Easter week is typically a recovery week for clergy and church musicians and their households – along with the many volunteers who give of their time to allow us to offer such a full range of worship opportunities in Holy Week. We bask in the light of resurrection to be sure, but we also unwind, look back and digest a full succession of liturgies from the week before. The feeling is at once: joy, relief, fatigue – and wonder. It is a wonder – and each year that goes by more so -- how it all comes together and works the way it should for the people who gather here.

If we ever doubt why we do what we do as a community of faith, it comes into sharp focus by Easter morning. The stripping of the altars on Thursday, the starkness and the emotion of Good Friday, the waiting in darkness of Saturday with the coming of the first Alleluia, and then Sunday -- the best Sunday of the year -- gathers people far and wide. The Paschal mystery – as we refer to it – is summed up by Archbishop Desmond Tutu – words that I selected for this morning’s reflection: “Goodness is stronger than evil; Love is stronger than hate; Light is stronger than darkness; Life is stronger than death; Victory is ours through Him who loves us.” We experience the world and all that is in it tipping towards and drawn closer to the power of God. The tide turns.

Our gospel story on this first Sunday after Easter never varies in our three-year cycle. Always John 20:19-31. It is always John’s version of Easter evening: fearful disciples behind locked doors, a peace-wielding, Holy Spirit breathing resurrected Jesus, and a doubting follower named Thomas (called the Twin). This is often the week when preachers speak of the role of doubt in our faith. How doubting at times is not always a bad thing and in fact is a normal reaction to a mystery larger and deeper than our human minds can fathom. Doubt is not the enemy, preachers contend. It is not all-together wrong to wonder about the great doctrines of the church and to ask ourselves again what the ancient creeds mean for us today. Fear is the opposite of our believing – not doubt.

We should pay attention to those rare occasions when the lectionary has us read the same lesson on the same Sunday each year. Why is this story so important for us as we still stand in the light of Easter morning? Are we not all a bit like Thomas? Are we, as some have contended, Thomas’ other twin? Is that the point of this literary redundancy each year? Don’t we all want to believe in God and the Risen Christ, but would find it a whole lot easier with some clear signs and tangible proof that God is alive and real and not a projection of our helpless imagining? We want to see credentials. We want to follow, but we want to follow the right person for the right reasons.

Notice that as the risen Jesus enters the room, and offers the same expression of peace that we offer to one another at each Eucharist – the peace of God which passes all understanding -- he shows him his hands and his side. He knows before the disciples know or ask. God moves towards us before we move towards God. This for me is a sign and gesture of God working with us in Christ where we are at the moment as believers instead of where we should be in the future. O.K. – here are my wounds. Here are my credentials. It is me.

The English medieval mystic Julian of Norwich spoke of her vision of the suffering of Christ. She wrote down what she experienced this way,“Then with a happy face our Lord looked into his side, and saw what was there, and rejoiced. And with this look he helped my understanding to look through the wound to what lay within. And then he showed a fair and lovely place, large enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and love. And then the Lord spoke,‘Look how I loved you.’”

If Thomas the doubting twin is the Rorschach test of what it means to be a believer of the resurrection – what we need in terms of facts on the ground or eye witness accounts or scientific backing to ascend to belief – then Julian’s vision is a pointed reminder of what lays behind – the reason for the marks of the nails in the hands and whole in the side of Christ. It is this connection we have to make.

The work of the church, perhaps its greatest work, is to remind others and ourselves by word and deed that we are beloved by God. The picture that we get of the early church in the Acts reading, is one of a group of believers trying desperately hard to live out what is means to be loved; they understood it by sharing what we had. This sometimes utopian vision of Christian living – when everything that was owned was held in common and there was not a needy person among them – well that may not have held up long before giving way to individual impulses. But it does remind us that we can never walk away from the needs of others.

Behind and within all of scripture – behind and within it all – is this drumbeat and repetitive message. “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8). No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” 4:12

This is what Jesus wanted to say again to the fearful followers in that locked room. The scars and the hole in his side were a way to say, I know your sufferings. I know your hurts. But live through them as I have. Learn from what scars you. Notice what scars and wounds others – and be gentler with those you meet.

In this journey of life in which we are all pilgrims – visitors to a holy place – when we can put aside our many fears and insecurities and doubts just long enough – stop acting like the huddled disciples and more like the followers to would later carry the message of the risen Christ beyond Jerusalem and Galilee and into the world -- God reminds us that there is a large, warm, protective place for us to enter.

In these 50 days of Easter, if we allow one dominant thought to stay with us, may it be this; God is alive, living and working within us.