Beyond All Hope
John 20:1-18[1]
In the face of all our recent discussion about
suffering, it may seem like faith in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead on that
first Easter morning might have little relevance for our lives right here and
right now. In comparison with the darkness we may have had to endure in this
life, something that happened so long ago and so far away might simply not seem
to make a real difference for us. Beyond that, when you look at the massive
suffering and violence that seem to dominate the world in which we live, it’s
all too easy to conclude that money and power have the last word in our world.
These harsh realities can make faith seem at best quaint and at worst a
delusion. The fact of the matter is that we live in a world where it’s not easy
to truly embrace the faith that Jesus’ death and resurrection brings new life
to us all.
I’m not so sure the original witnesses to the
resurrection had an easier time with faith. Our Gospel lesson for today
presents several different responses to the resurrection on that first Easter
Sunday morning. Mary Magdalene seems to react initially with fear when she sees
that the stone has been moved from the tomb. So she runs back and tells the
Apostles. In response, Peter and John run to the tomb. John the beloved
disciple is the first one to reach it, but he hesitates to enter, perhaps out
of the Jewish concern for becoming “unclean” by contacting a dead body. Later,
when he does enter, the Scripture says that he “saw and believed.” When Peter
gets there, he sees the empty tomb, and examines the wrappings that had been
used to prepare Jesus’ body for burial, but it seems he doesn’t understand what
to make of all this. The Gospel reminds us that “they did not understand the
scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9).
Three people, witnessing the same event, with
three different responses: fear, confusion, and faith. I think the first two
responses pretty well explain themselves. When confronted with the empty tomb,
I think it would have been only natural for those who had witnessed Jesus’
terrible death only days earlier to react with fear or confusion. It’s John’s
faith that seems hard to explain. What was it about what he saw that enabled
him to believe? After all, he saw the same thing Mary and Peter did. It could
be that John did remember and understand that Jesus had said he would have to
suffer and die, but afterward he would rise from the dead. Or maybe John was
just one of those people for whom faith comes easily. Maybe the difference was
in the way he was able to see what they had all witnessed.
When Mary returns, she is still overwhelmed
with grief and fear. By some accounting it may have been only about 36 hours
since Jesus had died. She meets Jesus, but she doesn’t recognize him. She
mistakes him for a gardener and actually asks him if he’s taken the body
somewhere. It’s only when Jesus calls her by name that she recognizes him and
believes. It takes his voice, his initiative to reveal himself to her, for her
to get past her grief and fear so that she could see in such a way that she
could recognize that Jesus was alive and standing right in front of her. Once
she was able to get past her own feelings and see clearly that Jesus truly was
alive, she returns to the Apostles again and tells them she’s seen Jesus.
When I think of this story, I wonder how the Apostles
reacted when Mary first told them she had seen Jesus. Did some of them think
she was crazy, or simply hallucinating out of her extreme grief? Were some of
them confused? Again, the Scripture states, they didn’t yet understand that
Jesus would rise from the dead. I think it’s a pretty good bet that some of
them doubted—seriously doubted—that what she was telling them could be true. As
some of the disciples unknowingly told Jesus later that evening, “we had hoped
that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). The implication is that now
that he is dead, that hope is gone. In the same place they reported that some
of the Apostles had gone to the tomb to “see for themselves,” but they didn’t
see Jesus (Luke 24:24). It would seem that there was a wide variety of
responses to Mary’s story, but it doesn’t sound like faith was the primary one
at first.
The plain truth is that faith is difficult for
some of us. There are all kinds of reasons for that. Some of us simply cannot
get past bad experiences we’ve had in church. Some of us may have a more
questioning bent of mind, and we’re more prone to doubt than to believe. Others
may simply find faith to be mostly irrelevant to the reality of life. When our
experience in life has been mostly tragedy, suffering, hardship, rejection, and
pain, faith can seem like just so many pretty words. They may mean something to
others, but they don’t have any real significance for life as we have
experienced it.
More than that, the whole way of thinking with
which many people approach life in this world these days can make it difficult
to believe that something that was so out of the ordinary, the idea that a man
who was tortured to death and was buried in a tomb somehow came back to life,
could truly make any difference for us at all. We’re taught to believe that
what we can see and touch is what is real. While faith has been around for
millennia, from the perspective that only what we can observe is real, it’s easy
to think of faith as “wishful thinking” or perhaps just plain superstition.[2] Almost like the equivalent of believing in vampires and ghosts. While vampires
and ghosts may make for some interesting entertainment, almost nobody seriously
believes in them. Why should it be any different with Jesus?
I think what makes the difference is
encountering Jesus, alive and present with us here and now. That’s what made
the difference for most of the disciples on the first Easter. You and I aren’t
going to be seeing him like we can see one another right now, the way the first
disciples met Jesus. I’m talking about an experience where we know in our
hearts that we have been sustained by a love that is beyond what our senses can
perceive.[3] When we have an encounter like that, it changes the way we see things, whether
we’re prone to believe or more prone to doubt. It enables us to believe that
God is not limited to the way things normally work in our world. An encounter
with the living Christ in our lives can enable us to see that that God already
working to make all things new in hidden ways (and in some not so hidden ways) here
and now among us. It enables us to embrace the good news of Jesus’ resurrection
as a promise that points toward a future filled with hope and joy and life. Death
is not the ultimate reality for us; life in and through the risen Jesus is the
final word. Meeting the risen Christ for ourselves makes it possible for us to
see our lives from a perspective of faith that goes beyond all the hopes that
our normal everyday experiences may offer us.
[1] ©
2024 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by
Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 3/31/2024 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Cf.
Shirley C. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, 182: “when we experience
tragic suffering in our own lives and see so much tragic suffering in the
world, we wonder whether all talk about a loving and just God is not in fact
... wishful thinking.”
[3] Cf. John Caputo, On Religion, 91, where he lays out the options:
believing that the world of faith is what is “really real,” believing that
faith is “unreal” in comparison with the observable forces at work in the
world, and a third way, in which faith is directed toward the reality that is
beyond what our senses perceive as real. He also says that (ibid., 125) in the
face of the “specter of a heartless world of cosmic forces,” “Faith is faith
that there is something that lifts us above the blind force of things, ....
That there is something ... or someone ... who stands by us when we are up
against the worst, who stands by others, the least among us.”
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