Issue 1.4 | May 2019
In this Article: often we misread the darkness, and the signs that light is breaking in; that God is already here.
A handful of years ago, at a time when the darkness seemed to cling suffocatingly close to me, my father remarked, “You know, sometimes when we are in a place of darkness, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, we don’t realize that the tunnel has a bend in it, and that its end is closer than we think. Be careful not to assume that you are seeing your reality correctly.”
On the Sunday morning following history’s most significant Passover, in about 33 AD, the followers of Jesus also found themselves in darkness, with no light at the end of the tunnel. What they did not know was that there was indeed a bend, and the light was very close. In fact, even as the first glimmers — more like dazzling rays, actually — pierced their gloom, Jesus’ followers, strikingly, remained unable to see the light for what it was. The light shining into their darkness was incomprehensible to them:
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. So 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.”
Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into 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.
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.
Then the disciples returned to their homes. But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. (John 20:1-11a)
Mary Magdalene’s friendship with Jesus seems to have been profound, but it does not give her special insight. Upon seeing Jesus’ tomb empty, she does not conclude that his absence from the grave is a good thing. Her imagination can conjure only one rational explanation: someone has stolen the body! When Simon Peter and the unnamed disciple discover the wrappings that had tightly bound Jesus’ body are sans corpse, their response is utterly mundane. They go home.
These are not the reactions of people clueing in to the possibility that the menacing darkness that came with Jesus’ crucifixion is, in fact, lifting (the only exception seems to be that of the “other disciple”, “the one whom Jesus loved”). Their responses show us that to their eyes, the darkness remains, and the signs of resurrection are simply baffling. For Mary, there is only one possible response. She bursts into hot, grief-laden tears.
Elsewhere, later on the same day, two other followers of Jesus walk beneath the shroud of their own post-crucifixion darkness, when the light shines in — and they too cannot see it for what it is.
… [they] were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad.
Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him.
“But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.” (Luke 24:13-24)
When I was a boy in New Guinea, I saw a young tribal man lying inert on a river bank, looking quite dead. He had just fallen from a bridge under construction outside our village. Everyone around (except for my dad) assumed he was dead, and was very upset. A man prayed over him, and the youth stirred. He was alive. As my dad had already recognized, he had simply been unconscious. But if you have had the misfortune of seeing a man battered and bludgeoned to death, you will know that what witnesses saw on Easter Friday of AD 33 was not a man unconscious after a knock to the head, but the total, barbaric, obliteration of a human being. Jesus, the “prophet mighty in deed and word” (Luke 24:19), was quite definitely no more. The beating, the scourging, the brutality of a Roman crucifixion, and — as if those weren’t enough — the spear thrust, had seen to that. They had seen him bleed out, and breathe his last. They had buried him in a tomb.
For the followers of Jesus, including the two disciples walking to Emmaus, their Lord, their hope — the hope of Israel, surely! — is quite thoroughly dead. They are stricken with sadness. More than that, they are clearly bewildered and confused. They have been traumatised by the deep betrayal, the swift and unjust kangaroo trial, and the equally swift execution of Jesus, and are unable to make sense of it all. Already the “astounding” (24:22) story that the tomb is now empty, and even that Jesus is alive, has reached their ears. Clearly, though, it has not shifted them from their sadness. They still speak of Jesus, and of their forlorn hope in him, as a thing of the past: “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”
The followers of Jesus are immersed in a deep, existential sorrow, a bewilderment at the injustice, the moral perversity, that in God’s own universe, God’s prophet would be so brutally and abruptly eliminated, ending all hope of his impact — and perhaps, of the redemption of Israel. The hope of these deeply faithful, God-centred people, who saw God so evidently at work in Jesus, has been dashed … crushed. They haven’t said it openly, but the whisper underneath their sorrow and loss of hope is that what wins in the end is evil, in all its perversity and injustice.
THE UNRECOGNIZABLE GOD
Today too, we who follow Jesus can find ourselves in a similar place of deep, existential crisis: of sorrow, of darkness, of hope betrayed. Recently I spoke with a seminary professor burdened by the morass that appears to characterise so much of the North American church today. My friend’s distress issues in an anguished question as to why, if God’s priority is redemption, he would allow this state of affairs. His anguish is an echo of equivalent crises which all faithful Christians at some point undergo. If God is present, if resurrection power is in play, we are not seeing it.
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and 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. They 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.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus 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.” (John 20:11–16)
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… As [the two disciples] came near the village to which they were going, [Jesus] walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.
They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”
That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread. While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. (Luke 24:28–37)
It is amazing what the human mind cannot comprehend, even when the evidence is in full view. Many years ago, while I studied at seminary in Toronto, I attended an ethnically Chinese church. Having grown up in South East Asia, I felt at home among my Chinese friends, many of whom were second or third generation descendants of immigrants. We spoke English together, but in our routine Friday visits to a nearby Dim Sum restaurant, my friends ordered the food using Cantonese. Being experienced at pronouncing foreign languages, I practised ordering in Cantonese with my friends, and then attempted the real thing. The waiter taking the order just stared at me blankly. I switched to English and he immediately took my order. I asked my friends what was wrong — had I pronounced the words that badly? “No”, they replied, “It was inconceivable to him that a foreigner could be speaking Cantonese, so he just couldn’t hear his language coming out of your mouth, even though your pronunciation was okay.”
Something like that is happening with Jesus’ followers on that Sunday morning. As they start their days crushed and in sorrow, Jesus has already risen. At this point their emotional state is to be expected. They haven’t seen the evidence. Then they encounter him one by one, or in pairs or groups, and while their responses are quite varied, there is one consistent feature: they each thoroughly fail to recognize him. In spite of how intimately they have known and loved him, or how devoted they have been to him as God’s prophet — and in spite of emerging, exciting stories that he is alive — in every single one of their encounters with him, it is utterly outside of their conceptional powers to comprehend him. Just as my waiter heard gobbledegook and not Cantonese, Jesus’ friends saw him in full, but comprehended him only as a stranger on the road, or a cemetery gardener with a grave-robbing sideshow, or, most strikingly, a ghost. They respond to their encounters with Jesus like this because nothing in their knowledge or experience provides them with the equipment to understand that this is him. What their mental framework tells them is:
- Death is final.
- Death ends all possibilities. The dead do not accomplish things. Once dead, a person’s time for achieving great things is finished.
- The dead are gone, and do not return (some Jews believed in a future resurrection, but at the end of history, when all would be raised to stand before God and receive his judgment).
- The power of unjust rulers, the power of evil, has once again succeeded in thwarting good.
In other words, because of their conception of God and how he works in our world, and because of their interpretation of the previous week’s events, they cannot recognise that the very person they have lost hope in is right in front of their eyes.
Like the followers of Jesus described in these passages, our encounter with the risen and active Jesus is shaped powerfully by our circumstances and how we interpret them. Our encounter with him is shaped by our perception of who God is, and by our assumptions about how he acts in our world. We too, encounter the risen Jesus in circumstances that seem dark and unaddressed, unresolved — circumstances which seem to say exactly this: Jesus is dead; evil wins.
In fact, Jesus is risen and present; and, the New Testament tells us, he continues to be fully active, unfolding the redeeming and reconciling work he inaugurated at the cross. That means the signs of his presence and activity are all around us. But do we recognise them for what they are? Do we recognise him? Or are we blind to him because we operate by a pre-determined set of criteria about what it would look like in our lives if he were present, and those criteria have not only not been met, they are telling us the opposite?
GOD, ACTUALLY
Then [Jesus] said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. (Luke 24:25-27)
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Jesus said to [Mary Magdalene], “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.’ ” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her. (John 20:17–18)
I know a man who, for many years, had never seen a car, but had seen small aircraft as a routine. He lived in a remote area without roads, but with airstrips serviced by bush planes. On his first ride in a car, he became quite anxious, and eventually blurted out in consternation: “when do we take off!?”
Jesus’ followers longed for salvation, but they couldn’t see salvation, because it looked nothing like what they were looking for. They (and we) long for a justice that is achieved by the removal of the person or disease or structure causing harm to us. Do we struggle with depression? Salvation is its departure. Do we groan under the burden of addiction? Salvation is its disappearance. Do we suffer at the hands of nasty, vindictive relatives or a bullying boss — or a hostile government? Salvation is a court order, the termination of a boss, the departure from this life of a cruel despot (when someone deeply violates us, it is not uncommon to experience a deep, pain-birthed desire that they be dead). But justice is not the immediate focus of God’s attention and action.
Just fifty days after Easter Sunday, listen to the clarity that has come to the disciples’ minds, via the spokesperson of Peter, about what God has accomplished in the resurrection of Jesus. Here he speaks to crowds of visitors to Jerusalem during the festival of Pentecost:
“Men, Israelites — listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from the pains of death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power. For David says concerning him,
‘I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand so that I will not be shaken; therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced; moreover my flesh will live in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One experience corruption. You have made known to me the ways of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence.’
“Fellow Israelites, I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would put one of his descendants on his throne. Foreseeing this, David spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, saying,
‘He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh experience corruption.’
This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says,
‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”’
Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”
Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2:22-38)
Our eyes are on the symptoms, God’s is on the root cause: sin, and the reign of death through sin, as well as the evil powers that come alongside sin and death.
Jesus’ ascension, described in several Gospels and Acts, and anticipated in his words to Mary, is not an exit. It is not his departure upward and away from a troubled earth and back to a better home above. It is his ascension to the throne of heaven, and therefore of earth. He is now seated in the place of rule, “at the right hand of God” (Acts 2:33, cf. Colossians 3:1). His enthronement is the logical outworking of his resurrection, because in his resurrection he has emptied of power all that stands in opposition to humanity and creation. Christ’s ascension is his exaltation to cosmic authority. To all that troubles us, this is the solution.
We long for a rectification of our circumstances. In Christ, God has accomplished the rectification of the fundamental order of things, beginning with our fundamentally broken nature as humans. As was the case for his followers, our salvation is not what we imagine it will (or should) be. We look for the signs and miss them, because the signs we look for are too small.
We are looking for just judgments in court, better friends, healthier minds and bodies, a change in leadership or government. We are looking for rectification and vindication. These are good things, but, relative to what God is doing, they are incidental. Not only are they incidental, they are in utter contrast to anything we could anticipate. Instead, he is busy with transformation — a radical transformation that begins with our personal transformation, the transformation of our world and, indeed, the transformation of the individuals and institutions that harm us: a transformation that starts with our release from unpayable debt, freedom from sin, freedom from the flesh, freedom from the authority of evil, and freedom from death itself (Colossians 2:9-15. See also Evil No More).
This fundamental reordering of reality is not an imposed solution. It is the reordering of all reality around the incarnate God, actually. We look for justice, but God has unleashed the reconciliation of all things. Only in a world in which all things are reconciled can there be the justice for which we long.
GRACE TO THE IGNORANT
What of Jesus’ resurrection are we not seeing because it doesn’t look like what we want or have hoped for? This is a question to take seriously, for if the odds of comprehension were against Jesus’ immediate followers, how much greater are they against us, who have never seen him in person? This raises, in turn, another troubling question: are we who follow Jesus in jeopardy if we cannot comprehend his presence? Are we heading for some form of opprobrium when we don’t correctly read the signs of Jesus’ present and active resurrection power? In our blindness, are we under judgment?
Within the resurrection narratives is a quite beautiful understory that is a balm for the uncomprehending. Only one follower of Jesus seems to have really clued in quickly to what was going on: the disciple “whom Jesus loved” (arguably John) simply saw the absence of a corpse and the folded linens, and “believed” (John 20:8). Mary, Peter, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the disciples in the room — all of them simply could not recognize Jesus even when they saw him in front of their eyes. Their deeply ingrained assumptions had rendered them quite unable to comprehend him. Yet their incomprehension does not lead to alienation. The opposite, in fact. These same narratives reveal God’s continuous movement of love towards us, even as we are stuck in our ignorance and its power to distort our comprehension of reality.
In the face of persistent incomprehension, Jesus persistently and repeatedly revealed himself to his disciples, and in varying ways:
- He helped the two walking to Emmaus to understand how the Scriptures really did anticipate all that had happened to their Messiah, and that it was not a disaster, but God’s redemption in play.
- With the same disciples he broke bread, repeating that deeply meaningful action of his at the last Supper. This was the point at which the truth came home to them.
- He appeared to the main disciples and showed them his wounds — and ate food!
- Even to Thomas, adamant in his disbelief about the news of Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus encouraged him to place his hands in (not on) his very wounds, a tactile, perhaps quite uncomfortable fingering of the bodily evidence that he was the same Jesus that had been crucified days before.
- And years later, he appeared to Paul, who not only did not follow Jesus, but was busy persecuting those who did. In Paul’s words, “and last of all he appeared to me, as one defectively born” (1 Corinthians 15:8).
But perhaps most beautiful of all is Jesus’ encounter in the garden, outside the tomb, with a grieving woman who also doesn’t get what is going on. To her, he simply speaks her name: “Mary”. Who else says our name like Jesus says it?
In some way particular to who we are, Jesus meets each of us in our ignorance and confusion, whether it is willful or a matter of incompetence. He meets us with Scripture, with symbol, with earthy evidence, with presence and companionship, with mercy … and with the speaking of our name, and all the intimate, loving knowledge about us which that reveals.
The cross, and all that Jesus accomplished on it, is a gift of grace. His resurrection, and the life you and I receive as a result, is a gift of grace. All of this represents his movement towards us. Our blindness does not cause him to halt this movement. The narratives of Jesus’ post-resurrection encounters with uncomprehending disciples reveal that his movement towards us persists. This steady erosion of our incomprehension is also a gift of grace. As Jesus said to his relatively stupid, spiritually inept disciples, “Do not be afraid. My peace I give to you.”
Do not be afraid of your blindness to the signs of God in your life. The risen Jesus is calling your name, and as Mary discovered, his call is greater than your blindness.
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