NOTES for Joh 20:1-31

It is considered that the disciple of Christ of whom the Gospel says that "Jesus loved him" was the apostle John. These words puzzle many people: how can this be? Does Jesus not love everyone equally? Did He not die on the Cross and rise for each of us?

Of course, for each of us; of course, His love cannot be compared at all. He does not love one person more and another less, but neither does He love everyone in the same way. He loves each person separately, each as an independent person whom He created, to whom He gave a name, for whom He suffered and died, whom He forgave, and to whom He gave eternal life. But we can love more or less. The apostle John himself loved more, loved Jesus more strongly than anyone else. And the one who loves more can receive and contain more love. Christ gives each person as much love as that person can bear, because in our souls there are sometimes such dark corners that they simply cannot coexist with love, and the Lord does not wish to do violence to us.

Therefore John needs no proofs or assurances, because his immense love for the Teacher gives him hope in Christ's Resurrection, although he, like the other apostles, did not understand the prophecies about death and resurrection. And this same immense love gives him such faith that it is enough for him to see "the linen cloths lying there, and the cloth that had been on His head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself," to know that the Lord has risen. The Gospel does not even tell us precisely what the disciple believed, because the whole Gospel speaks of faith in the Resurrection.

Standing by the tomb, Mary does not analyze how the enormous stone could have been rolled away; even the sight of angels neither terrifies nor surprises her. All the miraculous and unusual phenomena recede into the background for her: they have no meaning without Christ. Had she become distracted by the surrounding circumstances, she might have failed to notice the Risen One, just as even His closest disciples, who had been there moments before, did not see Him. But because Mary refused to be distracted even by everything miraculous happening that morning, she was able to see Christ standing before her.

Mary recognized the Risen One after He addressed her by name. He had not spoken in vain about the good shepherd who calls his sheep by name and whose voice they know. Yet none of the shepherds on earth, even the best of them, has such unity with those who follow him as Christ does. He asks her not to touch Him, not because He does not want to commune with one of the daughters of humanity, but because the moment has come for Him to go to the Father. Once He has gone to the Father, He will remain in the closest union with His faithful who stay on earth.

Did Jesus' disciples await the Resurrection? Yes, of course they did. All their fellow believers awaited it, so why would they be an exception? And yet the resurrection of their Teacher was an enormous surprise for them. Perhaps an expected one, and yet still a surprise. After all, the Resurrection was not supposed to happen like this, almost routinely. They simply came to the tomb, and the body was not there. The tomb was empty. The Resurrection is not like that; it is different. Everyone knows it is different. It will be majestic, solemn, unrepeatable... and here there is simply an empty tomb. He simply rose. He got up, came out of the tomb, and left. No, that does not happen. It cannot be. Surely someone must have stolen the body after all. The gardener, perhaps he knows... That is how the Encounter happens. And recognition.

But not at once. At first Mary is sure that the gardener is standing before her. It cannot be otherwise; there is nothing else to expect. And then everything depends only on openness. Whether one recognizes Him or not depends on how open a person is. Not simply open to Him, but open in general. How important, or unimportant, are one's expectations, opinions, stereotypes... how convinced one is that there is something that cannot be simply because it can never be. The stronger such certainty is, the fewer chances there are for recognition. Mary had no such certainty.

Perhaps because she did not think all that often about what could happen in her life and what could not happen in principle. Perhaps the feminine mind is generally less categorical than the masculine one. At least when it comes to postulates, schemes, and models. Fewer models mean fewer tests for conformity. And then He can be recognized: by a familiar word heard from Him before, by His voice, by His image... by an image greatly changed, yet still familiar. Familiar because an image is not only outward appearance.

An image is also everything that forms that appearance: its inner form, and not only its outer one. Outwardly, transformed humanity differs from untransformed humanity as heaven differs from earth. But inwardly it is akin to it, akin because from the very beginning God created our human nature so that it could be transformed. So that it could become completely new and at the same time remain itself. And therefore remain recognizable. At least for those for whom form is not only outward. As it was for Mary, who recognized her risen Teacher.

Mary Magdalene came to the tomb of the One who had been her beloved Teacher. The tomb is empty—but of course she cannot even imagine that anything good could be expected. All she needs is to find His body, simply to say goodbye to Him in a human way... And something very strange happens: Mary sees the One for whom she was searching—and does not recognize Him. She had known Him for several years, yet now she thinks the gardener is standing before her. What is happening? We do not know what Mary Magdalene was experiencing at that moment, but we can reflect on how this happens in our own life. We seek the Lord; we ask the same question over and over: where is He? Yet He stands nearby and says to us, “Why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” And when we answer that we are seeking Him, He calls us by name. At that moment, His voice cannot be confused with any other. Only He can call us by name in this way, because only He truly knows each one of us.

What, after all, is this question of Thomas? Distrust? A desire to see everything with his own eyes? Or a kind of prudence, proceeding from the fact that spiritual life cannot be built on someone else's experience, even if that experience is connected with people whom you trust completely? And in such a context, what do Jesus's words mean about those who believed without seeing what Thomas saw?

Of course, it would be easiest to stop at the version of distrust, as many people do: Thomas's faith, they say, turned out to be the weakest; he needed proof, but Jesus is glad for any faith, and therefore allows Thomas to be convinced of His reality in the way that seems adequate to him.

But is everything so simple? After all, when it comes to spiritual life, we really can rely only on our own experience. Spiritual life, like life in general, belongs to each person in his own way, and however remarkable the experience of someone else's life may be, it cannot replace our own. This applies fully to spiritual life. And Thomas, refusing to take the other apostles at their word, is most of all proceeding from this very thing. He wants to see and experience for himself what the others saw, without relying only on their stories.

But what, then, does Jesus have in mind? Does He have in mind the other apostles? Hardly, since by that time all of them had already seen Him, while only Thomas was being asked to believe others at their word. About whom, then, is the Savior speaking? About those who will believe later? But people always become Christians in the true sense only after living through that personal encounter with the Risen One without which one can speak of Christianity only conditionally. How, then, can one believe "without seeing"? Evidently, only through the testimony of those whose witness reveals the life of the Kingdom brought into the world by Jesus. Such testimony can become the beginning of a spiritual path, although, of course, if the one who has begun it is consistent, a personal meeting with the risen Jesus will take place sooner or later in his life as well.

And Jesus, of course, understands that the Church remains the Church only as long as it is capable of such witness. And He calls blessed those who will have to enter this true Church.

"Do not be unbelieving, but believing" (John 20:27). The meaning of these words pulses in this, or a similar, expression in the hearts of a vast number of people. Someone prays for relatives and loved ones who have not yet turned to God, someone prays for passersby, someone asks for faith for himself. But before anything else, these words were born in the heart of God. He brought us into life for fruitful cooperation with Him in love and, naturally, in faith in what He reveals to us. The Lord longs for our salvation more than anyone in the world, more than our relatives and even more than we ourselves do. And the one who believes in the Lord receives eternal life (see John 11:25-26).

That is precisely why He longs for faith for us. Every day He knocks at the doors of our hearts (see Rev 3:20). Every day, seeing the fire dying down, He sends miracles, great and small, repeating the words: "Do not be unbelieving, but believing."

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.

This verse is often mentioned when disputes begin about what it was like for those who saw the Passion of Christ. It is usually perceived as consolation for us, who did not see the living Christ: we did not see, but still believe, though our faith has fewer grounds than the faith of the apostles who saw the incarnate living God.

One does not need to see in order, after reading the descriptions of the Passion in all their vividness, to understand that the death of Jesus was tormenting and terrible. And then "blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" means something quite different. We are "blessed" not because the faith of those who did not see makes them saints at once. We are blessed, that is, happy, because we did not see the Crucifixion. It is easier for us to believe that Christ is risen, since we did not see His death, did not see how real it was. We can in fact never fully realize that our God was a corpse, that there was no more hope at all. Holy Week in our life is still already illumined by the light of the coming Resurrection, and this is our happiness, our blessedness.

This does not mean that we should not try to experience the pain of the Crucifixion as deeply as possible. Some saints are given to experience it with almost the same force with which the Mother of God experienced it; some are given stigmata. But they are also given faith such that no pain can obscure faith in the Resurrection.