Peace Be With You: Faith, Doubt, and the Breath of God

On the evening of that first Easter, the disciples were not shouting "He is risen!" They were hiding behind locked doors, paralyzed by fear. Then, in the quiet, Jesus appeared among them, breathing peace into their panic and purpose into their uncertainty: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21, NRSV).

This passage is more than a resurrection account—it is the birth of the church’s mission. Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit onto the disciples (John 20:22), echoing the creation story in Genesis where God breathes life into the first human (Genesis 2:7). In this moment, the church is not just given peace; it is commissioned to carry that peace into a fearful world.

In the United Methodist Church, we understand the Holy Spirit as both the sustaining presence of Christ and the empowering presence that sends us out. The Book of Discipline reminds us that the Church is “a community of true believers under the Lordship of Christ. It is the redeemed and redeeming fellowship in which the Word of God is preached… and the sacraments duly administered” (Book of Discipline, ¶101). The risen Jesus entrusts this very work to ordinary people—people who had failed, feared, and doubted.

Speaking of doubt, Thomas is often labeled “Doubting Thomas,” but his story is crucial for us today. He was not content with second-hand faith. He wanted to see, to touch, to know for himself. Jesus meets him in that desire, not with shame but with grace. As theologian N.T. Wright puts it, “Faith in the resurrection is not just belief that something happened a long time ago… It is belief that the new creation has been launched, and that it is transforming the world, including us” (Wright, 2011, p. 144).

Thomas’s confession—“My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28)—is the climactic moment of John’s Gospel. It names Jesus not only as teacher or healer, but as divine. In this declaration, we see the full scope of the resurrection: it is personal and cosmic. Jesus is not only risen; he is Lord.

John ends this passage by telling us the purpose of the Gospel: “that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). That’s not just about intellectual agreement—it’s about trusting, living into, and being shaped by resurrection life.

This Easter season, we live in the tension between belief and doubt, fear and peace, hiding and sending. And yet, the Risen Christ comes to us still, through locked doors, through trembling hearts, offering his peace and his Spirit, saying: "As the Father has sent me, so I send you."

References

• The United Methodist Church. (2016). The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church. Nashville, TN: The United Methodist Publishing House.

• Wright, N. T. (2011). Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters. HarperOne.

• The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). (1989). Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

• The United Methodist Church. (n.d.). The Holy Spirit. Retrieved from https://www.umc.org/en/content/the-holy-spirit