The Place Where We Come Close to God

June 8, 2025  John 20:19-23  

The Feast of Pentecost

“He breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’” John 20:22-23​

The Irish speak of “thin places,” where the distance between God and people is reduced, where the veil between the physical and spiritual world is thinnest, and it is easier to connect with the holy. Even the silence of thin places is different – it isn’t merely the absence of sound, but the presence of peace, where “still, small voices” come through not loud, but clear. Even the animals know there is something different about thin places, and seem to regard you reproachfully if you speak complacently, if you speak at all, if you don’t understand where you are.

The upper room where the disciples were hiding on the evening of Easter was not a thin place. It was thick with fear, and heavy with guilt. It was, that is, until Jesus quietly and seemingly out of nowhere was standing among them, and said simply, “Peace.” They saw his wounds, knowing that those wounds implicated each of them in the greatest crime in the world, and Jesus said again, “Peace.” He wasn’t there to condemn; he was there to announce mercy, to be mercy. Suddenly it became a very thin place indeed. Up to that moment, the disciples were unaware that the world they knew had died in the night. “What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth…. God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening, but the dawn” (G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p. 217).

Then Jesus breathed on them, as God had once breathed upon Adam, and “he became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). In thin places the breath of God isn’t just air. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” Jesus said. In that moment the veil fell away entirely, and the thin place became the very inner life of God. “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained” (John 20:23). The first and most obvious characteristic of the inner life of God is mercy – Jesus’ first word to the disciples after the resurrection, after all, was “Peace.” Now the disciples themselves were to be conduits of that mercy, instruments of that peace.

They were called to make thin places. They were called to be thin places.

The world has been trying for many generations now to reduce religion to ethics, to convince us that the fullest expression of faith is being a “basically good person,” – gentle, helpful, generous, tolerant, compassionate. The world has done this because it is easy to dismiss religion that is merely ethical. You don’t need religious faith to recognize the good, or to practice goodness, and so, says the world, you don’t need religion.

But we are not called just to be good. We are called to be thin places, revelations – burning bushes, pillars of cloud and fire, places where people can reach out and touch the mercy of God, places where the inner life of God dwells, places where the voice of God speaks, and banishes anxiety, guilt, and fear.

John the Baptist saw Jesus and said, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). John saw a lot more than just “goodness.” It was a very thin place on the bank of the Jordan River that day. That’s the kind of thing people always see in thin places. It is what they are hoping to see when they see us.