Better at Creating a New Normal
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”
John 20:19-23 (NIV)
When life drags you through some of these sinking moments and deeply painful experiences, when fatigue seems to have squeezed out the little optimism and hope you had left, when your reserve tank has now run out of fuel and the stall has given way to a complete stop, you may feel you can’t move forward anymore, you can’t find any more reason to stay positive.
You may say to yourself, “I don’t know how to process this, and if I could, I wouldn’t know where to house these thoughts and emotions because they’re too tough, too painful, too confusing, too fatiguing, too draining, and too disappointing.”
The first thing we must notice in this text is that Jesus appeared in His resurrected body. The writer thinks it is instructive to remind us that Jesus appears in a locked space in His resurrected body to the timid and fearful disciples, saying “Peace be with you.”
The lesson is to grab the important blessing of His appearance in that resurrected body and to define your own peace by it. Jesus is teaching and inviting us to consider that resurrection is not to be seen or embraced as a one-time event. Resurrection was the release of a spiritual norm.
You live with resurrection capacity.
All of us have areas of our lives that have experienced death. And here’s what He’s saying: Everything in your life that has ceased to be as God designed can be resurrected to fresh participation in the ongoing movement of creation in your particular context.
His appearance was not just a demonstration or confirmation. It was an invitation. What’s the invitation? Here it is:
Child of God, you are invited to move in your life from evidence of belief in Jesus to belief as an expansive norm. How expansive? So deep, so wide, so applicable, so necessary, so relevant, so needed, that there is no part of your life that you will just accept as okay, outside of the design of God’s will for it. Meaning, you don’t care what has experienced death in your life; you don’t settle for it. Whatever it is, relationship, ambition, dream, or vision. You don’t accept that which seems insurmountable at any cost because God has given you resurrection capacity.
