One week after Jesus appeared to the rest of the disciples, he appeared again to Thomas. One week. How long must that week have felt for the one who struggled with doubt? How long do the weeks and months and years feel in our lives feel when we just long for Him to show up?
Recently I've watched several of my friends going through seasons of immense pain. Some struggle to believe God is good, others to believe He's powerful, others that He exists at all. My heart feels so burdened in the midst of all of it and sometimes I don't know how to offer comfort. Sometimes I just want comfort myself. Mostly I just try to listen.
Someone asked recently if I would still be a Christian if the whole thing were false, if it were all a man-made sham and Jesus was a fluke. I think there have been times in my life when I would have said yes, when I would have felt that the Christian life was somehow worthwhile and beautiful regardless of its truth.
I can't bring myself to say that anymore. I have to agree with Paul when he writes: " If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins... If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied."
I believe in the resurrection like I believe in oxygen or water or food. I believe it because if I have hoped in Christ for this life only, it is a sad and desperate life indeed. This world can be a awful, nasty, brutish place. Life is horribly unfair and unjust and it makes me weep for the people I love who have suffered so unfairly. I believe in a resurrection that not only ushers in a hope for tomorrow, but an eternal life that begins NOW, that invades the ugliness and horror of humanity in this very moment on earth. Abundant life, joy, and hope are offered to us now in the midst of the pain and darkness. They co-exist--they don't cancel each other out. Not yet.
Last Sunday my pastor highlighted this part of the Easter story which I have often overlooked:
"Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
“Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!”
It hit me like a brick...."Woman,why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?" She had Jesus on one side, angels on another, and she was still searching. I also love that the moment she did recognize him was at the sound of her own name. "Mary." I wish I could have heard his voice as he said that and watched her face dawn with ecstatic recognition and utter shock.
Here's a John Updike poem that speaks to me powerfully about the resurrection:
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
