Presence and Absence

Good morning! It’s good to be back with you all.

I’m honestly glad to be here on this second Sunday of Easter. This Sunday doesn’t always get a preacher’s best work—we’re tired after Holy Week, sometimes even away—but even in a different kind of exhaustion, I’m grateful to sit with this text and wonder what it has to say as we begin the Easter season.

What strikes me about this moment for the disciples after the resurrection is how different it is from how Easter is celebrated. We mark Easter with beauty and joy—flowers, music, alleluias.

And yet the story we are given this morning is not triumphantly joyful. It begins as a story of hiding. Of fear. Of confusion.

In the Gospel of John, this takes place on the very evening of that first Easter day. Mary Magdalene has gone to the tomb, found it empty, encountered Jesus, and told the disciples.

And still—they are inside, behind locked doors. They are afraid.

Afraid of those who killed Jesus. Afraid of what comes next.Afraid because everything has changed—and yet, nothing has.

The systems of power are still in place. The empire is still the empire.

Everything has changed. And nothing has.

Absence defines this gathering: Jesus is no longer with them. In this locked room, even their safety feels fragile, and the future is unclear. Even together, the room is shaped by what is missing.

And then, Jesus comes and stands among them. He does not wait for things to settle. He does not fix the situation from a distance. He places himself in the middle of their fear, their confusion, their lack and he says:

“Peace be with you.” Presence, before anything else. Not the removal of absence, but God entering into it.

We are perhaps most familiar with this story because of Thomas. Thomas, who is often called “doubting Thomas,” but in John’s Gospel he is also the one who speaks what others hesitate to say—who names confusion and who follows Jesus even when the path is unclear. We do not know why, but Thomas is absent from this first encounter with Jesus.

When he does rejoin them, Thomas lives in the loneliness of “everyone else saw it”, in a different reality than the others.  The others live with what they have seen; Thomas lives with what he has not seen.

So often we define Thomas by his doubt, but his doubt, his seeking for understanding is one, totally human, welcomed by Jesus and two, a consequence of his absence. He longs to understand, to experience what  the others have for himself: “Unless I see…I will not believe…” he says. This isn’t just Thomas being skeptical. It is more than that. It is a refusal to accept someone else’s experience as a substitute for presence. He longs not to just hear about presence, but encounter it himself.

In this moment, this locked room contains both those who have experienced Jesus and the one who has not. The community doesn’t resolve this tension. From what we know from the text, Thomas is not excluded, those who have seen don’t try to convince him of what they have seen, they don’t recreate the moment for him. They simply remain together across unequal experiences of presence. Still today, the Church remains a place where some have encountered Christ clearly, and others perhaps have not.

A week later, the disciples return to the same room, Thomas with them. And Jesus comes again. He simply enters the room as he did before. And again he stands among them and says, “Peace be with you.” This time, he turns toward Thomas. Not with correction, and not with distance, but with attention—meeting him in the place of his uncertainty. “Put your finger here,” he says. “Look at my hands.” What Thomas is given is not a different Jesus, but the same presence returning—this time close enough for the one who was not there.

We don’t know if Thomas actually touches Jesus’ wounds. What matters is that Jesus offers them. They are the physical marks of absence—of death, of violence, of what has been taken away. They are, quite literally, places where something is missing. And yet they are not hidden. They are revealed within the risen body of Christ. So resurrection does not mean the undoing of absence. It means that absence has been taken up into presence. The wounds are not erased; they are integrated. They become part of how Christ is known. The presence Jesus offers is not a return to what was before. It is a presence that includes what has been lost—and refuses to let it be forgotten.

Jesus then proclaims gently, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” We often experience this as Jesus correcting or scolding Thomas. This is not a correction of Thomas, but an opening outward—a widening of the story. An invitation to John’s audience, years later, and us, generations later, to allow Thomas to be a representative character, one who stands in—is present in the story—for the sake of future believers and seekers who were absent from that physical moment. We enter this story, and all of scripture, as those who weren’t physically present, who didn’t see what the disciples saw. What begins with Thomas is not a rejection of others’ testimony, but a reminder that even what we receive through others can still become real for us. And because this is true, we are not excluded from presence, we are invited to it in new ways: through community, story sharing, and the breaking of bread.

Through this rhythm of absence and presence, something begins to soften in us. We start to see how quickly we assume that Christ is only present when everything is clear, or that absence means we have been left on our own.

In that locked room, in Thomas who was not there, in the return that comes again a week later—Christ keeps stepping into what feels unfinished, unsteady, unresolved. Not once, but again and again. And each time, what the disciples thought was absence turns out to be the very place he stands among them.

We begin to notice this pattern in our own lives. The moments when we miss what God is doing, or when others seem to have seen something we have not. The moments when peace feels far away, or when we find ourselves on the outside of a story we wish we had been present for—and then, unexpectedly, discover that we are not outside at all.

There is a quiet joy in recognizing how absence and presence coexist, and that we exist smack dab in the middle of them.  Because this story does not tell us that absence disappears, that everything is resolved. It tells us that Christ keeps showing up in the places we assumed were empty. To the same rooms, to the same fears, to the places where he was missed before. This story, this rhythm, reveals something stranger and more joyful: That Christ keeps returning--standing there, alive, uncontained, speaking peace into what still feels uncertain. What begins in fear ends in recognition. What begins in absence opens into joy. And there, in the middle of it all, he stands among us. And he speaks: “Peace be with you.”