Third Sunday of Easter, 2015
Shiloh Lutheran Church, State College, PA
In 1978, I spent two weeks with a missionary who made a lasting impact on my life. He, more than anyone I’ve ever met, convinced me that it’s worth it to keep going, that it’s a great thing to arrive at the end of our earthly lives knowing that we’ve finished the work God has called us to do. When I met him he was 92 years old and had been diligently following the Lord throughout his long life. It was a great thing to see him at that point, to see the fruit of a “long obedience in the same direction.” The presence of God was a tangible reality with that man, and every time I was around him I found myself stirred with a desire to know God and to walk with Him until the end.
He and his wife had served as missionaries in India, and then retired at 65. They had gone to live in America (he was from England, but his wife was American), and as far as they knew at that point, their ministry was over. They’d completed their work, and now they could sit back and do whatever they wanted. This was their time. But God had other plans. After two years, they were certain that God was calling them to return to India. So they went back, not to their old field, but to a completely new area, where there were no churches and no missionaries. They lived in a tent for the first two years, until they were able to build a mud hut. And when I met him, 25 years after their return to India, he said that God had been at work through them in ways that they’d never experienced before their retirement. The Hindus in the area had given their mission a name that meant “the dwelling place of peace,” because when they went there they recognized something different about the place. So, this man and his wife had come to what they thought was the end of their ministry. They had closed the door and returned to the West, planning to live out the rest of their lives in retirement. They had laid their ministry to rest, thinking maybe that they were too old to be of any use on the mission field. But then God had done something new, something that went beyond anything they’d experienced in their previous work.
Something similar is happening to the disciples in chapter 20 of John’s gospel. They’ve seen Jesus crucified and laid in a borrowed tomb. All their expectations centered around His ministry are over. These are not naive, gullible people. They know people don’t rise from the dead. They’re living in a time before modern medicine, when even something like a simple infection could easily be fatal, because of the lack of antibiotics. They’ve experienced death. They’ve experienced its permanence. They know that when a person dies, that’s the end of it. The 3 ½ years they spent with Him in ministry have come to nothing. It’s now time to put all that to rest and to find something to do with the rest of their lives. But then they find that this is different than all the other deaths they’ve experienced. They learn that He is risen from the dead. He even appears to them in the flesh. And, as a result, they come to know God in ways they couldn’t have during Jesus’ public ministry. Here are the steps: their faith is destroyed by the crucifixion; then, when Jesus rises from the dead their faith is restored, but it’s not only restored. It becomes something more than it had been before the crucifixion. Their whole relationship with God is transformed as a result.
First, notice that their faith is not an irrational leap into the dark. We too often, in our culture, assume that it is. We say, “well, this is my belief, but maybe you believe something else.” When I was in college, a visiting professor shared about how he lost his faith in graduate school and then came to a stronger faith by examining the evidence for the resurrection. Several students were talking to him after the lecture and one said, “faith has nothing to do with reason.” Faith belongs to a different realm altogether and has nothing to do with history and rational proof. Faith has to do with things that we “feel” are true, not things that can be demonstrated by historical and logical arguments.
This is completely different than John’s understanding of faith. The disciples aren’t interested, after the crucifixion, in persuading themselves that Jesus is really alive in some mystical sense. They know that He’s dead. They’ve seen Him die. The only thing that will persuade them of His resurrection is seeing physical evidence that something miraculous has happened. It doesn’t matter what they “feel” is true, as long as Jesus’ body is still laying there in the tomb.
The Resurrection is well-established by people who were eyewitnesses. John, who wrote this gospel, was there. This was the last of the gospels to be written, but the apostles had been preaching the truth of the Resurrection now for over half a century. They’d been preaching the Resurrection as a historical fact. Especially in the beginning, when they were preaching in Jerusalem, it would have been very easy for their enemies to discredit them by producing the body of Jesus. But they didn’t do it, because the tomb was empty. And those who preached as witnesses to the Resurrection paid a great price for the things they were saying. Many of them died as martyrs. They were willing to suffer great loss for preaching the Resurrection, because they were eyewitnesses and they knew it was true. They knew beyond any doubt that Jesus had risen from the dead.
The faith of the apostles was not an irrational leap in the dark. But, at the same time, their faith didn’t give them complete understanding. It didn’t do away with all their questions. It didn’t immediately clear everything up for them. John describes the graveclothes when they arrived at the tomb: “He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.” After the Resurrection, Jesus is still in a body, but His body is different. He appears to the disciples when they are hiding behind closed doors for fear of the Jews. He is no longer hindered by physical barriers. When Lazarus was raised from the dead he had to be freed from the graveclothes that were wrapped all around him. But Jesus had no need for this. He simply passed through them and left them laying there in the tomb. John got to the tomb first, but he didn’t go in. Then, after Peter was inside, John says this: “Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” John “took one look at the evidence and believed” (The Message). But he still didn’t understand Jesus’ teaching that the Resurrection was prophesied in Scripture.
As I listened to that visiting professor arguing with students who saw faith as a totally irrational thing, I thought he went too far. He made the Christian life sound like an intellectual exercise, as if the whole business of following Christ is primarily about ideas. I’m not sure that he really thought this way; he was trying to introduce some sanity to people who were at the opposite extreme. When I commented on some things he was saying, he agreed that the picture he was painting was unbalanced. Faith is rational; the Bible presents us with good, strong evidence for God’s intervention in real history. But faith is not limited to what we can explain and understand. Faith is rational, but it is not limited by our rationality.
We can come to genuine faith while we still have questions about many things. We can have genuine faith while our understanding is still cloudy. The evidence is sufficient so that believing the gospel is not intellectual suicide; but we don’t need to have all our doubts and questions fully answered before we can believe. Here’s something Jesus said earlier in His public ministry: “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own” (John 7:17). If we have a genuine desire to be obedient to God our creator, we will know the truth. Often our doubts and struggles are a smokescreen. It’s not that we doubt the truth. It’s that we don’t want to obey God, and our intellectual questions become an excuse for disobedience. As finite human beings, we never have complete understanding about anything. So, in the life of faith, it’s no surprise that there are going to be things that we don’t understand. Many of our questions will be answered over time, but there will be others that we won’t fully answer in this life. Having genuine faith doesn’t mean that we fully understand everything.
The last thing to notice is this: their faith was not an end in itself. Faith brings us into a living relationship with God. It’s common, in our culture, to put all the emphasis on faith, to say things like, “it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’re sincere.” “The important thing is to have faith in something.” Is this true, that faith has value in itself? Many people, in the history of the world, have believed in and practiced human sacrifice. They sincerely believed that God would be pleased if they sacrificed their children to Him. They were sincere, but they were sincere about the wrong thing. Or, what if I say “I believe I can fly.” I could spend a lot of time and energy concentrating all my faith on that one idea, to believe without doubting that I can fly. I may be perfectly sincere in this belief. But what will happen if I go to the top of a tall building and try to fly? I’ll have a very short vertical flight down to the pavement below. The important thing is not that we believe in something. The important thing is that we believe the truth. The truth is that I wasn’t created with the ability to fly. It’s important, for my continued well-being, that I believe the truth about this. Faith has no value in itself. It only has value in connection with the truth.
Thomas goes through a struggle to arrive at faith. At first, when the other disciples tell him they’ve seen the risen Lord, he says “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” He’s not gullible; he doesn’t want to be taken in. But then, a week later, the Lord appears to him and he immediately cries out, “My Lord and my God!” When he does come to faith, it leads him into a new relationship with Jesus; for the first time, he recognizes the truth about who Jesus is. He sees the truth of what we are told in the prologue to this gospel, that Jesus is the Incarnate Son of God, the Word made flesh. Genuine faith is not an end in itself. It leads us into a life-transforming relationship with God.
That’s the point John makes at the end of the chapter: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” Believing the truth about Jesus leads us to life. Believing the truth about Jesus brings us into a relationship with God. Listen to what John says at the beginning of his first letter: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life–this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us–we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 3:1-3). He’ speaking as an eyewitness, but his purpose in telling the things he’s seen is so that his readers can enter into fellowship with God. Faith is not an end in itself. It brings us into a life-transforming relationship with the living God.
John writes as an eyewitness. He’s not writing edifying religious stories to help us cope with the meaninglessness of life in this world. He’s telling us what he has seen and heard and experienced. But he also records these words of Jesus: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” We’re not eyewitnesses of the Resurrection, but we have the testimony of those who were. And Jesus says we are blessed, or happy, if we believe their testimony.
Peter writes to some people like this in his first letter. He’s writing to people who were suffering persecution for their faith, and he says this about their relationship with Jesus: “Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Peter 1:8-9). They haven’t seen Jesus, but they have believed the gospel and have come to love Him. And believing in Him, they’ve come into a life-transforming relationship and they are experiencing “indescribable and glorious joy” in His presence, despite the fact that they are suffering persecution. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Jesus is indeed risen from the dead. He has paid in full the price for our sins and has risen to give us new life. This is what we are celebrating during this Easter season. May God grant us grace to live more in the light of this truth.
