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Easter Sermon: Faith And "Proof"

John 20:1-18
March 23, 2008

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the
tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went
to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them,
"They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid
him." 3Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. 4The two
were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.
5He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in.
6Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen
wrappings lying there, 7and the cloth that had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the
linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8Then the other disciple, who reached
the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9for as yet they did not
understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10Then the disciples
returned to their homes. 11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept,
she bent over to looka into the tomb; 12and she saw two angels in white, sitting where
the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13They
said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away
my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." 14When she had said this, she
turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.
15Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?"
Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away,
tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." 16Jesus said to her, "Mary!"
She turned and said to him in Hebrew,b "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). 17Jesus
said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But
go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to
my God and your God.' " 18Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I
have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

“Somewhere in the eastern part of America in 1776, a woman by the name of Jemima
Wilkinson claimed to have died and come back to life again with a new body — this time
the reincarnation of Jesus Christ himself. She went about, dressed in masculine attire,
and let it be known that she could do miracles. In fact, she could even walk on water!
She invited her followers to come to a lake to watch her perform this feat, and after they
gathered at the lake she said that before demonstrating how she could walk on water
she needed to ask them a question: “Did they believe that Jemima Wilkinson could walk
on water?”   It is said that all of them, to a person, solemnly and rapturously answered
that indeed, they did so believe. In that case, she said, they needed no further proof
because they already believed, so she sent them home without the benefit of a
demonstration.”

I love that little tidbit of a story, mostly because of this image of Wilkinson dressing in
male clothing, telling others that she was the reincarnation of the Christ, but also
because of the audacity of her asking them if they had faith in her, if they had belief in
her ability to do miracles—and then never actually demonstrating that she could do
what they believed she could do. They all walk away believing without the proof to
undergird their belief, which is kind of comical, in a way. How gullible they must have
been! To believe without proof, without the documentation, without the evidence
before them that she was who she said she was—the reincarnation of Christ! But if you
pull back from the story a bit, I mean, if you think about it, the reality is that all of us are
put in that position as people of Christian faith, as people that believe in this one we
have never touched or directly talked with, this one whom we have never seen walk on
water, or seen actually rise from a grave. We’re really not much better off than these
folks, if we were to be completely honest—and at least they got to talk to their
reincarnated Christ, to hear her voice, to see her right before their eyes, even if it was
this beautifully strange figure of a woman in male clothing. I don’t know if we have
much right to really laugh at these seemingly gullible folks who lived more than 200
years ago, especially if we don’t have any more proof to buttress our belief that Jesus
lived and died, and most importantly on this day, was raised from the dead.

There have always been those who have had doubts about the Christian story, about
the story of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection, and many of them have been
friends of mine. At times in my own life, I’ve had my own doubts, as hard as that it to
admit to you, especially in this context, standing before you, sharing the good news of
Easter Sunday. I’ve always respected skepticism and doubt, and those that live with it
honestly and openly, mostly because I can relate to their experience at different
moments in my own life. When I was a teenager, I used to read all sorts of apologetic
works, especially the works of Josh McDowell. Apologetic works focus on the defense
of Christianity, arguing that pretty much everything in the Bible, including something like
the resurrection of Jesus, can be logically proved and argued for, as if you were a
lawyer in court arguing for the guilt or innocence of a particular defendant. It made me
feel good to think that faith, as irrational as it can be, as irrational as those folks who
said they believed Jemima Wilkinson could walk on water but who walked away without
the proof—that faith had some sort of rational basis, that if you looked hard enough
you could prove that God existed or that Jesus had physically been raised from the
dead.

But you know what? I found out later, especially in college, that the whole apologetic
stuff didn’t make much sense, really, if you thought about it. I mean, I personally
believe that Jesus was physically raised from the dead, but so what, really, if you think
about it? Jesus and Peter and Paul all raised people from the dead in the New
Testament, so it wasn’t obviously that big of deal to the people of the ancient world.
We find other stories of other healers raising people from the dead, so it wasn’t as if
the claim of being once dead, but now alive, meant much, really, or that it proved much
of anything, except that you could or somebody could raise people from the dead. The
more I saw people try to prove to me or others that God was provable, as if you could
do enough rational calculations and come up with the Jewish and Christian God, or a
divine Creator, the more skeptical I became of their arguments, mostly because their
arguments seemed to wrench all the mystery from the God and the world, as if
everything was something you could think through, as if there were not moments when
life makes our knees buckle and we fall before the mystery and wonder and awe of
what we cannot fully and completely ever understand, at least on this side of eternity.

I think one of the reasons there has been a spate of new bestseller books by atheists
like Richard Dawkins and others is because we Christians have often claimed that our
faith was a rational thing, as rational and scientific as geology or biology or astronomy,
as if it was something that was provable like evolution or black holes, or gravity.
Because modern science has been so successful, we have succumbed to the belief
that we had to compete with it in ways that are not possible, as if we too had to lay out a
God who was as quantifiable and measurable as a biological specimen. And for those
of us in the Christian tradition who long for the day of everyday miracles, like the ones
Jesus performed two thousands years, well, the reality is that there is a reason why we
don’t get the everyday bodily resurrections Peter and Paul and Jesus performed, Philip
Yancey gives us a possible answer: “Some Christians long for a world well-stocked with
miracles and spectacular signs of God's presence. I hear wistful sermons on the parting
of the Red Sea and the 10 plagues and the daily manna in the wilderness, as if the
speakers yearn for God to unleash his power like that today. But the follow-the-dots
journey of the Israelites should give us pause. Would a burst of miracles nourish faith?
Not the kind of faith God seems interested in, evidently. The Israelites give ample proof
that signs may only addict us to signs, not to God.” (Disappointment With God, 48)

So, what kind of faith is Yancey talking about? If it’s not the kind of faith that can prove
this or that, if its not the kind of faith that measures and quantifies, that clearly proves
that God does indeed exist, and the resurrection itself was an actual physical event that
happened two thousands years ago, then what kind of faith might God want from us?
Well, I do think that it’s a different kind of faith than what some seem to want in our
churches nowadays, the one that seems to want to prove the existence of God by
various proofs and arguments. I want us to leave Mary Magdalene at the grave for a
few moments, and go backwards to another resurrection, Lazarus’ resurrection as told
in John 11, in the same Gospel as the one we have before us today. In John 11, Jesus
is the raiser of his good friend Lazarus, the brother of Mary, a different Mary than the
one in this story, and Martha. And the scene of that resurrection is so different from
the one we have before us today, because the place where Lazarus’ resurrection took
place is packed with people and witnesses to this incredible sight of man walking out of
tomb—he is covered head to toe in the burial linens, the same kind that are neatly
folded in Jesus’ grave, in our story from today. But of course, there are no witnesses to
Jesus’ own resurrection in our text today—no one sees him walking out of that tomb
alive, in contrast to our friend Lazarus, who has his family and the Jewish authorities
witness the incredible event, to their utter astonishment.

Now, why is that? If you wanted to settle all the questions, all the doubts, then why not
rise from the dead in front of someone, another human being—let us see you walk out
of that grave! And yet, with all the resurrections of others that Peter and Paul do, and
even the ones that Jesus does all over the Gospels stories, resurrections done in front
of other people, Jesus’ own resurrection is a private affair, with no humans to see the
event that would have settled the question about WHO had sent him into the world.
Well, I tell you what I think, and you can take it or leave it, but it might just explain why
the one resurrection the world wanted to see was the one it never got a chance to see:
I think the reason why Jesus comes out of that grave so quietly that Easter morning,
why no one saw him walk out of that grave is because there will come a moment in each
of our lives when we will be asked to believe what we have not witnessed, what we not
seen, and faith is exactly what that moment is called.   Hebrews 11:1 says this: Faith is
the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Faith really is
believing without seeing, hoping in the midst of real despair, believing when doubt is
the most logical answer to the difficult question before us. One of my friends went to
the William and Mary, the second oldest college in this country and during the long
years of Civil War her alma mater was closed. Many accepted its future as doomed but
an old custodian refused to accept this verdict, however. Each day for five years he
rang the bells of this ghost college as though it still lived.   At the end of five years, he
rang them for a reopening that vindicated his vigil of faith. Faith is ringing that bell in
the middle of a closed place of learning, however irrational the prospect seems to be; it
is the hope within us that has no rational basis, no roots in reality, nothing that can be
seen to justify climbing the staircases of that bell tower at William and Mary during the
Civil War and ringing that bell as if he were calling the students to come to chapel to
begin their day.

I think the reason why there are no witnesses to his actual walking out of that tomb is
because Jesus knows that there will be times in our lives when we will not be as lucky
as the people who watched Lazarus stumble out of his grave, when the proof is not
before our eyes, and we will be asked to believe something that seems absurd to
believe. There will be moments when we will be asked to believe without evidence, that
the world is meaningful, that the shadows in this life are a sign that we are still in the
presence of life and light, even if the darkness feels like it will overwhelm us. Yes,
Jesus comes to the disciples after the fact, after the resurrection, but that will, ironically
enough, only fuel the pagan rumors swirling around the resurrection, that he had never
been alive, or that his body had been stolen, or that it was all an elaborate hoax by his
disciples. If only we had seen him walk out that grave, so many have said, and yet, like
Phillip Yancey said earlier, wouldn’t we have always come to expect what surely could
not come always come our way—that our faith was rooted in something we could prove,
something we could touch and measure and point to. No, real life will give us moments
when faith seems like an absurd thing, and we need to be ready for those moments,
and Jesus did so by coming out of that grave quietly, with no human witnesses, no
video camera, no artist renderings, no signed affidavits from the witnesses who saw it
with their own eyes. No, there will be times when we are asked to believe what seems
absurd to believe.

There’s an old story that as a boy the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson was intrigued by
the work of the old lamplighter who went about with a ladder and a torch, setting the
street lights ablaze for the night. One evening in Edinburgh, Scotland, as young
Robert stood watching with childish fascination, his parents heard him exclaim, “Look,
look! There’s a man out there punching holes in the darkness!” Faith, my friends, is all
about punching holes in the darkness, as overwhelming as the darkness can become
in our lives. There will be a moment in our lives when it really does it seem hopeless,
when we will gather like the women at the tomb who come simply to give their Messiah a
proper burial, and to tend to his cold body, a moment when all will seem lost. And it is
at that moment we will be asked to believe what seems impossible to believe—that he is
alive, that we are alive, that there is more, and that we are not alone, because Christ is
here, with us, in our graveyards, calling us by name, and we will be asked throw in our
lot with hope itself, a hope that we have no logical right to believe in, but a hope that is
as a real as the very air we’re breathing in, at this very moment. We will be asked to
punch a hole in the darkness, to walk into an empty tomb, and believe what seems
unbelievable to believe, that he is alive, he is not dead—you see, the Lord, the Lord is
risen, and if he has risen, then we too, we too will rise out of any grave that thinks it can
hold us down.   Amen.