The Triune God in Desperate Times
John 20:19–23
The following sermon was preached at 14th Street CRC in Holland, MI on June 7 (Trinity Sunday), two weeks after the death of George Floyd.
Dear People Loved by God,
The 20th century Swiss theologian Karl Barth routinely and famously advised his students to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. The image is a bit overused now, but it’s not a bad one. You get the point.
There are always two worlds involved in any sermon—the world of the Bible and the world in which we live, right now, in the present—and the pastor needs to be conversant in both. Which is precisely where I feel so vulnerable today, so paralyzed knowing how to respond to the newspaper in my hand, to which anything I might say feels so trite on my lips, so far from my own experience, so far from my own privilege. But it isn’t just that the pastor needs to be conversant in both. It’s that the book in this hand needs to be able to speak a word of gospel to the paper in this hand. It needs to be able to confront it, to expose it, to call it to repentance, to speak resurrection over it. The Bible can never just be a book that spoke, it must be a book that speaks, that speaks to the fierce urgency of now with the fierce urgency of then. The Word must leap the gap.
It must speak to a country whose streets are filled with protesters protesting generational, personal, and systemic violence against black and brown people, or it is a dead letter. It must speak to the mothers and fathers of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd—human beings, image bearers of God, whose bodies were sacrificed on the angry altar of violence and suspicion, the fruit from which humanity seems perpetually to take and eat. It must speak to every black mother and father terrified of a similar fate for their child, or it is just a dead letter. It must speak to every young black man who has ever had to avoid certain neighborhoods while out on a run, or who has ever dressed up to go to the corner grocery store at night so as to not have his intentions mistaken. And it has to speak to police officers, themselves now frequently stereotyped, their careers, character, and vocation called into suspicion. And it has to speak to a largely white congregation, full of good intentions, full of good people that, I suspect, like their pastor, feel paralyzed by the newspaper right now—the world a minefield in which it’s easier to crawl into the fetal position and wait for it all to pass, to retreat into comfortable silence. It has to speak to that congregation, or it is just a dead letter.
So let us open it, let us sit under it this Trinity Sunday, for the Bible is never just a prop; it is the living Word of God.
Barth didn’t just want the preacher to hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. He wanted the pastor to use the Bible to interpret the newspaper—to have a mind, a heart, an imagination so captured and aligned with this (biblical) story that the pastor could interpret, affirm, challenge, and answer the questions of this (newspaper) story, or offer it better questions than it knows how to ask.
So let us hear it, this living Word, from John 20:19-23.
On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.
Three observations—three things I notice—and then the gospel for our moment at the end.
First, let us not whitewash the terror that fills the room into which Jesus steps on that first Easter night: “The doors were locked for fear of the authorities” (v. 19). You don’t lock the doors if you feel safe. But let’s bring it still closer to home. Let’s slam the Bible into the newspaper.
By the time you get to these locked doors and these huddled men in Jerusalem that Sunday night, the capital city had been boiling over for seven days. Jerusalem was burning after a week of riots, marches and protests had left tables overturned in the Temple and the lead protester on a cross, because, let’s face it, the Roman state, to preserve its all-encompassing power, had every reason in the world to sacrifice one Jewish male in order to preserve its fragile peace through a heavy-handed exercise of law and order.
“The doors were locked for fear of the authorities.”
If it happened to Jesus, could it not happen to them also? Ours are not the first streets filled with protesters crying for justice. Ours are not the first homes locked up and huddled in for self-preservation. Our black and brown sisters and brothers are not the first humans in history buffeted by unjust systems of oppression maintained through the rhetoric of peace for the majority. The earliest events of the gospel played out on streets just like New York City, Minneapolis, and Washington DC.
Let’s not whitewash it. The doors were locked because they feared for their lives.
And it is into that boarded-up house, second, that the resurrected Jesus steps.
“Jesus came and stood among them” (v. 19).
It’s the first time the disciples had laid eyes on Jesus since his death. All they had to go on at that point was a visual of the empty tomb and the word of a few angels and an untrustworthy woman. Shaky evidence at best.
And then Jesus steps in, becomes incarnate to them in that locked-up house and in their fear, and announces the word that stills all fear and begins to set things to rights: “Shalom.”
Not simply “peace”—as in the cessation of violence. And certainly not the Roman peace through violence. No, the Hebrew shalom. There in that locked-up house, at the end of a week of riots and protests that culminated in his death, Jesus speaks the word—just like his Father did at creation—of the renewal, the wholeness, the resurrection of creation itself, of a world made new.
“Shalom be upon you.”
The Bible and the newspaper slam into one another. It’s right at the corner of 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis that Jesus announces the renewal of all things.
But this isn’t a cheap peace that Jesus announces—crying “Peace, peace” where there is no peace (Jer 6:14; 8:11). This isn’t a cheap plea for the cessation of violence because we cannot bear to look at the injustice wrought on George Floyd’s dead black body—a plea for peace born out of white discomfort. No, the one who announces “shalom” has holes in his hands and a gaping wound in his side. The one who declares “peace” was executed by the State. This shalom is not sentimental. It has gone to hell and back, and has come to announce the first day of a new week to terrified disciples in a locked-up house.
Jesus still bears his wounds on the other side of the resurrection, and so too must his church: “We are always carrying in our bodies the death of Jesus,” Paul writes, “so death is at work in us, but life in you” (2 Cor 4:10-12).
Is there a more challenging word the white church in America could possibly hear than these words of Paul? That we are not to ally ourselves with idolatrous visions of peace through strength, peace for our good at others’ expense, but that we are meant to suffer—to carry around the death, the wounds, of Jesus in our bodies for the life of the world? For these wounds which we carry bear witness to the type of shalom that Christ has brought—a peace not as the world gives, not through the world’s means, not as the world could imagine, but peace through a cross. This is unthinkable on the world’s terms—a march to the Stone Table so that winter might thaw, and spring might come again.
“Peace, shalom be upon you,” Jesus says. “Here, look at my hands, my side.”
In a terrified and locked-up room (first), Jesus comes to them (second), and then, third, he sends them.
“Shalom be upon you. As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (v. 21).
He will not let them stay cloistered. The locked-up house is where this all begins, but it is not where it will end. For how will the world experience shalom if the church, which is itself supposed to be the witness of an alternative society comprised of every tribe, language, people and nation (Rev 7), stays cloistered and refuses to testify to the powers that be that their time is up, that the kingdom of God is near, and that the time has come to repent and to throw away their oppressive weapons of war, for justice is about to roll on like a river, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream (Amos 5:24)?
If the church can’t or won’t testify to it, embody it, then who will? How will the world see the shalom of Revelation 7 and 21 if the church is more segregated than society, if the white church stays actively or passively silent in the face of the sin of racism, personal and systemic, if Satan has his way with us rather than the Son and Spirit having their way with us?
“As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you”—a multicolor people into a racist world. And then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
It’s Trinity Sunday, the hope of the world. Here’s the gospel at the end. Do you notice who is here on this first Easter night, at the dawn of a new creation? The same One who is there at the dawn of creation itself: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
If humanity, in all its rich, beautiful, and remarkable diversity, is going to hold together rather than splinter apart, if there is to be unity amidst this remarkable diversity, it won’t come through a constitution or a flag, but through the gospel of Trinity Sunday, through the one who is a diversity in unity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons, one God—in whose image we are made.
We are made to bear witness, to image, a Three-in-One God, a diversity in unity, a communion of love at the heart of the cosmos. We have the theological resources for this desperate moment if only we will testify to the world that the Triune God is the storehouse of riches where all that this world desires can be found.
It’s not that easy, of course. The beautiful vision of Genesis 1—of a human community that images the Three-in-One communion of divine persons—almost immediately falls apart. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain cries, Abel’s blood spilled before him. Our country’s response has largely echoed that refrain, for 400 years, at the spilling of black and brown blood. We are not our brother’s keeper.
Which is why constitution and flag are not our final hope, and why Genesis 1 is not Scripture’s final answer to the sickness that plagues humanity.
John 20 is, when Father, Son and Holy Spirit descend once again into a locked-up house, and give birth to a new community from every language, tribe, nation and tongue—a human community baptized by the Spirit to image the divine communion, the triune God, in the world.
May God in his mercy make us so.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
This resource is part of the series More than Imago Dei: Theological Explorations on Race. Click here to explore more resources from this series.
Benj Petroelje is the Pastor of 14th Street Christian Reformed Church in Holland, MI. He holds a PhD in New Testament from the University of Edinburgh. Benj is a member of the St. Peter Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
