My oldest daughter, who is a graduate student in Chicago, tells me . . .

My oldest daughter, who is a graduate student in Chicago, tells me that there are certain sections of the city—nowhere near her apartment, thankfully—where people have as many as three, sometimes four, locks on their doors.  Growing up in Detroit that doesn’t necessarily surprise me.  Indeed, as a kid, I can remember feeling just a little bit safer whenever I heard my father go to the door in the evenings and turn a series of deadbolts.  “Click, click, click.”

John’s Gospel tells us that, on Easter Sunday evening, the disciples did much the same thing.  They hid behind locked doors “for fear of the Jews.”  But I can’t help wondering if there might have been more to it than that.  Maybe, in addition to being afraid of the Jews, they were also worried about the scorn and ridicule of the crowds.  Maybe they were embarrassed by the way they had behaved during Jesus’ final day.  After all, one of them had betrayed him, one of them had denied him, and the rest of them had abandoned him.  Maybe they weren’t just afraid; maybe they were ashamed.

Garrison Keillor once said, “We always have a backstage perspective of ourselves.”  That is, we allow our audience to see only the carefully-arranged stage out front.  But behind the curtain, there are all kinds of other things strewn about—old failures, past hurts, unmentionable guilt, unrelenting shame.  Of course, we try our best to make sure those things stay hidden from public view.  We turn more and more deadbolts on the door of our lives—click, click, click—in order to prevent our true selves from ever being discovered.  We think that, in so doing, we are keeping the rest of the world out; but in reality, we are keeping ourselves locked in.

At the heart of John’s Easter evening narrative is the message that the risen Christ always comes looking for us.  Even when we lock ourselves away for fear of how we’ll be perceived, or whether we’ll be accepted, or what people will think of us if they knew what was hidden behind the curtain.  Even then, the risen Christ walks right through the locked door in order to find us!

According to John, the first thing Jesus says to the disciples is “Peace be with you”—meaning, “All is forgiven, you can stop hiding now; you have been set free.”  Notice that he doesn’t scold them for being afraid, or call them out for hiding behind locked doors.  What he does is release them from their imprisonment.  Just as he got up and walked out of that tomb, Jesus gives the disciples permission to unlock the door and experience resurrection!