SERMON TITLE: A Breath of Fresh Air
TEXT: John 20:19-29 (NRSV)
I. INTRODUCTION: Have you ever got the wind knocked out of you? Maybe as a child, you fell on the playground, or you were somehow hit in the stomach and couldn’t breathe. It is terrifying in those moments when it seems like time stands still and the only thing that matters is the next breath. I read an article that explained that the problem is not the air (or the wind) but our diaphragm, a dome-shaped muscle under our lungs. The diaphragm pulls down to help pull air into the lungs as you inhale. “When you exhale, the diaphragm pushes up to help push air out of the lungs. Getting hit in the stomach or back can cause a spasm in your diaphragm. That means the muscle contracts — or gets tense — instead of doing its usual thing to help you breathe.” Laying on the playground trying to catch your breath, this explanation would probably offer little comfort. When you can’t breathe, all that matters is breathing. Getting the wind knocked out of us can be a metaphor for the difficulties of life. We all experience moments and seasons of loss, grief, and significant life transitions, and the stress of living life can knock the wind out of us. When life comes at us as a barrage of stomach punches or backward falls, the claustrophobic walls of self-doubt can close in on us, and it can seem hard to breathe. When we can’t breathe, we stop in our tracks and everything else is on hold including the mission that God has called us to.
II. MOVE 1: This is where the disciples were the day after Easter. They had just lost their teacher, their Lord, their friend. They were experiencing grief. They had watched as Jesus was arrested, tried, sentenced to death, brutally crucified, and then buried. They were traumatized. Like many Jewish people, they had aspirations that the Messiah would come and set them free from their Roman occupiers. They had been sure that Jesus was the Messiah, but He was dead. Hope was gone. The breath had been knocked out of them. They were paralyzed by fear, hiding behind locked doors, just trying to breathe. When you can’t breathe, nothing else matters. Mary Magdalene told them that Jesus was alive and claimed that she had seen Him, but who knew if this was true? She had always been a strange one. Her explanations were not enough to give them breath and hardly comforting. No, the mission of those 1st-century disciples of preaching the gospel and being fishers of men was on hold behind those closed and locked doors where they just trying to breathe. And here we are, the Wednesday, after Easter and even in this room where we 21st-century disciples of Jesus are meeting there are those here who are just trying to catch your breath. Life has stomach-punched you, sucker-punched you, and knocked you flat on your back, and knocked the wind out of you. In the place where you are, the mission for which God has ordained you is on hold.
III. MOVE 2: And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, surprisingly, Jesus Himself simply “came and stood in the middle” of their fear in the locked claustrophobic room (20:19). John portrays Jesus’s appearances as unpredictable and uncontrollable. He shows up when He wants to, how He wants to, where He wants to. Yet, there is a pattern in the surrounding text (20:1-18). Jesus moves from one enclosed space to another, the garden, the tomb, and the locked room. He shows up in the stuffy places where we hide and speaks words of peace! His blessing, “Peace be with you” (20:19), is a wish and a command that they would have wholeness in every area of their lives. It is a wish for them to have shalom. The Hebrew concept of shalom means all is well. To wish someone shalom implies that you want everything in their world to function as it should: their family, finances, career, emotional life, mental well-being, you fill in the blank, and even the jolted diaphragm that is causing them to not be able to breathe. Jesus speaks peace into the room before He does anything else because He knows everything is not well with the disciples. They are experiencing the pressure of the world, but He has risen from the grave, overcoming the world, and carries with Him the Promise and Power to bring true peace (Cf. John 16:33). He invites the disciples to examine the evidence of His victory—Himself—His Hands, His Side. Jesus shows up in the middle of their fear and invites them to have a personal encounter with Him. Everyone of them was welcomed to examine Him for themselves. This brought joy because they “saw Him” for themselves (20:20). Mary Magdalene’s testimony of her encounter with Jesus was not enough to move them towards catching their breath and moving on with living life and fulfilling God’s mission. God does not intend for us to live for Him based on someone else’s experience. Even now in the middle of your locked room of fear, Jesus has entered speaking peace, and inviting you to touch Him! Can you sense His Presence? He shows up when the wind is knocked out of us! He is here! And in His Presence, we can breathe again.
III. MOVE 3: We can refocus. But Jesus doesn’t just speak a wishful shalom blessing and allow us to touch Him. He wants more than for us to have an initial encounter with Him and then to go back to life as it was. There is more. He knows that the disciples, as we sometimes are in our moments of loss, grief, doubt, and transition, are wrestling to breathe. And when we can’t breathe, the only thing that matters is breathing. So, he speaks a shalom blessing a second time and this time reminds them of their mission. “As the Father has sent Me, so I send you” (20:21). And then He does something that we have been waiting for Him to do all along, “He breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:22). The Greek word translated “Spirit” is p?e??µa. It can mean wind; breath; spirit, Spirit. Jesus does not just give the disciples, or us, an explanation of why we can’t breathe: “It’s a small muscle called the diaphragm…” “You’re stressed out and experiencing grief…” “You’ve just got the wind knocked out of you…” No, Jesus breathed on them. One commentator translated it simply as “Jesus breathed.” He both shows us that it can be done and breathes His life-giving power upon us because He wants us to continue His mission in the world. And His mission is to bring about shalom, wholeness, in every realm. We can’t do that without breathing. We can’t do that hiding behind locked doors in a claustrophobic room. The Holy Spirit is the power to breathe again! Earlier in John’s Gospel, John the Baptist comes preaching and His message is that Jesus is the One Who has the Spirit of God without measure and Who will baptize all who believe with the Holy Spirit (1:33; 3:34). He will immerse us in His Spirit.
“Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, or HBOT, is a type of treatment used to speed up healing of carbon monoxide poisoning, gangrene, stubborn wounds, and infections in which tissues are starved for oxygen. If you undergo this therapy, you will enter a special chamber to breathe in pure oxygen in air pressure levels 1.5 to 3 times higher than average. The goal is to fill the blood with enough oxygen to repair tissues and restore normal body function.” You are baptized, immersed, in what can help you catch your breath which is what will heal you to move on with physical life. As the natural is, so is the spiritual. These disciples had entered a small space. They needed healing. They needed to catch their breath. And then He showed up! Jesus is here this evening, and He is there in your claustrophobic place of loss, grief, transition, struggle. That thing that is keeping you hemmed in and breathless will become a place of healing as Jesus breathes into it and into you.
IV. CONCLUSION: There is an old hymn of the faith that says, “It is no secret what God can do. What He’s done for others He’ll do for you…” When the disciples saw Jesus, heard His words of shalom, breathed in His life-giving breath Thomas wasn’t there. They did to Thomas what Mary Magdalene had done to them. They told Thomas the story of how they “had seen the Lord” (20:24). Thomas was not satisfied with their testimony. He declared that He must have an encounter with Jesus on His own if He was going to believe. When we read the text, it is as if Jesus was there hearing Thomas’s words, eavesdropping on him as he struggled to catch his breath and get on his feet again. A week later the disciples were in the house again. This time the doors were shut, but not locked. The disciples had caught their breath. Fear wasn’t the dominating force it had been a week ago. And “Jesus came and stood among them” (20:26). He invited Thomas specifically to handle His physical body in just the way Thomas had said he wanted to. And Jesus added, “Be not faithless, but faithful.” Okay, Thomas, now that you have all caught your breath its time to get to work living the life, I call you to and working in my mission. It is at this point that Thomas make a declaration that carries the reader back to the first chapter and verses of John’s Gospel. The Gospel declares that Jesus is God. Thomas agrees. He takes a deep breath and exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” (20:28). Just as the disciples and Thomas had a personal encounter with Jesus and His Spirit in the time when the wind was knocked out of them, so Jesus is here inviting you to encounter Him and to receive the empowerment of His breath to heal and to move forward with the mission He has chosen you for. What He’s done for others, He will do for you…
