NOTES for Joh 20:20-22

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.