As were the first disciples, so we are sent out on a great mission to make disciples of all nations. We are sent out each with our own style of evangelisation and our own very individual array of gifts. There should be no stopping us, and yet there is. Like it or not, we all live in little prisons of our own making. We might live in a prison where every corner of our life has been consumed by the need to make money leaving no room for anything else. We might live in a prison where household chores dominate from morning until night. We might live behind the locked doors of inadequacy, inferiority, self-doubt or fear. We might have spent our whole lives building prisons brick by brick so that whatever dreams we might once have had, we are now totally incapable of realising them.

In today’s gospel we find the disciples locked away for fear of the Jews, and we must surely be able to empathise with them. But then comes the good news. Jesus shows us that the Holy Spirit is the exit from the hopelessness of being locked into a fearful and damaging past. The Holy Spirit is not shy of the boundaries that people erect. The Holy Spirit is not halted by locked doors or locked hearts. We may have spent our past making feeble attempts to love, to forgive or to make special things happen, but today’s exciting message is that the past does not have to equal the future. The Spirit which filled the apostles and enabled them to change history is the very same Spirit which has been given to us. If we believe in, and trust in the Holy Spirit, we can make things happen.

We can of course spend more of our short lives locked away, doubting as Thomas did that anything miraculous could happen. At the end of the day the proof of the pudding would be to step out of our self-made prisons and allow the Holy Spirit to work in our lives.