“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked, for fear of the Jews…”
This is how today’s Gospel passage begins. Though we are a week removed from Easter Sunday—with the sugar high of jellybeans and chocolate rabbits receding, and with the hysteria of the solar eclipse just ahead—in the Gospel story it is still Easter evening, and if we are to understand the what’s going on in the hearts and minds of the disciples, we must return to that moment.
For us, Easter is a day of joy, in which we worship in the morning, then laugh as we watch our children hunt for Easter eggs, and finally gather with family and friends for a feast. For the disciples, Easter was a day of discombobulation, spiraling emotions, apprehension, and fear. Why so? The disciples followed their charismatic leader—Jesus—to Jerusalem under the misapprehension that Jesus was about to force great change in Judea. As James and John repeatedly argued, the disciples wanted to be Jesus’ right-hand men in this work, to be worldly, important, and powerful. On Maundy Thursday all came crashing down when one of their number—Judas, their treasurer, no less—switched sides and helped the Sanhedrin ambush Jesus and drag him into custody. At that moment, rather than sound the clarion call to rise up, Jesus, his power apparently drained, went meekly with the mob.
The events of the next eighteen hours were crushing. Judas walked away a rich man with powerful new friends[i]; the disciples scattered into the shadows, despite the fact that at their last dinner together they’d promised to stay with Jesus come what may; and Jesus himself—all alone bereft of his friends—was brutalized and then killed in the most public and intentionally humiliating way.
And then, just this morning (for them), the disciples have received word that Jesus isn’t dead after all. Jesus has apparently emerged from his tomb alive and different, even stronger than he was before.
So, as our Gospel reading begins, we find the disciples huddled in a house, with the door locked and barred. John tells us that they were barricaded there “for fear of the Jews.” I once preached a sermon that asked, “Just which Jew do you think they were afraid of?”
Maybe they are afraid of Judas, who might come with the authorities to mop of the remainder of Jesus’ followers, to finish the job he’d begun three days earlier, once and for all.
Maybe they are afraid of Jesus himself, the Jew they’d abandoned after all their bravado, who they gave up to Judas before slinking away into hiding, but who now has demonstrated by defeating death that he is more powerful than they could have imagined.
Maybe both. But I deeply suspect that the Jews of whom the disciples are most afraid, and from whom they are desperately hiding, are themselves. They are terrified of facing who they are and what they have done and failed to do, as they bear the triple shame of 1.) having crassly craved worldly power like adolescent boys, 2.) having so quickly given in to fear and deserted the Jesus who had inspired and changed their lives, and 3.) perhaps even having had the terrible thought that maybe they should have joined Judas in his betrayal, should have switched sides when he did and thus be spared their current circumstance altogether.[ii]
John’s Gospel leaves it for us to decide. All we are told is that the door is locked and that the disciples are huddled inside in apprehension and fear of someone. Today’s account inspires a once well-known, but now mostly forgotten name for the peep hole in a door, the little aperture that allows one to see what is coming outside but not expose the one within. Do you know what it is called? The name for that tiny, one-way opening is the “Judas window,” named for Jesus’ betrayer who may return to betray the others.[iii]
The Judas window is how the disciples might spy who is coming for them, whether it’s Judas himself with the mob, the resurrected Jesus, or the disciples’ own overwhelming sense of shame. The Judas window is how we, too, guard ourselves against that which threatens us. It’s a symbol for the barricaded doors in our lives, both literal and figurative, the locked doors of our houses and our souls. The Judas window is the way we look out at the world warily, charting its comings and goings, while anxiously protecting ourselves from whatever may try to enter in.
As it turns out, the one who enters the disciples’ room is Jesus. The Judas window ultimately provides the disciples no warning, and the barred door provides no protection. The resurrected Jesus goes where he wills, and suddenly he is among them. The disciples cower when they first see Jesus with them in the room. What will the one who can defeat death do to them? But Jesus says to them, “Peace be with you.” He shows them the wounds in which they are complicit, but which God has redeemed. And he breathes into them the healing and forgiving power of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus enters them just as surely as he has entered the room. Despite their wary and watchful gaze through the Judas window; despite the locked door of the room and their hearts; despite their shame, Jesus enters. In every way, Jesus enters. And the disciples are finally and forever changed. Only now do they become people of faith and confidence. Only now can they truly follow Jesus. Only now, with the Spirit within, them are they able to forgive themselves and others. Only now can they release their shame.
Fast forward those two thousand years, from Easter evening with the disciples to a new Easter season here and now. What might this season of Resurrection mean for us? We’re not so different from the disciples in that room, I think. For many of us, we have been peering out at the world through the Judas window of our souls for so long, not allowing anyone truly to see in, desperately barricading the doors of our hearts in the attempt to hide from who we have been or what we have done. I suspect that’s one reason we so insistently secularize holidays like Easter, so that the holiday itself can serve as yet another barrier against the incursion of Jesus.
But as with the disciples, the risen Jesus goes where he will. The Judas window provides no forewarning. The locked door provides no protection. Jesus will enter into us, and at first that can be cowering. When Jesus enters, we see starkly the wounds we have caused to God, to God’s children, to God’s world. We know, in the presence of the crucified and risen one, all the ways in which we have misunderstood, and abandoned, and hidden from God’s goodness and grace. But in the very next breath, Jesus reveals to us that there is no wound God cannot redeem. Jesus bestows his peace upon our hearts. Jesus fills us with his Spirit. In short, we experience the death of that old life which both defined us and from which we sought to hide—the life that had us anxiously peering out the Judas window day and night—and we begin a new life. That is Easter.
We then become people of confidence and faith, because Jesus has come to us regardless of who we were. We become disciples because we now see that discipleship is the work of extending to others what Jesus has done in and for us. We not only unlock but tear down the doors that seek to block Jesus’ path.
Like Thomas, we finally say of Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” and we rejoice.
[i] We know from Matthew 27:1-10 and Acts 1:18 that things don’t end so well for Judas, but the remaining disciples would not yet have known this.
[ii] Ibid
[iii] This term is still used in Great Britain to describe the one-way window in a prison cell door, which allows the guards to see inside the cell without allowing the prisoner to see out.
God in the Midst of the City 
I really enjoyed reading your message this morning and