An Interruption to What We Think Is Real
Do you know what is strange? How subtle the resurrection stories are in the Gospels. Mary Magdalene not recognizing Jesus in the garden, his strange warning to her that it is not yet the time she is hoping for where she can to cling to him, the male disciples not believing the women, the randomness of how Jesus appears to them when all the doors were locked, how Thomas said he would never believe unless he could touch the scars of Jesus (John 20:11-18; Luke 24:11; John 20:19-29). How time just seems to go on as usual until Jesus interrupts some of the disciples after they’d been fishing all night. They don’t recognize him and then he makes them breakfast (John 21:1-19). What?
It’s all so every day, right? No angels appearing, no special star in the sky, no political conquest. Just a bit of déjà vu from when Peter was first called to follow him. Something is the same and very different in this scene: no fish, listening to Jesus’s absurd advice to let the net down on the other side of the boat, the overwhelming number of fish that then fill the nets. The net was not torn this time.
And there’s Jesus’s appearance to the two disciples walking on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:1-35). They just heard the news from the women about the resurrection, and they are disturbed by it. They don’t believe it. Jesus appears in the midst of their arguing. And they are so disillusioned that their eyes are prevented from recognizing him. It’s all a bit of a comedy. They are talking about Jesus to Jesus. Frederick Buechner says, “I think those eyes are almost the most haunting part of the whole haunting story because they remind me so much of my own eyes and because I suspect they may remind you also of yours.”
Resurrection just doesn’t make sense. How could their brains make sense of it? It couldn’t be…
We learn that the resurrected Jesus hung out here in the flesh for 40 days. Paul tells us that he “appeared to over five hundred brothers and sisters at one time…” (1 Cor. 15: 6). That’s a lot of witnesses, but not the impressive audience we would think to behold a resurrected person. How many people would you expect to show up to see the Son of God? This is how Jesus did it. This is how we are told in the Scriptures.
Buechner preaches about the writers of the Gospels,
They are not trying to describe it as convincingly as they can. They are trying to describe it as truthfully as they can. It was the most extraordinary thing they believed had ever happened, and yet they tell it so quietly that you have to lean close to be sure what they are telling. They tell it as softly as a secret, as something so precious, and holy, and fragile, and unbelievable, and true, that to tell it any other way would be somehow to dishonor it. To proclaim the resurrection the way they do, you would have to say it in whispers. “Christ has risen.” Like that.
We celebrate it loudly. Well, sort of. On one day a year. And maybe in some methods of evangelism. We have Easter pageants and sunrise services and such. But do we recognize him—the resurrected Christ? Do we really know of his life-givingness? Buechner again:
But the shadow side of the great Easter celebration is that sometimes the very fanfare and fortissimo of it are apt to leave us feeling like the only guests at a great New Year’s Eve party who are not having the time of our lives. All the wonderful things that are going on around us on Easter Sunday can sometimes make us more conscious than usual that nothing even close to all that wonderful is going on inside ourselves.
Maybe it’s because there’s a lot inside ourselves that needs dying to be able to wait for and recognize resurrection. Some are even good things, but we’ve made them the things that make us feel whole and loved and valued.
Maybe it’s because we spend all our time with trying to convince others—convince ourselves—with our evangelism. With our doctrines. Our programs and our worship services, faithfully attended.
Because that it happened at all is really important. As Paul tells us, our faith is worthless if Christ has not been raised. Is not our faith but an active looking, listening, and waiting to see the resurrected Christ? And to finally see our face in beholding his face? Do we believe that that time is breaking in?
Are we listening for the whispers of the resurrection now? The Eastering that is all around us? Easter is a glorious interruption to what we think is real. Just look at how Jesus’s resurrection is told in the Gospels. The people who spent the most time with him didn’t know all the right things about him. They didn’t expect his dying or rising, even as Jesus told them it was going to happen. In their mourning, gathering, leaving, fishing, going about their day…in their disillusionment Jesus shows up. The Gospels tell us of their clumsy yet beautiful encounters with the face of the resurrected Jesus. Christ has risen. Buechner calls it the secret in the dark.
We’ve been fishing all night and we don’t even know that if we just throw our nets to the other side of the boat, the fish will let themselves in.
It's the wonder of it. The interruption to our own ideas about who God is, how he relates to us, and who in the heck we think we are. It’s his face hiding in our faces. And the aching and longing for encounters with God as we are stumbling about, living to that day when all is resurrected.
Every encounter with beauty whispers. Christ has risen.
The truly remarkable transformation is not the one from
unbelief to belief
nor from
despair to hope.
The truly remarkable (and frightening) transformation is from
dogma to wonder
from
belief to awe.
Brilliant, sister. Quietly brilliant.
This line really hit me: "In their mourning, gathering, leaving, fishing, going about their day…in their disillusionment Jesus shows up." Thank you so much for these words.