The community blessings

John 20: 19 - 31

19 On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. 21 Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” 22 And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” 24 Now Thomas (also known as Didymus[a]), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” 26 A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” 28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” 30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. 31 But these are written that you may believe[b] that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

​Everything in Christian life is about community, even God is a Trinitarian Community as we declare in our creed. The idea of a single faith full of individualism and selfishness is not coherent with the teachings of the bible, especially in the New Testament. One of the great differences about the structure of the Isarel and the Church, comparing the Old and the New Testament, is related to the sense of community developed for the first believers and the way that they changed the Jews tradition in a living experience with God through the community.
 
In the 3rd and 4th Centuries, and even to some extent today, the popular image of holiness was solitude, silence, and severity. The really (quote) "holy people" back then were those who lived like hermits, wandering in the desert alone -- fasting, praying, and having visions. Some of them went to extremes: eating nothing but grass, living in trees, or refusing to wash. Then Pachomius, an Egyptian soldier, came to faith in Christ through the witness of some Christians in Thebes. After his release from the military, around A.D. 315, he was baptized. Now, Pachomius was serious about his new faith and determined to grow, so he attached himself as a disciple of Palamon, an ascetic who taught him the self-denial and solitary life of a religious hermit. But Pachomius began to question the methods and lifestyle of his mentors. How can you learn to love if no one else is around? How can you learn humility living alone? How can you learn kindness or gentleness or goodness in isolation? How can you learn patience unless someone puts yours to the test? In short, he concluded, developing spiritual fruit requires being around ordinary, ornery people. "To save souls," he said, "you must bring them together." So Pachomius began to gather people together in communities where holiness was developed not in isolation, but in rubbing shoulders with flawed, demanding, and sometimes disagreeable people. As a result, followers of Pachomius learned to take hurt rather than give it. They discovered that disagreements and opposition provide the opportunity to redeem life situations and experience God's grace. Thus began the monastic movement in the 4th Century.
 
According to evangelical tradition, the appearance of the Risen Lord to the group of gathered disciples plays a fundamental role in the existence and future of the ecclesial community. John has unfolded the story into two episodes. The first (20, 19-23) follows the tripartite scheme of the appearance stories: Jesus, (a) who takes the initiative, (b) he recognizes the disciples, and (c) he entrusts them with a mission. It presents certain analogies with Luke's story, but it also has notable differences: much more sober, it does not have the same apologetic tendency; The gift of the Holy Spirit is not only announced but effectively communicated. The second episode (20, 24-29), typical of John, concentrates on the character of Thomas, the doubt before the Risen One that was mentioned in the Lucan story, but it is to lead to a Christological proclamation of a disciple and a word from Jesus destined to the believers of the future. The first Christian communities were portrayed in the ideal profile that the evangelist Luke drew of them in the book of Acts of the Apostles.
 
The text is based on three factors: the personality reflected by Thomas as an image of the believers for the present and for the future, the testimony of the resurrection of Jesus, and the sending of the disciples. Thomas appears as a representation of all the believers throughout the history of Christianity, requiring evidence of the faith even for Jesus. The encounters of Jesus with his disciples provoke the reaction in them of surprise, joy, and doubt. Is it possible? The little group debated between skepticism and faith; Thomas represented the group; even the rest of them kept silence, the difference between the attitude of Thomas and the disciple who in the sepulcher decided to believe is the situation of the church around the world. Every time we are challenged to believe, we are in the same situation as Thomas. The tradition of the story of Thomas highlighted the idea of touching to say, only is possible to believe that we experience through our senses, this is our human limitation, but the divine reality of God is superior to ourselves.
 
The gospel of John shows us through the figure of Thomas the path of faith that led that generation of Christians to contact the resurrected One. Thomas's faith was reduced to what he thought should be reality rather than what he saw. Tomas perceived how the lives of his brothers and sisters in the community were transformed by contact with the resurrected One.
 
Those who previously closed themselves off out of fear and hid from the authorities now openly undertake new works and missions. However, Tomás did not see it because all reality was limited to his poor immediate experience. The community had made a significant journey through a process of conciliation that had taken them from despair, guilt, and inconstancy towards a new way of relating in 'the peace of Christ'; When Thomas experienced the nails, wounds, and sores of Jesus in his flesh, he did not understand the salvific meaning of the resurrection. Tomas, after his encounter with the resurrected One, felt saved from his human smallness, his lack of understanding, and his lack of mental and emotional openness. For Thomas, salvation had passed through his own body.
 
The second aspect is about the testimony of resurrection; it was required for the first believer to sustain the idea of Jesus resurrected, then there was no doubt about all the signs that followed the resurrection, but all of them in community. A small community was witness of marvelous fact, as promised, Jesus was raised from the depth and the story was spread around the corners of Jerusalem and beyond. The gospel of John highlights the contradiction between apistos-pistos to believe or not believe.
 
Jesus’ living is demanding from Thomas and all his followers to believe in His resurrection because His signs, that is just comparable to the miracles narrated in the Exodus Book, were performed by God in favor of the Israelites. Through this passage, a new tradition was raised for the Christian community, as was taught in the Old Testament, which is now taught through oral tradition and through the first Christian community. Christ was raised from the tomb, and He lives. The third aspect of the text is in relation to the action of sending. Jesus appeals with authority to His followers to go beyond Jerusalem, being full of the Holy Spirit, they must take the message of His death and His resurrection through the villages and the world. A lot of people will be blessed by them because of His message, and they will believe in His resurrection. Other people will come to believe, and nations will come to the gospel of Jesus, thanks to the proclamation. This was the mandate that the disciples received from Jesus.
 
The first communities were born under the sign of the total community. The disciples of Jesus understand, from the resurrection, that their destiny is irremediably linked to the same options of Jesus, and they embark on a path of communion and total solidarity. The communities, despite sharing everything, show reluctance when it comes to accepting those who are of the same race. The church of Jerusalem resisted, at first, full communion with Christians from nationalities other than the Jewish one. The first community was perceived as Authentic Israel, not only explicitly from a theological point of view, but, above all, practically from a racial point of view. Therefore, it became necessary not only to transform economic knowledge but also to overcome cultural barriers.
 
We live in the era of the Social Community and in the Era of communications. New technologies make it possible to keep in touch and help us to find information even for the stranger aspect of human life. There are professional experts called community manager specialists in the creation of content to keep a virtual presence. The awareness of the Christian community was increasingly gained, and openness and adaptability were developed in all cultures.
 
In one community, the Village atheist was not a bad man. He just didn't believe. He wasn't interested in church...and there was only one in the area. And this church was, well, mostly a social club. Heartlessly and spiritually dead, no conversions or decisions for Christ had been made for some time. One day, the church building literally caught on fire, and everyone, the whole town, ran toward to help extinguish the flames...including the village atheist! Someone noticed the village atheist and hollered out: "Hey, this is something, this is the first time we've ever seen you running to church!" The atheist replied, "This is the first time I've ever seen the church on fire!"
 
The centrality of the kingdom of God was thematized in other ways in Greek, African, and Roman environments. For this reason, we began to speak of 'salvation' as the objective of the Christian faith. We must be careful because this change of terms did not lose the substance of the Christian faith centered on the imminent emergence of the reign of God. This was understood in the gospel as the definitive presence of God's will in human organizations so that through commitment, honesty, and effectiveness of action, God's justice became a reality in the human community. If salvation is spoken of, it was not in purely sectarian and individual terms, but as the vital experience of the realization of that hope that Jesus had made possible through his life, death, and resurrection. The communities discovered the importance of charting a path in faith that adapted to their new realities. Christians from the second generation onwards did not have any type of physical contact with the Lord Jesus; their starting point was the testimony of those who became listeners and servants of the Word. This is why the text of the First Letter of Peter places so much emphasis on the values of the community that he loves without having seen it.