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Lectionary for April 12, 2026
First Sunday of Easter
Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Psalm 16;
1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31
One of the great joys of being a father is witnessing my children become themselves. Their personalities are emerging and preferences manifesting. The oldest likes high fantasy and religious fiction. The middle enjoys emotion-based contemporary stories. The youngest likes Spiderman and Super Kitties. They are all into something different. And I, flawed as I am, know that one size doesn’t fit all. So they receive different books, different clothes and different encouragement. Jesus says in Matthew 7 that if earthly parents know how to give good gifts to their children, imagine how much greater and more appropriate are the gifts that our Heavenly Father will give? This week’s lectionary texts circle around gifts of inheritance from a loving God.
In my preaching on John 20, I usually trip over myself to defend Thomas after centuries of condemnatory preaching. This year, however, I’ll focus squarely on Jesus’ actions.
When Jesus first appeared to his disciples—Jews hiding out for fear of other Jews—he gave them two gifts. The first was his blessing of peace. “Peace be with you!” he proclaimed. Yet, this wasn’t a peace of stillness but one of action: “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” Jesus’ peace was not meant to be calm in a hideout but out in the world. It is the peace that the disciples need while proclaiming the good news of the kingdom in the face of a violent empire and religiosity. It’s the peace we need today when anti-Christ voices proclaim “Deus Vult/God wills it” for wars, violence and neighbor-hate that God certainly doesn’t will at all. Whatever else, the way of the cross is not about subjecting others to violent death for a kingdom that is not of this world. The peace to live out sacrificial love is Jesus’ first gift to his disciples.
The second gift is the Spirit. Jesus breathes her (the word is gender neutral in John 20:22, and “it” doesn’t feel right for the Spirit) out upon the disciples, just as God breathed life into the lungs of the garden human (Genesis 2:7). In John, the keys to the kingdom are given to the disciples who have received Jesus’ peace and the Spirit into their bodies. Jesus’ mission of love, reconciliation and noncondemnation (John 3:16-17) is the inheritance that the disciples receive in addition to peace and the Spirit.
When Jesus first appeared to his disciples—Jews hiding out for fear of other Jews—he gave them two gifts. The first was his blessing of peace. The second gift is the Spirit.
Yet, hundreds of years before this moment in a closed apartment in Jerusalem, God had already been giving an inherence of peace and presence. In Psalm 16, David writes that the Lord Godself is his inheritance and the outline of this inheritance is pleasing to the human king (5-6). Indeed, while surrounded by riches of a growing kingdom, David proclaims that he has nothing good besides God’s presence (2). God is continually before David and at his right hand (8). As David composes this song for fellow Israelites to express their gratitude and trust in God, he insists that God’s inheritance for him is God’s presence and the peace of knowing that God will not abandon him (10).
Peter takes up David’s psalm in his speech to Jewish pilgrims 50 days after the Passover that coincided with Jesus’ murder by the Romans. Peter told those assembled that Jesus’ death—and the collaboration between some Jews and the godless Romans who killed him—was predetermined by God. This man had been attested by signs of power from God. After his murder, Jesus was raised from the dead by God. Peter insists that David looked forward to the resurrection of Jesus as a fulfillment of God’s promise that one of his descendants would always sit on the royal throne. Thus, according to Peter’s preaching, Jesus received a double inheritance—a royal throne from his ancestor David and, much more than that, long awaited resurrection and power over death from his Father, God.
The letter of 1 Peter insists that the giving of an inheritance doesn’t stop with Jesus. Instead, Jesus passes on the gift of God to all those who are born again to a living hope in Jesus. Though the trials in this life are distressing (1 Peter was written to churches facing persecution for their faith), the inheritance of Jesus is imperishable, undefiled and won’t fade away.
Hear the good news: God is a good Father who gave Jesus victory over sin and death. Jesus gives us the Spirit and peace to continue his ministry of reconciliation, especially when times are tough.
