The Wicket Gate

Introduction

Go ahead and turn to the gospel of John, chapter 20, we will start in verse 19 in just a moment. The world is a scary place ins’t it? It is very easy to have a pessimistic outlook when inflation is out of control and eggs cost a kidney. Planes crash, bombs drop, sickness and hurt beat us down, homes separate, and culture constantly degrades. It’s really not even a political thing as many like to claim because either the progressive wokes are going to ruin the world or the bad orange man is going to destroy everything. For very different reasons every dinner table, on any given evening, it can be heard uttered I hope Jesus comes back soon because this is going to be the death of us. Whatever the “this” is that is convincing you the end is surely near is secondary to the reality that we all live under the cloud of imminence. White knuckled we clinch our fists because we don’t know what, but something is about to happen.

If that resonates with you then let me draw your attention to our first Christian fathers and their experience shortly after the crucifixion of Christ. Jesus was laid in the tomb on Friday evening having been murdered essentially by an angry mob of Jewish people at the prompting and prodding of the Jewish leaders at the hands of the Roman authorities under the leadership of Pontius Pilate. For fear of their own lives the followers of Christ scattered with the exception of at least John who we know was an eye witness to the crucifixion. The disciples reconvened at some point and gathered together, and locked themselves up in a room to hide. It’s possible, maybe probable, that the room they locked themselves up in was the same “upper room” where the last supper was held.

Imagine the fear and the cloud of imminence that they were under. Their Rabbi and Lord has been brutally killed and this angry mob, they felt, was certainly going to come for them next. That is not even to mention the extreme sorrow they were under facing the reality that their master and friend was taken from them and killed. Just think about that. You spend years seeing all these unbelievable things from Christ and your confidence grows that this really is the one who will save us and restore our kingdom. You are filled with hope and encouragement and excitement and just as quickly as it started he’s gone. I’ve sat in those rooms after a loved one has passed and everyone is sharing stories of the good times they had and people exchange some funny moments and we all laugh a little which is alway a nice respite from the hurt but it’s still there.

In this case, while there was perhaps a glimmer of hope given that Peter and John had, just this very morning, been to the empty tomb of Jesus and Mary had reported that she has seen him, there was still much fear, much doubting and much sorrow. Maybe some had even reached that point of accepting the defeat. “Well, we had a good run, we gave it our best shot but nothing left to do now but wait till the end.” How often is this us? Do you wake up or did you come here this morning through experience or your observation of the world and feel as though you are just waiting or perhaps even hoping for the curtain to close. Have your past mistakes, station in life, or current circumstances brought you to the place where you feel like locking yourself up in a room and white knuckling through to the end is the only path forward? Has pessimism, doom and gloom overshadowed you?

Or maybe you are just living and serving the best you can and need encouragement to keep running the race, keep pressing on in this upward call we have been given. In either case, the resurrection of our Lord and the words to his disciples still speak to us this morning.

Stand with me as we read John 20, starting in verse 19

John 20:19–23ESV

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

It Starts with Fear

It is the evening of resurrection Sunday and the emotion that is used to best describe the disciples is fear. They had locked themselves in the room because they were afraid. Why wouldn’t they be right? Everything that they had hoped for to that point had just come crashing down on them and they feared immediate danger, feared the future, and feared the unknown. What I want you to see is that this fear that starts our passage on this resurrection Sunday is a circumstantial fear. What I mean by that is the emotion was driven by the present circumstance.

Not unlike the fear they experience when they were in the boat with Christ and a windstorm swelled up and and they cried out to Jesus, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” I think it’s easy to chastise them after the fact and say “come on guys you were in the boat with God.” Even here in the upper room with the doors locked fearing their lives, with many questions, still mourning, we should look upon this situation with a bit of compassion.

I point to the compassion we should have for those men and the circumstantial nature of that fear to bring it forward again to our day today and say again the world is a scary place isn’t it. Everyone in this room has come to resurrection Sunday with some fear. We fear sickness, cancers or some other life threatening thing. We fear wars and tariff wars. We fear bills, we fear relationships, we fear death, we fear pain, we fear persecution. Insert any number of things in there because everyone has something this morning that they fear, something this morning that is burdening them, weighing on them, potentially pushing them to the point of saying, I’m just going to go lock myself up in a room and i’ll see you all next year maybe.

At least today, I want to approach all these things with the utmost compassion. There will be days and situations throughout the year where it will be appropriate to respond as the Lord responded to the disciples in the boat that evening when the wind was blowing saying, “Why are you so afraid?” Today though when he meets with us on the day he walked out of the grave and defeated death, this situation calls for something else as our text has presented to us.

Peace Be With You

“Jesus came and stood among them and said them, peace be with you.” If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times if we don’t look to the original language to help inform our reading of the text we not only run into interpretive issues but we risk missing the fullness of what is being communicated to us. Consider this word “peace”. For reference let me give you a couple other times this same word and form were used. 1

Thessalonians 5:23ESV

Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Hebrews 13:20–21ESV

Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

To use the definition pulled directly from the Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, this peace means this:

A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament εἰρήνη

a conception distinctly peculiar to Christianity, the tranquil state of a soul assured of its salvation through Christ, and So fearing nothing from God and content with its earthly lot, of whatsoever sort that is.

So when Christ arrives in their midst, the peace that he gives them is not some hippie peace, or complete resolution from all trouble or trial but rather he gives the most important peace we need, the greatest peace he can offer, peace with God. It is an objective peace that transcends circumstances and instead grounds it with right standing with God. The magnitude of this can not be overstated. We all come here today as I have said fearing something, burdened by something and despite everything I say this morning almost assuredly you will wake up tomorrow with at least some of the same burdens because in the resurrection we were never promised that all our troubles just magically go away. What we were given though is that even if everything and everyone in the whole world is against us and coming after us, because Christ has come out of the grave and has secured our reconciliation by defeating sin and death we have peace with God.

Romans 8:31–33ESV

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.

I don’t know about you all but that’s the peace I need this morning. That is the transcendent peace that I need to keep walking, to keep trusting, to keep living. That’s the peace that the disciples needed for the rest of their lives too, right? Because we all know that their lives just got better and better after Christ showed up in the upper room.

Consider Paul who says,2 Corinthians 11:24–28ESV

Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.

But this was the same man who also said,

Philippians 4:7ESV

And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

So what is he saying and what is Christ saying? The message is that this peace which surpasses understanding, this peace that guards our hearts and minds despite our circumstances, this peace that shows up when we are locked away in fear and frustration is the reality that in Christ and because of Christ you are at peace with God.

That’s really the peace that you want and need isn’t it? How often have we heard the stories of so many people spending their whole lives in pursuit of circumstantial peace. What do they always say after having grabbed everything they were after? Something is still missing… I thought all this and that would make me happy. I thought if I can just get past all this, just get through all this, just get to this level then I would be at peace. But it doesn’t come does it? The tragedy is, and why compassion is in order this morning, is that the peace we need, the peace we seek is not far off. As Paul tells the men of Athens that when we seek God, when in the dark we feel our way towards him, we find that he is not actually not far from each one of us.

What assurance do we have of this peace and this nearness of God? Paul says in that same section that God has given assurance to all by raising Christ from the dead. The reality of the resurrection is the assurance that we have peace with God. It is the assurance that whatever today or tomorrow or next week brings, we will get through it, we will persevere, we will arrive with our Lord in glory because in him, the one who lives, we live and move and have our being.

Because he lives I can face tomorrow

Because he lives all fear is gone

Because I know he holds the future

And life is worth the living, just because he lives.

We, much like Thomas, will say sure that sounds good but unless I see him, unless I touch him, unless I place my fingers in the marks on his hands I will never believe. We stubbornly reject the notion that peace with God confirmed through the resurrection is sufficient. Like Paul we plead and say Lord fix all this, Lord take away all that, Lord why is all this or all that happening. To which he replies “My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in weakness.”

We see in the cross the grandest display of God’s power made complete in weakness. A power that offers to us peace today, tomorrow and everyday after until the end of time because through that weakness and in the resurrection we have the full and final remedy to the only real problem we had, enmity with God.

It was our sin that fractured our peace. You can name anything and everything wrong with the world and our present lives and situations and it can all be traced back to sin and the effects of a sinful and a fallen world. Everything not perfect and not good comes from sin and the subsequent separation from God. It stands to reason then that they only real remedy and hope in the midst of all that which sin has caused is to deal with the root, i.e. the sin which put us here. That is why Christ went to the cross and the point of the whole bible and all of redemptive history, right? “Behold the lamb of God, who takes away everyone’s problems and makes our lives better.” Is that what John said? “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

Psalm 32:1–2ESV

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

Please behold the lamb of God this morning and receive the peace, that is eternal security of salvation, that is offered to us through his death and resurrection. That and only that will bring you peace and it will bring you something else too.

They Were Glad

John 20:20ESV

When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.

The wonderful thing this morning is that just like the peace of God that transcends our circumstances, the gladness given to us through that peace also transcends our circumstances. I read this week the last words of a number of Christian martyrs and while I will spare you that emotional roller coaster this morning, I will say this. Everyone I read, having been given the peace of God knowing they were truly at peace with God, left this world rejoicing. They displayed a gladness that could only be described as supernatural. In the direst and imminently terrible circumstances they leave us with an example of glad rejoicing in the surety of salvation in Christ.

I pray for a peaceful year for us church. I pray the Lord grants you blessing and favor and that you are healed from any ailments and kept free from any further. I pray the Lord protects us all, protects our work, protects our families, protects our church. I pray he keeps us in unity and harmony and even that he prospers us financially as a church and as households. I pray that in his grace he sees fit to do all those things but we must know that those things, in and of themselves will not make us glad.

True gladness and true rejoicing only comes when we see the Lord. When we behold the lamb of God who has taken away our sins. When we experience the peace that comes from having been made right with God. When we rest in our reconciliation and trust that our God will supply every need according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

So is the world a scary place? Are we often filled with burden and fear? Of course. But believe it or not, and I hope you believe it, the Lord has fully and finally dealt with all that on the cross and through the resurrection he has assured us that we indeed have peace with God. So what do I want you to leave with today? I want you to all close your eyes, take a deep breath. “Peace be with you.” May you know and believe and receive this morning that because Christ lives, you are at peace with a holy God for all eternity. We may not see him visually but may we be blessed to believe and to be glad and rejoice in that belief.

From the Valley of Vision – Hear this puritan prayer.

O God, most high, most glorious, the thought of Thine infinite serenity cheers me, for I am toiling, troubled and distressed, but Thou art forever at perfect peace. Thy designs cause thee no fear or care of unfulfilment, they stand fast as the eternal hills. Thy power knows no bond, Thy goodness no stint. Thou bringest order out of confusion, and my defeats are Thy victories: The Lord God omnipotent reigneth.

I come to Thee as a sinner with cares and sorrows, to leave every concern entirely to Thee, every sin calling for Christ’s precious blood; revive deep spirituality in my heart; let me live near to the great Shepherd, hear His voice, know its tones, follow its calls. Keep me from deception by causing me to abide in the truth, from harm by helping me to walk in the power of the Spirit. Give me intense faith in the eternal verities, burning into me by experience the things I know; Let me never be ashamed of the truth of the gospel, that I may bear its reproach, vindicate it, see Jesus as its essence, know in it the power of the Spirit.

Lord, help me, for I am often lukewarm; unbelief mars my confidence, sin makes me forget Thee. Let the weeds that grow in my soul be cut at their roots; grant me to know that I truly live only when I live to Thee, that all else is trifling. Thy presence alone can make me holy, devout, strong and happy. Abide in me, gracious God.

In the name of our resurrected Lord and King, Jesus Christ I pray. Amen.

Peace be with you!