Sermons
May 24, 2026 (Pentecost)
“Breathe on Me, Breath of God”
John 20:19-31
You might be thinking, “That Scripture sure sounds familiar; didn’t we just read it?” You’d be right: it was the text for the Sunday after Easter. At that time I focused mainly on Thomas. But I promised then that we would come back to this text for Pentecost.
Normally on Pentecost we hear the story from Acts 2, about the incident that happened on that Jewish holiday, known in Hebrew as Shavuot, which takes place seven weeks after Passover. That incident is dramatic, a hundred and twenty people in a room together and the wind blows inside the room, everybody’s head has fire on top of it, and they start speaking languages they’ve never studied, so that people outside who are visiting Jerusalem from all over the world can understand the good news of Jesus.
John’s version of the story could be titled “Pentecost for Introverts.” It’s the smaller group of disciples hiding in a locked room on Easter evening, none of them except Mary Magdalene having seen the risen Jesus yet, when Jesus suddenly shows up among them. His greeting is, “Peace be with you,” perhaps translating the traditional Hebrew greeting Shalom.
He says it again, and then something else happens—John’s version of Pentecost, quieter, more intimate, with Jesus still present with them, not a week and a half after the Ascension, as in Acts. And it’s interesting that the assignment Jesus gives the disciples here is very different from what they’re meant to do after receiving the Holy Spirit in Acts.
There Jesus tells them that after the Holy Spirit comes, they will be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. They will preach the gospel there in Jerusalem, and then branch out to not just Jewish folks but the whole known world—and the rest of the book of Acts recounts that adventure, beginning with Peter and John, and then picking up the story of Paul, which continues through the end of the book. There are great crowds, thousands of people becoming believers in a single day, the attention of the Jewish temple leadership and the Roman powers-that-be attracted, and not always in a good way.
But John is different. Not only do we not have a dramatic incident featuring wind and fire, we also don’t have a dramatic sermon preached by Peter or the church growing by thousands that day and every day afterward. Instead, Jesus simply breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Even though it’s much less dramatic than the Acts version, there is something extremely important going on here.
You will probably remember that first words of John’s Gospel are the same as the first words of Genesis: “In the beginning…” (in Greek en archē, or in the Hebrew of Genesis Bereshit). And you might remember me mentioning at some point that I see quite a bit of connection between the Fourth Gospel and Isaiah 55:10 and 11, which says,
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
The Gospel begins with “In the beginning was the Word…and the Word became flesh and lived among us…”[1], and Jesus’ last words from the Cross are “It is finished”—or, more literally, “It is accomplished.”
For John, Jesus is God’s Word, God’s entire essence (abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, full of grace and truth), made flesh. He is the best revelation we have of what God is like, God in human form.
And so here, at the end of the Gospel, Jesus’ version of the Pentecost story, which really isn’t Pentecost at all since it doesn’t happen on that holiday but on Easter evening, John reaches back into Genesis once again. This time he turns to the second creation story, which begins in the fourth chapter of Genesis 2:
In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up…then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.[2]
In order for the first human being to come to life, God breathes on him.
There’s a play on words here in both Hebrew and Greek. The Greek word pneuma and the Hebrew ruach both mean not just spirit but also wind and breath.
I think we also might make the connection to the story of the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37, in which the prophet sees in a vision a field full of scattered bones, perhaps following a battle where the casualties were so catastrophic that there was nobody left to bury the dead. God calls the prophet to speak to the bones, and they came together and then grew muscles and flesh and stood—but they were still dead bodies, until Ezekiel spoke to the breath, or the wind, which then blew into each of the newly re-formed bodies and they came to life.
Wind as a key element of Pentecost, and in John’s version Jesus’ breathing on the disciples, are meant to call to mind how the breath of God—the Spirit of God—brings new life. The church is born on Pentecost, in Acts 2, when the Holy Spirit comes to the 120 disciples in the upper room with the sound of a mighty wind. On Easter evening, in John 20, Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
And as I said, the assignment the disciples are given in John is different from the call to witness to the Good News of Jesus Christ throughout the known world, as in Acts. What Jesus tells the disciples here is to be about the work of forgiveness and reconciliation.
I think we hear what Jesus says here in a way that might not be what John intended originally. We hear it like this because of what Jesus says to Peter in Matthew 16:19, after Peter has confessed that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God.[3] He tells Peter that he will be given the keys to the kingdom of heaven, “and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” If we take that statement and make it the lens through which we read John 20:23, we hear it as Jesus telling the disciples they have the power not only to forgive sins, but also to refuse to forgive.
But that might not be correct.
Contrary to how the verse reads in the NRSV, the word sins is only in the verse once. It does not say, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Instead, a literal translation says, “Of whomever you forgive the sins, the sins are forgiven to them; whomever you hold fast [or embrace], they are held fast.”[4]
Jesus isn’t telling Peter and the rest of the disciples that they have the authority to withhold forgiveness. He is saying, “Forgive on my behalf by the power of my Spirit, and embrace people with my love.” And leave judgment to God.
Acts says, “Go out and preach and perform signs and wonders.” But John says, “Always love.”
Jesus says, “That’s what the Father sent me to do, and it’s what I’m sending you to do.” Remember back at the beginning of John 13, when Jesus gets ready to wash the disciples feet, the narrator says, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” He is God’s hesed, God’s steadfast love, active, stubborn, utterly reliable, in the flesh, and by the power of the Holy Spirit we are called to continue to make that love manifest in this world, by welcoming and embracing and holding fast as Jesus welcomes and embraces and holds us fast.
So maybe we say, well, surely there are people we shouldn’t welcome, right?
And yes, we might say that; if someone wants to be in our midst to do harm, we would probably have to take action. But short of that, who would we be justified in rejecting, given that Jesus welcomed even the one who denied knowing him to save his own neck and put him to work tending his flock?[5]
“Jesus breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. Of whomever you forgive the sins, the sins are forgiven to them; whomever you hold fast [or embrace], they are held fast.’”
Always err on the side of love and welcome, just as God errs on the side of love and welcome with each one of us, and you’ll never go far wrong.
[1] John 1:1, 14. All Scriptures in this message come from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).
[2] Genesis 2:4b, 7
[3] Matthew 16:13-20
[4] This argument was made by Sandra Schneiders in a 2010 presentation to the Catholic Biblical Association, and is quoted in this week’s Working Preacher commentary, which is found at https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3413.
[5] John 21:15-19