John 20:20 (NRSV)
"He showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord."
It's the evening of the first Easter Sunday, and the disciples have the doors locked. Why? They fear the authorities. Their teacher had been arrested at night and executed in public, and everybody in Jerusalem knew who his followers were.
It shouldn't have been a surprise. Mary had come running that morning saying, "I have seen the Lord." Peter and John had found the tomb empty. And Jesus told them it would happen. They locked the door anyway.
I'm not going to lay any guilt on them — I can't say I'd have done any different. Believing is harder than it looks from where we sit, knowing how the story ends.
Then, from out of nowhere, Jesus is there. Standing among them. "Peace be with you," he says, and before anyone can get a word out, he shows them his hands and his side.
Nobody asked him to. Nobody said, "Prove it." John doesn't give the disciples a single word in this whole scene. Jesus takes over the room.
Why? Because he knew them and he knew what their first words would be. Peter is standing right in front of him. The last thing that passed between Peter and Jesus was three denials and a crowing rooster. If the disciples speak first, the scene becomes about their failure — the explanations, the apologies, the accounting of where everybody was on Friday. Jesus doesn't let that conversation start.
You can't have a conversation with terrified people. Luke, telling this same evening, says they were startled and frightened, sure they were looking at a ghost — and that Jesus asked them, "Why do doubts arise in your hearts?" In your hearts. The question was never spoken out loud. Fear only has two questions: Am I safe? Is it true? Peace answers the first. The scars answer the second.
Only then comes the joy. John's word is echarēsan (eh-KHAH-ray-sahn), and that word should ring a bell. Three nights earlier Jesus had promised these same men, "Your grief will turn to joy... and no one will take your joy from you" (John 16:20, 22). A different form of the same word. Now the promise lands right on top of them. Fear turns to joy in the space of one verse.
We don't get scarred hands held out for our inspection — just the story, two thousand years later. But a week after this, Jesus tells Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe" (20:29). That blessing is for us. And it's not a consolation prize. The joy was never in the seeing; it was in the Lord they saw, and he's just as risen now as he was that evening. Peter, who stood in that room, later wrote to believers who didn't: "Although you have not seen him... you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy" (1 Peter 1:8). Same joy. Same Lord. Their joy arrived by proof; ours arrives by promise. Jesus calls that blessed.
And the joy was never meant to stay put. "As the Father has sent me, so I send you" (20:21). The sending took them out the same door they'd locked, back into the same city that scared them. Sending doesn't usually mean leaving. For most of us it means the neighbor across the fence, the coworker carrying grief, the person behind us in the checkout line. The door doesn't change. The direction we're facing does.
So take the joy and let it loose — not by adding one more thing to a full week, but by letting it work in what's already there: how we listen, how we show up, how we love the people God has put within reach. Joy has never been good at staying in the room. It wasn't designed to.
Let us pray:
Father, thank you that you speak peace before we start with our reasons. Give us the joy that rests on your promise, and send us through our own front doors with it — to the people already within reach. Amen.
This devotional was written and read by Cliff McCartney
Grace for All is a daily devotional podcast produced by the members of the congregation of First United Methodist Church in Maryville, Tennessee. With these devotionals, we want to remind listeners on a daily basis of the love and grace that God extends to all human beings, no matter their location, status, or condition in life.
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