The Rev’ Ivica Gregurec

Easter 2, Year A (2026)

Readings: Acts 2:14a, 22–32; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3–9; John 20:19–31

There is a story that the Anglican theologian and New Testament scholar Ian Paul tells about visiting a primary school assembly. He asked the children who their heroes were, then claimed he had met each of those heroes on his way to school that morning. The children grew increasingly sceptical. But then he turned the question: How would you feel if I really had met your hero and you had missed it? A small boy shot his hand up: “I would be very angry.”
Ian Paul reflects on that moment in light of Thomas’s story, observing that anger at the way life has turned out is far more common a barrier to belief than an actual lack of evidence, even when evidential language is what we naturally reach for.
That insight opens a door into the heart of today’s Gospel and into our own.

It is the evening of the first day of the week. The disciples are behind locked doors. John tells us plainly why: for fear. These are people who loved Jesus deeply, who had followed him, who had staked everything on him and then watched him die while they fled. Now they huddle together, waiting for footsteps on the stair.
Fear can do that to us, it locks us in. We know what locked rooms look like in our own lives: the silence after a diagnosis, the numbness after a bereavement, the paralysis after a betrayal. Communities of faith can lock their doors too: turning inward, afraid of a sceptical or hostile world outside. Locked doors are not an ancient problem. They are a thoroughly contemporary one.
And into that locked room, the Risen Christ walks. Simply present, standing among them. ‘Peace be with you’, he says. Not a reproach, not a reckoning, but peace.

This is the first and most important announcement of the resurrection: the One who was killed has not returned to settle scores. He shows them his wounds, not as accusation, but as recognition: It is I, the same One. The One you knew and loved and failed.
The disciples rejoice as they are commissioned. They receive the breath of the Holy Spirit, which is that, extraordinary echo of Genesis 2; the same divine breath that animated the first human creature is now animating the new creation community. They are sent: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’.
Disciples become apostles, those who have been learning are now being sent.

But Thomas was not there.
We should resist the easy caricature of ‘doubting Thomas’. Thomas is not a sceptic in the modern philosophical sense. He is a grieving, perhaps angry, man who has lost the person around whom his whole world was organised. When the others tell him, ‘We have seen the Lord’, his response ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails…I will not believe’ carries in it something raw and wounded. He has been through too much to be talked into hope by other people’s excitement.
Many of us know that place. The place where someone else’s spiritual joy feels almost like an insult to our pain, where the cheerful announcement ‘Christ is risen!’ from someone who seems to have suffered little, lands strangely on someone who has suffered much. Thomas is not a villain in this story, as he is really one of us.
Notice too that Thomas stays in those eight days of waiting. He does not leave the community even when he cannot share their faith. Thomas remained with the community of faith, although he couldn’t believe what the others believed, he did not leave them. That, quietly, is its own kind of faithfulness.
Eight days later, on another Sunday, another first day of the week, Jesus comes again, with the same greeting: Peace. And then he says directly to Thomas: ‘Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt, but believe’.

We do not know whether Thomas actually touched the wounds. What we know is his response: ‘My Lord and my God!’, which is the most exalted confession of faith in the entire Gospel of John. Thomas’s confession is explicit and remarkable: he acclaims Jesus as ‘ho theos mou’ (THE God of me) and Jesus clearly accepts it. His response fairly paraphrased as: ‘At last you have understood’.

The one who doubted arrives at the deepest confession and that should comfort all of us who have wrestled.

The passage we heard from 1 letter of Peter was written to communities scattered across Asia Minor, which were under social pressure, living as ‘aliens and exiles’ in a culture that viewed them with suspicion. Does this sound familiar? The writer offers them not a strategy for cultural influence, but a theology of joy in the midst of trial.
‘Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy’.

This is the condition of most Christian faith across history, and certainly of ours. We are not Thomas, who was granted a personal appearance. We are the ones Jesus speaks of at the end of today’s Gospel: ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’. Our faith is not lesser for being unseen faith. It is, in a sense, the faith Jesus specifically commends.
And the First Letter of Peter grounds that faith not in feelings but in an inheritance, something held in trust, imperishable, kept in heaven. In an age of anxiety about the future due to economic instability, ecological crisis, or fraying social bonds, the language of an inheritance that cannot be taken away speaks with quiet power. Our hope is not wishful thinking, it is, as Peter says, a living hope, born from a resurrection.

We heard Peter preach in our first reading, in his Pentecost address, where he stands up and speaks to the crowd in Jerusalem. This is the same Peter who, weeks earlier, denied knowing Jesus three times by a charcoal fire. Now he is proclaiming him publicly in the city where he was executed.
That transformation is itself a resurrection testimony. Broken, frightened people do not ordinarily become courageous public witnesses unless something has genuinely happened to them. Peter appeals to the Psalms, specifically to Psalm 16, our psalm today, to show that David himself had spoken of one who would not see corruption, one whose path of life would not end in the grave.

‘You will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor let your Holy One experience corruption’.
Peter’s argument is bold: David died and his tomb is here among us. David was speaking of another, of the one God raised up, of whom we are all witnesses.

In a world awash in competing truth claims, there is something striking about the apostolic community’s confidence. They are not offering a philosophy or a spiritual technique. They are making a historical claim: this happened, and we saw it. The Church’s proclamation has always rested on that concrete, embodied, vulnerable assertion.

We live in a cultural moment that has some structural similarities to the disciples’ locked room. Many people, perhaps some of us here, find themselves somewhere between the locked door of fear and the open door of faith. Institutions are distrusted and grand claims are met with scepticism. Within many churches, there is a temptation to bolt the doors against a changing world.

The Risen Christ does not wait for us to unlock the door from the inside. He comes and stands among us, he speaks peace before he issues commission. He meets Thomas in his anger and grief before he invites him to touch the wounds.
The resurrection does not demand that we pretend everything is fine. It does not require us to suppress our doubt, deny our grief, or perform a certainty we do not feel. What it asks of us is what Thomas ultimately gave: presence (staying in the community even when faith is fragile) and openness to encounter.

And when we encounter the Risen One, the wounds are still there. Christianity does not offer a God who is untouched by suffering. It offers a God whose resurrection body still bears the marks of crucifixion, whose wounds are not erased. They are transfigured – transformed from signs of defeat into signs of recognition, of solidarity, of peace.

‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’.
That blessing is for us. It is spoken across two thousand years directly to every person in this room who has ever sat with Thomas in those eight days of waiting, who has not seen, but who stays, and hopes, and sometimes manages to love.
The doors of this place are open and the breath of the Spirit is still moving. The peace of the Risen Christ is still being spoken into locked rooms everywhere and the invitation stands, as it stood to Thomas: ‘Do not be faithless, but believing’.