First reading: Acts 4:32-35
Psalm: Ps 118:2-4,13-15,22-24
Epistle: 1 John 5:1-6
Gospel: John 20:19-31
But these are written that you may come to believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and that through this belief you may have life in his name.
Christ is risen! Alleluia!
He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Things are written so you may come to believe, but who can?
We wonder.
In this week after Easter we may feel a little like the disciples, with a sense of wonderment. That wonderment is mitigated by the long history, the things that have passed since Jesus’ resurrection. We try to understand things in light of what Jesus said, did, and accomplished. Chief among these are His sacrificial death and His resurrection on the third day. Yet we still wonder. We still have a hard time understanding this resurrection thing.
How can this be?
Imagine sitting in your living room and suddenly a beloved relative, who has died, is standing before you. Imagine too that you know that you are sober and sane. Would you be able to wrap your mind and emotions around that experience? Would you know what to make of it, or how to react?
I think that I would be much like the Apostles. I’d be running around in circles, like a dog chasing its tail, not knowing what to do. Imagine what it was like for the Apostles. At first sullen, then things unexplained, and then WOW! I would hope that my relative would say —peace be with you.— Maybe that would calm me down.
After time passed, and our shock subsided, we might find context for the experience. At least we have knowledge of Christ’s rising. We have context based on the testimony of the witnesses, and our faith, that Jesus conquered death. Jesus is our context for life after death.
We know death.
The Apostles had no context. The Jews who lived during Jesus’ time on earth saw death as finality. Of the Jewish groups, only the Pharisees believed in the resurrection. The Sadducees believed that the soul died with the body. Jewish sacred texts and literature have little to say about what happens after death. The Torah and other Jewish writings on death indicate that the soul goes to Sheol, where the soul continues to exist in some way, but not consciously. The Apostles likely thought that Jesus went to Sheol, to the place of the ancestors, or simply was no more.
We all know death and loss. Death is ever real for us as well. We are saddened by death, depressed by death, and hurt by the death of our loved ones. Death is real because we can see it; we have personal knowledge of its implications, its pain.
We do not know death anymore.
There is Jesus! Imagine the wild scene when Thomas returned.
Thomas! Thomas! Guess what! Wow! You missed it! Jesus! Oh man! You shoulda been here…
Once he cut through the ruckus, and got everyone calmed down enough to understand what they were saying, Thomas would probably have said: Jesus what?
The others were trying to explain the thing we look at so calmly: Jesus lives, He has been raised, death is no more. The Gospel tells us that the Apostles said those things, but we read it in the context of history, and a recitation of words. The Apostles didn’t know the words, they didn’t have the history, and nothing in history could have prepared them for this.
History is the problem.
Jesus has been looked at, disected, examined, philosophized over, theologized on, and has been run through the gauntlet of human examination from the moment he was conceived in the womb of our Blessed Mother, Mary. In biblical studies, a field caled hermeneutics, there are at least six major approaches to understanding the Bible, and the whole point of the Bible, Jesus’ ministry. There’s a Lexical-syntactical method dealing with the words of the bible; a Historical-cultural method; a Contextual method; a Theological method; various Literary methods studying the genres found in Scripture: narratives, histories, prophecies, apocalyptic writings, poetry, psalms and letters; and the Historico-grammatical method.
Each of these approaches to God, to Jesus, depends on our knowledge, on our study. We approach Jesus, much like the Apostles, based on our experience and knowledge. The problem is -—“ we cannot know, not from our experience, not from our limited knowledge, not from all the other stuff that has occurred in history.
Jesus is history and beyond history.
Jesus is God. He is history and is beyond history. He is everything and beyond everything. We cannot put a context, based on our experience, around Jesus and His resurrection. We cannot grasp resurrection based on what we know, based on our study, based on any other historical event. That makes it easy for man to do his all to disprove, to impeach every source, every word on the resurrection. We cannot even match up the accounts from the scriptures. How many women went to the tomb? How many Apostles ran to the tomb? Were Peter and John running to the tomb while Jesus walked with the other disciples on the road to Emmaus? Was Jesus standing by the tomb in the guise of a gardener? The Sea of Tiberias and the fish fry? Was Thomas there, when Jesus walked into the locked room, or not? Nothing agrees, and some assume that the conflicting histories disprove the event.
Remember what I said about the deceased relative showing up and how I would be like a dog chasing its tail, not knowing what to do? So it was with these accounts. Was Jesus raised? Surely as I stand here. Can we analyze it and understand it? Can we get it? Not so easy!
We know.
St. John tells us:
for whoever is begotten by God conquers the world.
And the victory that conquers the world is our faith.
My friends, we are a people born of faith, a people begotten by God. Conquering the world has nothing to do with argument, with armed conflict, with disproving the naysayers and the analysts. Conquering the world has nothing to do with history and a historical analysis of what happened 2,000 years ago. They are not bad things to do, but we can only conquer when we say that we know based on faith. When we come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, when we are regenerated, we win. In that we have life…eternal life.
These are written so you may come to believe. Holy Scripture helps to get us there; it helps us in coming to believe. Faith brings it home. Scripture and faith allow us to give our testimony, to tell all the reason for our hope: Christ has risen! Alleluia!
