Appearances Deceiving
By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
Easter Day, 2015
John 20: 1-18
Isaiah 25: 6-9
How do we believe what we don’t understand?
That’s what happens to the disciple who loved Jesus when he entered the tomb and saw Jesus’ shroud lying there where Jesus’ body had once lain. The Bible says, “He saw and believed,” but then adds, “They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” So the disciple who entered the tomb—John, the gospel writer—believes, even though he doesn’t understand. Apparently his theology is not sufficient to cope with what he is experiencing. Apparently he doesn’t fully grasp the intricacies of the Chalcedonian Definition of the Dual Nature of Jesus, or the Five Points of Calvinism. Worse, he doesn’t understand the most basic, basic, core principle of Christianity: the actual resurrection of Jesus our Lord. John, the apostle, the Gospel writer, the Disciple who Jesus loved, John himself doesn’t understand that Jesus is raised from the dead!
And yet, he believes.
John and Peter look into the tomb and see Jesus’ shroud lying there, and it calls to mind our lesson from Isaiah:
On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
The shroud that has covered up humanity—the shroud of death itself—has been abandoned. The shroud of death that has occluded human vision, that has made us unable to see beyond our brief fourscore and some years, the shroud that has made us fearful of the future and uncertain of the present—that shroud has been lifted, and John at last can believe, can have hope, can see beyond this world. He doesn’t understand, but because the shroud is lifted, he believes.
When John and Peter leave, Mary stands alone at the grave, weeping. The empty grave is the last straw for her. Remember what she’s seen: the politically and religiously motivated execution of Jesus. She’d stood at the foot of the cross and seen hope die a horrible painful death. Mary Magdalene stands in for all the women throughout history who’ve seen hope die—seen children and husbands disappeared in South and Central America; seen their children kidnapped and possibly killed by Mexican police working with drug lords; seen their daughters kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria, in the name of God, and their government unmotivated to do anything about it. She stands in for us, too, and the cynicism that we’ve developed watching politicians use religious language to alienate one constituency in favor of another and religious leaders use political means to foist their will on others; and watching politicians and corporate leaders on all sides simply throw the poor under the bus, take away our promised pensions, and limit our ability to find a job and make a living, all the time while we’re living under the cloud of terrorism. That empty tomb looks like all hope is lost.
And then Mary sees a person she mistakes for the gardener—until she realizes, contrary to anything reason or nature or history could possibly dictate or predict, beyond what politicians and religious leaders could possibly control, that she is looking at the Resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.
The shroud of death is lifted, and though she doesn’t understand—she believes.
In John, all the resurrection stories are in some way about the nature of belief. Belief is deeper than understanding. It is deeper than physical experience. It is more complex than intellectual assent to a series of theological assertions. Understanding is in fact irrelevant to belief. Jesus has been raised from the dead. It’s a mystery. Sometimes John presents Jesus’ resurrection as if it is a spiritual event, as if the resurrected Jesus is a spiritual being, and sometimes he presents it as if it is a physical event, as if the resurrected Jesus is a physical being. So is the resurrection metaphysical or physical? John doesn’t entirely understand it, and doesn’t seem over-bothered by it. Jesus’s resurrection is both and neither. The point is that it is real.
You can believe it without understanding it.
I have sometimes had the opportunity to introduce young children to The Lord’s Supper. I used to face this with some trepidation: do they really understand what’s going on? Do they understand the relationship between the bread and the body, the wine and the blood? But then I thought: Do I understand it? And the answer is no. I apparently understand it well enough to pass my Theology Ordination Exams–but no, I don’t understand it, not really. It’s a mystery. But I don’t need to understand it to believe it. And neither do kids.
Our belief in the Resurrection of Jesus is about far more than agreeing with all the points of the Apostles’ Creed. It is about hope. It is about believing that God has
destroyed the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
that God has swallowed up death forever.
It is about trusting that
the Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace? from all the earth.
A well-known pastoral counselor once wrote that the core of addressing human need was to address the human tension between fear and faith. Both are ways of understanding the world. Living in fear could be viewed as a logical response to a fear-inducing world. You could make the case that all the evidence points to bad news. We can let the shroud of death cover our eyes and make us blind to hope.
But faith is deeper than understanding. It is deeper than the evidence of our senses. Faith sees the world as it is, but sees beyond it. An empty tomb doesn’t mean a stolen body. It means the resurrected Lord.
Fear concedes to the world, concedes that the way things are has power over us and is beyond our control.
But faith can change the world. Faith does change the world. Because faith changes us. We don’t need to entirely understand what we have faith in to believe it’s true.
But that’s part of our problem. We want evidence that faith is true, but by it’s very nature faith is beyond evidence. As the book of Hebrews says, “It is the substance of things hoped for, it is the evidence of things unseen.” Faith actually exists to contradict and upend the evidence of our senses. Here’s the evidence: Jesus was killed by religion and politics. That’s a bummer. But here’s faith: God raised Jesus from the dead. Religion and politics can’t beat God.
And God is on our side. God loves us. Faith believes that, and doesn’t need to understand the mechanics of it. We know that love wins. Do we understand how love wins? Not all the time. How does love win against Islamic extremism? How does love win against racial misunderstanding and unrest? Haven’t a clue. But it’s high time we stopped trying to understand it, and started trying to do it. Whatever love is, it isn’t hating our Muslim neighbor down the street, or shooting a black kid in your neighborhood wearing a hoodie. That’s fear. Love is building bridges of understanding, taking the risk of being kind to someone you aren’t sure you can trust. I am appalled that many Christian leaders today advise us to arm ourselves against the coming apocalypse. That isn’t faith, that’s fear. How can they even claim to be Christian leaders at all?
We Christians are called to live in faith, not in fear. And we are warned that to live in faith is risky and uncertain. This is not a world that rewards faith in anything other than the material hope of money and power. But one of the most powerful acts of Christian witness of the early church was a mass act of love that took place in a time of apocalypse.
In 165 AD, during the emperorship of Marcus Aurelius, a plague devastated the Roman Empire, causing many to believe the world was about to end. It lasted 15 years, and decimated a third of the Empire’s population. A hundred years later, the plague came around again. As one commentator points out, not only were the government and pagan religions of the age unable to offer any hope, but the dominant philosophy of the day, Stoicism, demeaned compassion to others on general principle. Acting compassionately was a bad thing, viewed as putting oneself at risk for no positive gain.
So while Romans were fleeing the cities and leaving their neighbors to die, Christians stayed, and did what they believed in. They showed compassion. To quote Charles Moore in “The Plough” Magazine:
“In Rome, the Christians buried not just their own, but pagans who had died without funds for a proper burial. They also supplied food for 1,500 poor on a daily basis. In Antioch in Syria, the number of destitute persons being fed by the church had reached 3,000. …
“During the Plague in Alexandria when nearly everyone else fled, the early Christians risked their lives for one another by simple deeds of washing the sick, offering water and food, and consoling the dying.
“Their elementary nursing greatly reduced mortality. Simple provisions of food and water allowed the sick …to recover instead of perishing miserably.
“… Christian survivors of the plague became immune, and therefore they were able to pass among the afflicted with seeming invulnerability. In fact, those most active in nursing the sick were the very ones who had already contracted the disease very early on but who were also cared for by their brothers and sisters. In this way, the early Christians became, in the words of one scholar, ‘a whole force of miracle workers to heal the dying.’”
These aren’t the actions of people who live in fear. They aren’t the actions of people who live under the shroud of death. They are the actions of people who believe that God has lifted the shroud of death—that the resurrection of Jesus is a real event—that life after death is a reality, so they needn’t fear death. Not only do they not fear death, but belief in the resurrection calls them to fight death, even at risk to themselves. And they did this, by the way, despite the fact that they didn’t understand what they were dealing with! They lived in an age that didn’t understand the nature of epidemics; all they saw was death. They didn’t need to understand to have faith.
It was that willingness to live in love, without fear of death, but with faith in the resurrection, that led to the healing of a whole Empire—an empire, by the way, that had been dedicated often to persecuting them for their faith. They healed their enemies with resurrection love. That is faith.
We desperately need that faith today. The world needs us to have that faith today. Desperately. We have become accustomed to asking of providing for the needs of the poor, or showing compassion to those we fear, “What good does it do?” We don’t need to understand it, anymore than we really understand the mechanics of the resurrection. We just need to have faith—and do it. I’m not saying, don’t use common sense or best practices. But let’s stop living under the cloud of suspicion and fear that have too often characterized our age since 9/11. We’ve allowed the shroud of death to cover us again. But it is Easter. We live in resurrection hope—believing that God has destroyed
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
that God has swallowed up death forever.
We don’t need to understand how the resurrection works, how it came to be that Jesus rose from the dead, or how love and compassion and peacemaking and empathy can change the world. We don’t need to understand it. We just need to believe it. To believe it is to believe in God, the God who sent the Son of Man, Jesus, “Not to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved,” who “came that we might have life, and have it abundantly.”
Believe in the God who raised Jesus from the dead–because that God can change the world.