April 12, 2026
As If…
John 20:19-31
Rev. Shannon Jordan
Today’s passage continues the story that first Easter morning. I will begin at the verse that Patrick ended last week. I know that this is a familiar passage, and I invite you to let God speak to you through these words today.
Hear the word of the Lord:
19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.
This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God.
How many of you watched the splash down of the Artemis II Friday night? I was fascinated by it. There were ships off the coast of San Diego waiting for the splash down. How on earth did people know that it would all work out that way? That they could know with certainty that the capsule would land right there, at that time?
When our kids were growing up we would rent the same house at the beach each year and each year we would watch several of the movies that were at the rental. The Italian Job. Home Alone. And Apollo 13. Most of what I know about missions to the moon was from watching Tom Hanks make it back safely in Apollo 13. I am really thankful this mission went well and I will not be watching Artemis II with my grandchildren at the beach!
As I mulled over the miracle of the safe arrival of these four astronauts at the location predicted after traveling almost 700,000 miles and recognized that they splashed down within a minute of when they predicted they would I realized that they did a better job of predicting when and where they would land than I sometimes get driving the just over a mile to work. Absolutely amazing. The expertise, the practice, the focus, the teamwork, all pulled together for this outcome.
When I started preparing for today, I read the passage several times to explore what stood out to me. The phrase “Peace be with you” kept jumping out. Jesus says it in verse 19, 21, and 26. Three times in eight verses.
This is a really interesting time in history to reflect on peace, surprising given the state of the world. Peace, especially God’s peace, is so needed in our lives and our world today. I had heard Jesus called the “Prince of Peace” for decades, but as things have become more and more divided, it has been very hope giving to reflect on the meaning of peace. I have not been living or praying or acting as if I believed that Jesus is the Prince of Peace and that God has control of all things.
As I read and reflected on the theological and biblical perspectives on peace, I could see three main lenses:
God’s Peace.
Personal Peace.
Practiced Peace.
Let’s look at God’s Peace first.
You may be aware of the Hebrew word for peace is Shalom. God’s peace, God’s shalom is not just absence of conflict but the presence of something better in its place. Shalom means complete or whole in the Hebrew Bible. Life is complex and when any part of our lives is out of alignment, then we need shalom, we need those pieces to be fixed.
We can find broken or incomplete places in our personal lives—sin, addictions, anger, hurt, illness, grief—or can be a part of our communities with injustice, poverty, racism, and systems that support these injustices. They can also be on a scale that encompasses our entire planet. This wider can be war, it can also be the poor stewardship of our natural resources and the destruction of God’s beauty and resources for the greed of a few. All of these areas need God’s shalom.
Scripture describes the job of the followers of God in both the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament as the bringing of shalom in partnership and obedience with God. That’s why the prophets shared God’s anger—people were not living according to God’s call to bring shalom to the world. They were greedy. They didn’t care for the poor or the immigrants. They put other things above God and God speaks with great force and anger against that in scripture. God calls us throughout scripture to live lives that bring about shalom. In the New Testament, hearers of Jesus’s promise of peace would have absolutely contrasted that with Pax Romana, Roman Peace, which was brought about by force, through war and the military, through power and control, and was a stark contrast to God’s peace.
Jesus is our peace and shares it with us. The apostles said that Jesus brings peace between us and the creator. The New Testament continues to call us to be people of peace—being disciples of Jesus means that we work with God to bring about shalom here and now. This is part of Jesus’s statement that the Kingdom of God is at hand—God’s shalom is breaking into our world.
Personal Peace.
Personal peace really does come to be as we align our lives with God’s will, and God’s vision of shalom. We usually lack personal peace when we have values and beliefs that are out of alignment with God’s plan for our lives. When we want something more than what God has for us. Discipleship, opening ourselves to the transformation of God, is what brings us more fully into alignment with God and brings about the peace that we all crave. We try and control our lives ourselves to attain that peace, but we can’t do it on our own. It would be like me trying to do any part of the Artemis mission. Not my job and taking responsibility for it would cause huge anxiety and stress.
Dallas Willard writes about the importance of faith formation and discipleship in having this peace during difficult times. He says non-discipleship costs us five things:
- abiding peace,
- a life penetrated throughout by love,
- faith that sees everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good,
- hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances,
- power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil.
In short, nondiscipleship costs you exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring (John 10:10).”[i]
Faith formation is key for our own personal peace. If we want to be able to be resilient in the face of adversity, so that even when we feel grief or fear or anger, we can also feel peace—that takes practice. That takes self-knowledge, and that takes a learning to open our lives to the work of God. It takes practicing trusting God, learning to see God at work, and remembering what God has done for us in the past and trusting that God will do the same going forward. I think all three pastors have lifted the value of the spiritual practice of examen in sermons. Self-knowledge helps us understand where we need God’s transformation—and what in our lives is transforming us, sometimes to the negative.
About 60 of us were in Koinonia Groups during Lent where we explored Rev. Luther E. Smith’s Hope is Here! Spiritual Practices for Pursuing Justice and beloved Community. I really appreciated how Smith emphasized the work that we need to do, the discipleship we need to do, in order for God to transform us to be people who can participate in the hope God has for this world. The work that we are called to do to bring about shalom in our world. It is learning to trust God and to let go of our own understandings of the world.
I saw a video this past week on my social media stream. A truck driving down the highway at about 50 mph and a man on the back of the truck being catapulted off and landing in a standing position. It was amazing! I thought it was the perfect example of what it might look or feel like for us to each learn to live more fully as disciples of Christ—learning to recognize and participate in the work that God is doing around us. Something might look scary or impossible, but really, it isn’t and living in this alternate reality that is aligned with God’s will is where we find our own peace. As I started poking at the backstory of the video, I realized it was an even better illustration than I could have hoped for! Five guys who call themselves the DD Squad—I think it stands for Dare Devil Squad, so don’t try it at home! But they drove a truck 80 km/h or about 50 mph and then shot themselves at 50 mph from a catapult system on the truck going the opposite direction. The theory was that the relative speed would allow the guy being shot off the back of the truck to land in a standing position. It was crazy! The really cool thing as I researched it was that they started out really slowly. They started at 20 km/h…or about 12.5 mph. After lots of study and trials and using other objects, they did their first human trial and it worked perfectly…they slowly increased the speed until they got up to the 80km/h.
Our personal peace will also not happen without practice. We need to learn to trust God and believe in God at slower speeds before we take off at higher speeds. We need to practice living in God’s way of doing things. And that takes transformation over time. We need to practice in the little things so that we can be ready for the big things. And there will be big things.
Practiced Peace
When we have a better understanding of God’s peace, and when we work to lean into God’s peace for us personally, then we are ready to work in community with others to live into a practiced peace in our world. Working in community, with peace, can be really hard to do. There is a reason that most of the key verses on loving others are near the various lists of the variety of gifts of the spirit. The gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12 are followed by 1 Corinthians 13—love is patient, love is kind, love does not insist on its own way. When we are well grounded in our own discipleship, we are most useful in working in community for shalom on a bigger scale.
In Smith’s book that we explored in the Koinonia groups, Smith talked about the importance of being ready for the hard parts of ministry. He shares how the training of civil rights marchers included the practice of forgiving before an offense even occurs. They went into the marches knowing that they would be mistreated and they were trained to “forgive the anticipated abuse of police and White mobs before they marched. The nonviolence commitment of the civil rights movement had the spiritual practice of forgiving enemies as a prerequisite to protest.[ii]
Smith also shared stories of forgiveness from the Amish schoolhouse shooting and the 2015 shooting at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church at a Wednesday night Bible study. Both communities showed incredible, miraculous forgiveness, and both communities shared that they practiced forgiveness on a smaller scale, so they were able to forgive on a larger scale.
When a community works together from a place of practicing together the peace of God and to bring about the shalom of God in our world, it is a beautiful thing.
The Artemis mission worked because everyone trusted something beyond themselves, they didn’t control on their own.
And the same is true for us, but even more so.
We are not the ones holding everything together.
God is.
Our role is not to create peace from scratch, but to receive it, live it, and offer it, trusting that God is already at work bringing shalom into the world.
When we look at our internal struggles, our relationships, our world, we may not think that peace, that shalom is possible, and we live as if it is not true. We lock ourselves in rooms with others who live and look and think like we do often out of fear.
But what would it look like to live as if that were true?
As if God really is holding everything together.
As if peace is actually possible.
As if Jesus, the one called the Prince of Peace, meant it when he said, “Peace be with you.”
Jesus still walks into locked rooms like ours and says, “Peace be with you.”
Let’s live as if that is true.
Amen.
[i] Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship
[ii] Hope Is Here!, by Luther E. Smith Jr. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2021), 200.