls come a-tumbling down.

Jesus comes not to shame us but to bring the good news of resurrection. He comes not to reproach but to comfort; not to punish but to reestablish connections cut off by human failure and by death. One by one, he takes his disciples in his arms and breathes fragrant new life into their hearts. As God breathed life into the first human at creation, so now Jesus breathes into his followers the breath of the Holy Spirit, God’s breath; breathes into them the germs of a new creation. You are set free, he tells them. Free to forgive, as I have forgiven. Unlock your doors. Death has no power over you now.

Then the disciples rejoiced, the gospel says. They rejoiced with the joy that God has intended for us from the beginning: the joy of the heart that has tasted the goodness of God, and knows it has nothing to fear.

Imagine if we believed that. Imagine if we believed at the core of our beings that life had triumphed over death, and that the life we live now is a beginning, not an end. What if we knew that what seems to us like a terrifying emptiness lapping at the borders of mortality is in reality only an opening into still more life, and more and more, ever deeper, ever more real, ever more joyful. Would it make a difference to us?

Jesus doesn’t stay long. As mysteriously as he entered, he is gone. But the disciples know, now. He is out there somewhere. At large, on the loose. Uncontainable. Passing through locked doors, befriending enemies, making a way out of no way. Planting the germs of God’s new creation everywhere he goes. In one brief encounter, not only the trauma of Jesus’ death but the trauma of death itself, that old enemy, has turned to joy.

This is what resurrection does. It brings life out of death. Hope out of hopelessness. God’s boundlessness from our mortal limits. New possibilities from our old certainties.

Now, if they could just convince Thomas.

Thomas. He’s such a perfect emblem for our time. We all have some of him in us, don’t we? Some of us have almost nothing but. Did you have to persuade your inner Thomas to let you come here today? The skeptic, the empiricist, old “show-me-the-evidence”? I’m not knocking Thomas. I grew up in the 20th century, I think like that too. Still, I’m not surprised he was late for the resurrection, and I’m not surprised that he had a hard time taking it on hearsay. Thomas knows what is reasonable to believe and what isn’t. Give him a nice moral teaching, and he’ll take it gladly. Ask him to believe in resurrection… “Did you touch him?” he wants to know. “Did you feel his wounds to see if it was really him?” Well, no, the disciples say. “Then it must have been a trick. What you’re telling me makes no sense.”

So Jesus comes again, just for Thomas. He doesn’t shame. He doesn’t rebuke. “Peace be with you,” he says. And this time he doesn’t just show Thomas his wounds: He offers them to be touched. Because skeptics need to touch and feel and verify… but as much as anyone, they also need the resurrection. It is need, not scientific curiosity, that makes Thomas reach across the barriers of his rational doubt to touch the wounds of irrational love: a love that is for him too, and that pours through him at the first touch, unlocking the most ardent confession of the gospels: “My Lord and my God!”

There’s a need and a confession like that in all of us, beneath our resistances, behind the barriers of what we know and what we have learned to expect. Sometimes the barrier is that no one has ever loved us in a way that would make us believe in love. Or perhaps life has just been hard, so that we have learned not to hope for much. Perhaps the disappointment we feel is in ourselves. We’ll never be good enough. We’ll never be able to stay sober. We’ll never amount to anything. We don’t know how to have faith.

Jesus doesn’t shame. He doesn’t rebuke. He knows we need grace. Grace is what he has come to give us. He meets us where we are, at the place of our deepest woundedness and need, and offers us himself, to touch and to be touched. He is wounded, just as we are. Even in his glory, risen and alive with the boundless life of God spilling up in him, he still has those wounds of his human life, so that we might not have to bear ours alone.

Friends, we need to help one another find the places in ourselves where Jesus can touch us in the way we need to be touched.

We need to help each other with our questions but also with our yearning for God. We need to voice our skepticism, but also that part of us that simply aches to experience God.

Can this be the kind of community that welcomes Jesus in? That makes a place in which people’s stories and experiences of God can be shared as precious gifts, so that one’s person’s story becomes the beginning of another person’s hope? “Have you believed because you have seen me?” Jesus says to Thomas. “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe.” Thomas’ encounter with Jesus is not for himself alone. It is good news for the whole hungering world, which needs a reason to turn from death to life, from cursing to blessing, from self to the community of creation. It doesn’t matter that he has become the butt of jokes for two millennia, so that a contemporary hymn writer could say of him that:

The vision of his skeptic mind
was keen enough to make him blind
to any unexpected act
too large for his small world of fact.

The bigger the joke, the more amazing the grace. Even skeptics need a patron saint.

So if you’ve discovered within yourself the germs of God’s grace and love and joy, please, turn to your neighbor and share them. Breathe, laugh, sing, cry, bear witness. If you infect just one other person with joy today, you will give joy to God.

That joy is what we need to get us to open the locked doors of our selves and our churches and be out in the world—on the loose, uncontainable, befriending enemies, making a way out of no way. Can you imagine what that would be like? If not, don’t worry. Jesus will help.

Amen.