THROUGH UNTRUE

Often, we behave like the disciples as narrated in today’s gospel reading: “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, the disciples gathered together in a house, and they locked all doors for fear of the Jews” (John 20:19). This is what we also do when we are afraid. We shut the doors or hide inside ourselves, creating our own prison and refusing to come out.
The disciples were actually overwhelmed not just by fear, but also by guilt and shame for having abandoned Jesus during His passion and death. But in the same gospel, we read that despite the locked doors, Jesus suddenly appeared before the disciples and greeted them: “Peace be with you.” The Christ whom they saw as a failure and a victim, and whose death had crushed all their hopes, suddenly appeared before them, wounded but glorious.
This is the good news of the Resurrection. We cannot lock Jesus out because Jesus is never outside. Jesus does not come from without; he appears from within. This is what hope is. It is not an invasion of baseless expectations, but the breaking out of realizable possibilities.
Hope changes the way we look at things. It gives us new eyes to recognize the surplus of meaning amidst the abundance of nonsense which engulfs us. Despite our tendency to hide under a blanket of despair and self-sufficiency, God always finds ways to uncover and recover us.
It is quite clear that Jesus did not come to exact vengeance and say, “Now, I'll punish you or teach you a lesson so you will realize the terrible thing you have done to me!” He offered them forgiveness and peace and this must have destabilized them because He did not treat them as they thought they deserved. Instead, by forgiving them, he “called forth” the persons inside them whom they never thought existed.
Jesus set free the persons the disciples were afraid of becoming. Jesus was unbinding them from a whole series of things that they had thought were part of them. By His forgiveness, Jesus recreated and transformed them from frightened, remorseful, and guilty disciples into strong, courageous, and relentless preachers of the resurrection.
That is the meaning of grace. It makes us something more than we thought we were. When God forgives us, we are no longer conditioned by our past but by a future that God has forged for us. If, in the past years we seethed with regret because we had continually failed Him, now we are blazing with hope because we are aware that every road we take always leads to Him.
God knows that we may again betray, reject, or flee from Him, but like the “Hound of Heaven” in Francis Thompson’s poem, God tirelessly pursues us. So, when we decide to go back to Him, we don't need to run very far back to meet Him. We just have to turn around and He is there, with arms outstretched to welcome us home.
Even in our gloomiest and darkest nights, He appears as the Spirit who brings forth the strength that lie dormant within us. The Spirit of the risen Jesus strengthens and enables us to discover that we have what it takes to become the persons He wants us to be.