To give you peace, Jesus turns up his volume — John 20:19–31

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.”

Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. John 20:19–31

To give you peace, Jesus turns up his volume.

I. His forgiveness drowns out fear,

II. His presence drowns out unbelief.

Everyone wants peace. Many people go to church looking for peace. Churches in our international church body, the Wisconsin Lutheran Synod, apparently know this. You can go on our church body’s website and search for churches, did you know this? It’s a good way to find a church when you’re traveling, you can put in your location and you can find the nearest Wisconsin Synod church where you know that God’s truth and love will be proclaimed. But you can also search churches by name. And so I did a little research. I typed in church names like “Hope” and “Faith” and “Love” and “Resurrection” and “Life,” and guess which name had more than those. “Peace.” There are 54 Wisconsin Synod churches throughout North America named “Peace Lutheran Church” or something like Abiding Peace. Now, to be fair, Peace gets edged out by churches with the name “St. Peter Lutheran Church.” And actually there’s more than 100 “St. Pauls” and “St. Johns.”

But that actually might prove my point. Because I’d bet that those St. Someone churches were founded decades ago, in the 1800s and the first chunk of the 1900s, when people were naming their churches they would commonly use names of the apostles like that, names that people associated with truth in their minds. But recently, “Peace” has been making up some major ground as far as church names go. Because these days, people want peace.

And everyone is looking for peace. Where do you go to find peace? What comes to mind when I say “peaceful”? Maybe you think of a quiet morning reading a novel in a coffee shop. Maybe you think of a long sunrise run on the lakefront trail—or maybe a short run. Maybe you think of a camping trip in a national park. Maybe you think of the 20 minutes in the morning when you open up your Bible and maybe your journal before your day starts and you spend time alone with God in Word and prayer.

But that’s the key—before your day starts. All of those things that I mentioned, and maybe the thing that came to mind for you when you think of peace, could also be described by another word; quiet. In other words, different and separate from the hustle and bustle of your regular routine. An escape from the noise of your regular life. When we look for peace, we think of quiet, we think of an escape. And that’s a gift from God every time we find it.

But what about the rest of life? Are the noisy parts of our lives doomed to be peace-less? Can the stresses of work and social life and all the different hats that we wear ever bring us peace? Today we will see that no, they can’t. But we can have peace even there. Not because Jesus eliminates the noise, not because he swoops in and erases deadlines or fixes your family drama, but because he brings you a peace that is so loud that it drowns out the noise. A peace that does not require escape from the noise, but stands in the middle of it and speaks louder than it. Jesus gives you peace by turning up his volume.

I. His forgiveness drowns out fear.

That’s what he does in our reading from John 20. Our reading spans eight days, from the first Easter Sunday to the Sunday after Easter. And on those days, Jesus’ disciples were dealing with two things that commonly fight against peace in our lives: fear and unbelief. The ten disciples who were gathered in that room on Easter Sunday were afraid. They knew in their head that Jesus had risen, they had heard the testimony of the women who had actually seen and touched his risen body and heard his risen voice; Peter and John at least and maybe the rest of them too had seen his empty grave. And yet they still were afraid.

They were afraid of the Jews who had opposed Jesus. See, they had not only seen with their own two eyes Jesus’ empty tomb; they had seen with their own two eyes a detachment of soldiers come to arrest him. They had heard with their own two ears the reports of the mob that shouted “Crucify him!” And they knew that he had been sentenced to death. So even though they knew in their heads that Jesus was victorious, the fear of his defeat still gripped their hearts and drove them to try to isolate themselves to a quiet locked room.

We know that fear. The fear of being on the “losing side” so to speak. We know in our heads that Jesus is alive, we sing about his resurrection, but the noise of the world around us threatens to push that peace out of our hearts every day. We look around and we don’t see a world where everyone recognizes Jesus as resurrected Lord of all. Instead, people look to themselves as Lord. They determine what is best for them and they chase after it. Our relationships are full of people who want to seek their own good instead of our good. And so, we can fear that if we don’t respond in kind, if we don’t fight fire with fire, if we don’t look out for ourselves and our own interests, we will lose.

This can play out at your work. Maybe you’re in a highly competitive workplace, or maybe your workplace is quitter—but even there, the desire to be competent drives us. And so there’s this pressure to be in the right. And when something goes wrong, the temptation to avoid responsibility comes in. Because apologizing feels like losing.

This plays out among your families even more often. Even in Christian homes, conversations can easily become dominated by an imaginary scorecard of who’s right and who’s wrong. And so we’re tempted to justify instead of apologize, to accuse instead of forgive. Because once again, apologizing feels like defeat.

Fear has a voice. And it speaks loudly: protect yourself, prove yourself, don’t lose.

It spoke to those disciples so strongly that it drove the peace of the resurrection right out of their hearts. How did Jesus answer the disciples’ fear? With some volume. He did not quietly whisper in their ears peaceful words. He did not leave them alone in the upper room to provide time for some self-discovery. He appeared dramatically among them, in fact John doesn’t even say that he quietly unlocked the door and snuck in, he makes a point to say Jesus appeared in their midst. He revealed himself right in the middle of their group, quite the jump-scare! And the first word out of his mouth to them after he rose from the dead is: Peace.

And here’s part of the issue: when we think of peace, we often think of “quiet.” But that’s not a great synonym for the Bible’s idea of peace. A better synonym for what Jesus brought to the disciples that day might be “harmony.” Harmony, as in when all your relationships, at work, at home, wherever are working well and as they should so that everyone involved can flourish.

And the peace Jesus brings brings that harmony, because the peace that Jesus won us makes us victorious at all times. Fear shouts that we need to fight for ourselves, but Jesus shouts forgiveness—and his voice is louder. The fact that Jesus had risen again, the fact that he took on death and won, shows you that those who believe will be victorious over death too. But there’s more than that to, Jesus won the victory over sin. He took your sins of trying to speak your righteousness more loudly than the next person and he suffered the punishment for them. When he revealed himself to the disciples as victorious over death and sin, when he showed them the nail marks in his hands and feet that proved that death and sin could not defeat him, he showed that his voice of forgiveness for all sins drowns out any accusatory voices. So, it makes sense that as Jesus appeared to his disciples, the peace, the harmony, the forgiveness he gave them led naturally to giving them the commission to go and forgive others. If your sins are forgiven, there is nothing left to prove and nothing left to protect. The more you tune in to the peace, the harmony he’s won for you, more you will be able to step out of the fights for who’s best in your relationships and forgive instead. The more you tune in to his peace, the more you will be confident enough to admit your faults and break the cycle of the noisy blame game.

But there’s one disciple who wasn’t present that evening. Jesus left the ten, and at some point Thomas returned to the room. They couldn’t wait to share with him the good news! Jesus had appeared, he had spoken peace, and he had driven fear out of their hearts. But Thomas didn’t share their peace.

II. His presence drowns out unbelief.

We know Thomas as doubting Thomas. But “doubt” might actually be too soft a term to describe what was happening in Thomas’ heart. Literally, when the disciples tell him about their newfound peace, Thomas says in the strongest words that language can muster, unless I see and feel for myself, I will never believe. And when Jesus appears again, again not quietly but suddenly and dramatically in their midst, Jesus diagnoses Thomas’ spiritual state not just as doubt but as unbelief. What led Thomas to do this? Well, in a way, it was a fear similar to what the other disciples felt. A fear of being on the losing side. A fear of everyone else being right and us being wrong. A fear of believing in this physically impossible idea that a dead man walks alive.

And we’re familiar with this fear as well of course. We’re familiar with the fear that we’re wrong about our faith. Maybe you grew up in a Christian household and Christianity was all you knew, until at some point you came to the realization that there’s actually all kinds of belief systems out there. And you heard that there’s all kinds of different denominations. And there’s all kinds of super intelligent people who think that the Bible and Christianity are nothing more than beneficial stories at best, and at worst outdated moralizations. And we fear that we’ve built our lives on something that’s wrong.

How did Jesus answer Thomas’ fear that led to unbelief? Again, not with a quiet reassurance that he should feel validated in his refusal to believe, not by saying, “take your time Thomas, belief should come at your own pace.” No, he turned up the volume again! He once again greeted everyone with his peace, and then he turned to confront Thomas. The verbs that Thomas used with hesitation, unless I see the nail marks and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, Jesus turns into forceful commands: put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting, or stop unbelieving, and believe. And sure enough, Thomas’ fear collapsed into these words: “My Lord and my God.” Which, by the way, is the clearest profession of belief any of Jesus’ twelve disciples speak in the gospels.

Jesus does the same for us. Now I’m not saying that it’s wrong to be curious about our faith or about the Bible. I might even go far as to say it’s ok to be skeptical to a certain extent. To really dive into the historicity of the Bible and of Christian faith. To make sure that what we believe is correct. And we do that often. We love learning about historical proofs for the resurrection of Jesus.

But there comes a line where skepticism stops listening to Jesus. And we have to ask ourselves whether it is faithful curiosity or the loud voice of the fear of being wrong that is leading us to examine these things. Because if it is the latter, Jesus does not negotiate. He treats us like Thomas, demanding that because he is risen, therefore believe.

But make no mistake, it wasn’t just Jesus’ stern commands that overwhelmed Thomas’ heart with belief. It was Jesus’ presence with Thomas in the flesh, graciously showing that he was risen indeed and that he does live to drive away our fears, wipe away our tears, calm our troubled hearts. And the fact that he is present with you is what floods your heart with belief too. He is present with you not in the flesh as he was with the disciples, but he is very much present in something you can touch and see and hear at any moment of any day—his Word. And maybe that’s why John records this story of Thomas as the very last story in his book. Because he follows up the story of Believing Thomas by telling us why he wrote his gospel: that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. John wants you to turn up the volume on God’s Word. He knows that God’s Word offers you a peace that you can enjoy not just during the quiet moments of your life, but during the stressful ones too. God’s Word offers you a peace that drowns out the fear that taking responsibility for our sins will make us lesser people. God’s Word drives out the fear that everyone else is right and you are wrong about Jesus. And that’s because, in God’s Word, both in hearing his Word and tasting his Word in Jesus’ body and blood as we’re about to do, in God’s Word Jesus gives you himself. And his forgiveness and his presence give you a peace that is louder than anything else in your life.