When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” (John 20:19)
John’s account of Jesus’ first resurrection appearance to His disciples begins with a line that may sound jarring to our ears. They were locked away “for fear of the Jews”.
Some translations soften this to “for fear of the Jewish authorities” to make it sound less antisemitic, and “Jewish authorities” is historically correct, of course, but the softer translation risks obscuring the deeper ache that is here in the text. The disciples were themselves Jews. Their fear was not of some foreign enemy but of their own people, and that is a very particular kind of pain.
We all have a sense of who ‘our people’ are – the tribe that gives us identity, belonging, and safety – a people whom we call home. Whether we define ‘our people’ by race or culture or religion or country of birth or by the football team we support, having a tribe is a fundamental part of what it means to be human.
Tribalism becomes toxic, of course, when we start thinking of our tribe as being better than all the other tribes, but the longing for a people, a home, a community where we are known is essential for all of us, and John tells us that the disciples no longer felt safe at home. They were disoriented, displaced, and unsure where they belonged. They had followed Jesus to the margins of their community, and now Jesus had gone, leaving them suspended between a past that they could not go back to and a future that was completely invisible to them.
That sense of alienation is not foreign to me. I grew up in a Christian household where my father was a prominent church figure until his marriage to my mother collapsed. The church—our tribe—effectively ostracised both my father and my mother. My father eventually found his way back to the church, but my mother never did. She died young, still wounded, still feeling unsafe among the people who were meant to be her spiritual family.
People who know my parents’ story are often amazed that I opted for a career with the same church, and then, of course, ended up having a very similar experience. I guess I’m not the first person to repeat the mistakes of their parents.
It is a terrible thing when your own people turn on you, and I imagine the disciples huddled in that locked room, clinging to one another, unsure as to who they were anymore. They’d staked everything on Jesus. Then Good Friday came—violent, bloody and disillusioning. They’d gambled their lives on red. The wheel spun black. Jesus was gone. They didn’t know how to move forward, and they were too afraid to go back.
This is the emotional landscape into which the risen Jesus steps. And it is the same landscape Thomas walks back into when he returns to the group and hears what he missed, and we know his response:
“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
We call him ‘doubting Thomas’, but it’s not as if Thomas is a sceptic weighing evidence. I’m pretty sure he was shouting those words, “… I will not believe.” He was angry, and he was angry because he felt that not only had his own people turned on him, but that God had abandoned him too!
I’m not suggesting that Thomas thought of Jesus as God at that stage. Even so, I have no doubt that after years of being with Jesus, Thomas had come to realise that Jesus was the closest thing to God he had ever known, and then Jesus up and left!
Of course, Jesus didn’t leave Thomas and the disciples deliberately, any more than my mum left me as a boy when she died of cancer in her 30s. Even so, the feeling of being left behind was real, and I’m sure Thomas, similarly, felt abandoned by Jesus and, almost certainly, abandoned by God.
“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
I still struggle with fears of abandonment – with doubts. I wonder all too often whether we’ve been abandoned by God, especially when lying awake at night.
Even this past week, when I heard a late‑night report claiming that Russia had delivered a thousand nuclear warheads to Iran and that Israel had issued a 48‑hour ultimatum, I lay awake for hours. The next day the story vanished—fake news, I guess—but my fear was real. It wouldn’t be accurate to call it “fear of the Jews” but fear of what the state of Israel, Iran and Russia could do if things get out of control.
In retrospect, I didn’t need to lose sleep over that report or any other. Whether the news is true or false, whether conflicts escalate or subside, whether ceasefires hold or collapse—I don’t really need to worry because Jesus has not abandoned us.
Thomas came to understand that. When he and Jesus finally had their moment, it wasn’t a doubter being convinced of the truth. It was a relationship being restored.
“Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!'” (John 20:28), so perhaps he had come to think of Jesus as God. Either way, what we see in the climax of this story is Thomas’ restoration of trust in both Jesus and in his Heavenly Father.
Jesus has not abandoned us. It often feels as if He has. Life becomes violent, bloody, confusing. We feel betrayed, devalued, alone. But then, as with Thomas, Jesus comes to us. He shows us His hands and His side, breathes peace into our locked rooms. And in that moment, we realise that He actually never left.
And that is God’s promise to us – not that life will be safe, nor that our people will always hold on to us, but that Jesus will come to us in our fear, our grief, our sleepless nights, and speak the same words He spoke to His disciples back then:
“Peace be with you.”
first published on Father Dave’s blog – April 11th, 2025
