April 12, 2026

My friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

This morning’s Gospel passage is most often associated with “Doubting Thomas”.  It’s easy to understand why.  Thomas is a character we can all empathize with.  Who among us hasn’t doubted at one point or another?  Needed Jesus to show up to help sustain our faith?

So while you might be expecting a sermon about doubt, I’m not going to do that today.  Because there’s a lot more going on here than that.  We’ve reached the pivotal point in John’s Gospel – the place where all the threads are brought together.  The notes from this day in my Gospel of John class have “remember the themes of this Gospel” underlined. 

So I want to focus on how John’s Gospel comes together in the moment when Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on his followers and send them out with the authority to forgive and retain sins.  And I want to focus on this because it goes to the very heart of this Gospel’s message about what Jesus’ mission, the disciples’ mission, and our mission is – to bear witness of God’s love to the world.

So what is Jesus’ mission?  At the very beginning of this Gospel, John the Baptist declares “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”   Now, each of the four Gospels tells a different story about Jesus, and this is especially noticeable when it comes to the idea of sin.

If you were in church about a month or so ago, you would have heard me preach on sin in John’s Gospel.  So as a reminder: in John’s Gospel, sin isn’t simply bad behavior that breaks a moral or legal code – like lying or stealing or even killing.  In this Gospel sin is the unbelief – the lack of faith – that leads to alienation from God.  This underlying sin gets expressed in all the misbehavior that affects our relationships with other people.  And we end up trapped in all the ways that sin leads away from abundant life and toward death.

Jesus’ divine mission is to take sin away and restore people to relationship with God by moving people from unbelief to faith.  Jesus does this by revealing who this unseen God is through his words and deeds.  And John’s Gospel is clear: God’s true nature is a being of self-giving love.  This is what Jesus means when he says “for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life”.  God loves the world, and this is how God loves it – God sent Jesus to embody what divine love is.

And just how does Jesus do that?  In John’s Gospel Jesus performs signs, like the feeding of the 5,000 and the healing of the blind man, that show God’s love for the world and God’s will for us to have abundant life.  And Jesus’ crucifixion is the ultimate demonstration of that extravagant love.  When we see Jesus on the Cross, the crucified Lamb removes sin by conveying the divine love that creates faith in us.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus brings the disciples into this mission.  God brought Jesus into mission by sending the Holy Spirit upon him in the form of a dove at his baptism.  Now Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit upon his disciples and sends them out, just as he was sent by God.  But there is one critical difference between Jesus’ mission and the disciples’ mission that we share 2,000 years later.  The disciples aren’t sent out to take away the sin of the world.  They are sent to forgive or retain sins.

Jesus does not – he cannot – empower his disciples to take away the sin of the world by creating faith.  Because unlike God, we cannot will faith into existence any more than we can will the loaves to multiply or the dead to rise.  That is for God alone to do.

When Jesus empowers his disciples to forgive sins, this is more than simply forgiving misbehavior – although we are called to do that.  What Jesus empowers his disciples to do is to create the context where people can meet him.  And Jesus’ followers do this by living out the commandment Jesus gave them at the Last Supper – that they love one another just as Jesus has loved them.  That love and service is how Jesus’ disciples make God’s love known to the world.

By loving one another as Jesus loves, the faith community reveals who God is to the world– a being of self-giving love.  When God is revealed, people can enter into relationship with this God of limitless love and have the abundant life God wills for all of us.  We can be like the blind man whom Jesus healed, and choose a relationship with God when we see God’s love embodied in Jesus, and have our sins forgiven.  Or we can be like the Pharisees who refuse to see God’s love, and reject that relationship, and have our sins retained.

The mission you and I share in as disciples of Jesus, therefore, is not to be the judge of what is right or wrong.  Our mission to bear unceasing witness to the love of God in Jesus.  To – as our Collect for today says – show forth in our lives what we profess in our faith.  So that sins may be forgiven.

Loving people as Jesus loves is hard work.  It’s easy to love those who love us back.  It’s easy to love when it doesn’t cost us anything.  It’s hard to love those who don’t love us back.  Those we don’t understand.  Those who are different from us.  It’s so much harder to love when we have to give something of ourselves away.

And yet, that’s what Jesus is calling us to do today.  Jesus calls us to join him in embodying God’s love by loving the least, the last, and the lost – just as Jesus did.  To embody God’s love by humbly serving those we find hardest to love.  Jesus is calling us to embody God’s grace to a world that is filled with hardness of heart.  Even when it costs us something.

In joining Jesus’ mission of bearing witness to the God’s self-giving love, we create opportunities for the world to meet Jesus and come to faith through him.  So that, through God’s self-giving love, the sins of the world might be forgiven.  So that, through God’s abundant grace, abundant life might be had for all.

Amen.