Locked Doors

Seven o’clock in the morning.

It’s light. The streetlights have gone off, the birds have started, and somewhere in the house the coffee is going. You’ve come through the night. Whatever kept you up is still here in the daylight, and the day is going to ask things of you anyway.

The book started last evening with two people hiding behind trees. It ends with a room full of people hiding behind a door.

It was a Sunday evening in Jerusalem, about two thousand years ago. Three days earlier the man these people had followed for three years had been arrested at night, tried in a hurry, and executed by the Roman government on a cross outside the city. Most of his friends had run when he was arrested. One had sworn he’d never met him. They’d watched him die, or heard about it from the women who stayed.

Now they were in a room with the door locked. The story says why. They were afraid. The people who had killed their teacher knew their faces.

That morning some of the women had gone to his grave and found it empty, and one of them said she’d seen him. Nobody in the room knew what to do with that. So they did what people do when they’re scared and nothing makes sense. They stayed together and kept the door shut.

And then he was in the room.

The story doesn’t say he knocked. It doesn’t say anybody opened the door. Jesus came and stood among them. And the first thing he said was this.

Peace be with you!

It’s worth thinking about what he could have said instead.

These were the people who left. They had promised to stand with him and then disappeared when it counted. If anybody had a speech coming, it was them. A lot of us would have opened with “where were you?”

He opened with peace. Then he did something that’s easy to read past. He showed them His hands and His side.

The wounds were still there. Whatever had happened on that Sunday morning, it hadn’t erased Friday. The marks from the nails were still in his hands. He didn’t come back looking like nothing had happened to him. He came back carrying what had happened, and he showed it to them first, as a way of saying “it’s me.”

That’s the last thing that was still true when peace came. The wounds stayed. The city outside was still dangerous. Nobody’s failure had been undone. And the first word in the room was peace.

There’s a line a little further on that most people skip, and it might be the most hopeful line in the story.

One of the friends, Thomas, wasn’t there that first night, and when the others told him, he said he wouldn’t believe it until he’d touched the wounds himself. A week went by. And the story says this.

Eight days later, His disciples were once again inside with the doors locked, and Thomas was with them.

Once again inside. With the doors locked. A whole week after peace had walked into that room, they were still locking the door.

It didn’t take the first time. Not all the way. They’d seen him, they’d heard the word, and a week later they were still scared enough to bolt the door. And he came back. Same room, same locked door, same first word. Peace be with you. Then he turned to the one who doubted and didn’t scold him. He held out his hands.

If peace has come to you once and then gone again, if you were sure for a while and then found yourself locking the doors, that’s in the story too. The story doesn’t treat it as failure. It treats it as the second visit.

What this says about peace

Every story in this book has had the same shape. The trouble was still there when peace came. The dinner wasn’t finished for Martha. The storm was still up when he slept through it. The raiders were still coming for Gideon. Peter was still in chains. Hannah still had no child when her face changed. The fields were still empty when Habakkuk wrote his song.

And every time, peace came the way it comes in that room. As something said to someone. From outside them. Usually to people who hadn’t earned it and weren’t expecting it.

Earlier in the same book, the night before he died, Jesus had told these same friends what kind of peace he meant. Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.

The world gives peace when things are arranged the way we want them. The bills paid, the test clear, the people we love safe and agreeable. That kind of peace is real, and it’s good, and it lasts exactly as long as the arrangement does. He was describing a different kind. The kind that walks into a locked room while everything outside it is still wrong.

There’s one more thing he said, earlier, long before that room, to a crowd of ordinary working people. It might be the best one-sentence summary of the whole book.

Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

He goes on. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. A yoke is the wooden bar that goes across the necks of two oxen so they can pull together. He didn’t offer people a life with nothing to carry. He offered to pull alongside them, and he said he was gentle about it.

That’s not the end of work. It’s the end of working alone and on watch.

The story of that room has a line between the two visits, almost thrown away. After the first Peace be with you, the friends saw him, and the story says what happened to their faces.

The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.

Nothing outside that door had changed. They rejoiced anyway. That’s what this book has been about from the beginning.