How did the apostles understand the resurrection? It is hard to say exactly. Of course, like all their fellow believers, they knew that resurrection meant the dead returning to life. But what would this life be like? After all, some kind of life went on in Sheol too. Though calling it life was still a stretch. Rather, it was a kind of likeness, a shadow of real life. And what would the life of the resurrected be like? Whom would they resemble: people, or shadows that had come out of the tombs, or straight out of Sheol?

The appearance of the risen Jesus in the room where the disciples had gathered gives the answer to this question. He stands before them as a human being. In a transformed body, but precisely a human one. Not as a ghost or a shadow. He is so fully human that even after the transformation His body still bears the marks of the sufferings He endured. Resurrection is not a likeness of former life and not some immortality of the soul existing apart from the body. Here is all life in all its fullness. The life of the Kingdom.

And the risen Jesus immediately shares this life with the disciples. He says to them: receive the Holy Spirit. God's breath. The breath of the Kingdom. The very breath that was to enter the world on the day of Pentecost. Jesus gives it to His disciples already now. He lets them feel what this breath is like. The breath with which they will now have to live. And which will make them themselves part of the Kingdom. Here, of course, there is not yet the fullness of entry that became reality on the day of Pentecost. Here there is only the first contact with the Kingdom. But whoever has touched it once will never be the same again.

Even the relationships of the one who has touched it with other people change: all relationships now become part of the Kingdom. A forgiven sin is now forgiven once and for all; it no longer darkens the relationships of those it touched. In the Kingdom everything that is done is done forever and completely. But refusal to forgive a sin also turns out to be something absolute and irreversible, because in the Kingdom refusal is just as unambiguous, full, and final as forgiveness. Forgiving a neighbor's sin opens the road into the Kingdom; refusal closes it, because unforgiven and unrepented sin is incompatible with the life of the Kingdom. Having let the disciples feel the fullness of the Kingdom, Jesus at the same time lets them feel their responsibility for this fullness. And this is understandable: one does not exist without the other.

The first thing that comes to mind about Thomas is that he is a person like many of us, combining faith with little faith. But Thomas differs from us in this: although he was nicknamed unbelieving, he nevertheless possessed far greater faith than many of us who would like to compare our excessive rational skepticism, which eats away at the soul, with Thomas's desire to find firm foundations for faith. Let us not forget that Thomas was ready to follow the Teacher to the end, and he proved this by his whole life. But what is true is true: it was hard for him to trust immediately any news he heard; he wanted confirmation and proof.

There is truth in such caution: how many rumors there are about "spiritual manifestations" produced by a game of telephone or by hallucinations, or even coming from a poisoned source. Christ, by the way, did not reject Thomas's desire to be convinced through personal verification, and He gave him that opportunity.

There are iconographic depictions in which Thomas literally puts his finger into Christ's wound, but the Gospel text does not say that he used the opportunity given to him. It tells something else: immediately after Christ invited him to put his hand into His side, Thomas confessed Him as his Lord and God. Christ did not count Thomas's doubts as sin.

No doubts, not one difficult question, will in the end remain without God's answer. Only let doubts not become a pretext for the self-assertion of a proud sophist, who, like Pilate, rejects the possibility of knowing the truth, but instead arise from a conscientious desire to overcome the difficulties on the way to it.

John describes his state at the beginning of the revelation and of his encounter with the Risen One with the words, "I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day" (v. 10; in the Synodal translation, "on the day of resurrection"). It is hard to say exactly whether this refers to the Sabbath day, or to Sunday, as the Synodal translation interprets it, or to one of the feast days traditional in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The only thing that is clear is that it was not an ordinary weekday.

The expression "to be in the Spirit" is traditionally used (from the time of the early prophets) to designate a special kind of ecstatic state, when God's nearness is experienced directly, when a person senses His presence like a gust of wind rushing in from outside, or like a mighty breath entering within and merging with his own breathing. At the same time John, as we see, hears the voice of the Risen One, who calls Himself "the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last," and commands him to write down what he has seen and send it (clearly for reading and study) to the churches of Asia Minor, with which the apostle's ministry was chiefly connected (vv. 10-11).

Turning around, John sees the risen Savior and recognizes Him, though He looks nothing like He did during those forty days after the resurrection, when He associated with the disciples and when John had to see Him for the last time. Now His appearance recalls not the first days after the Resurrection, but the Transfiguration: this is how Peter, James, and John saw Him on Mount Tabor, shining with the light of transfigured humanity (vv. 12-15; cf. Matt 17:1-2). Such a transformation is clearly not accidental: immediately after the Resurrection the history of the Kingdom had not yet begun, and the Savior Himself had not yet taken His place in it. But now, after the Ascension and Pentecost, the Kingdom has entered the world, and Jesus appears before His apostle already as its head, set by His heavenly Father in the place that He prepared for His Son before the creation of the world. As for the Church, its task in our world, which is being transfigured but has not yet been transfigured to the end, is to sanctify this world just as, before the coming of Christ, it was sanctified by that presence of God with which God blessed His people. Now this role has been given to the Church, which, according to God's design carried out by the Messiah He sent, is to become the living expression and embodiment of the Kingdom opened to the world so that everyone who seeks may share in it.

That is why John sees Jesus dressed in a long priestly robe, against the background of the menorah (the sacred seven-branched lampstand that stood in the Temple, after whose pattern the special lamps still used in synagogues are made). And just as the light of the menorah symbolizes the radiance of God's presence, in John's vision the light of the menorah, against which Jesus appears before the apostle, symbolizes the light of the new life with which the Risen One shines and with which the life of the Church, sanctifying the world, must be permeated. But, as we see, things are not so simple with specific church communities, and through His apostle Jesus conveys to them something important for their spiritual life and witness (vv. 17-20).