Too Good to Be True?

Luke 24:36b-48

April 15, 2018

I.

It is remarkable to me that in some of the accounts of Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection, some of the disciples do not recognize him or fully trust what they are seeing.  Whatever form Jesus is in, it is ambiguous enough that at least some of the people — and this includes people who have been hanging around with him perhaps for years — remain confused, even as he is standing right there in front of them.  They don’t completely get it.    

Luke reports that “in their joy they were disbelieving and wondering,” which sounds like he is trying to cover for their disbelief by attributing it to excess happiness.  Maybe they were not allowing themselves to let go of their suspicion regarding something that seems too good to be true.  Maybe they doubted because they were afraid of being disappointed and disillusioned.  Maybe they wanted to understand and trust what they were seeing, but there remained some part of them going, “What’s the catch?”  Like they were looking around for Alan Funt to show up and tell them it was really a gag, for those of you old enough to remember a TV show called Candid Camera.

The two things that Jesus identifies in his disciples here, which are giving them such trouble in accurately perceiving and recognizing him, are fear and doubt.  “Why are you frightened,” he asks, “and why do doubts arise in your hearts?”  Fear and doubt are blocking their view.

Fear and doubt are what tend to arise in our hearts when we are confronted with something that we don’t understand.  We often feel fear when something happens that is outside of our regular understanding and expectations, something we can’t explain.  We doubt our senses and our interpretations.  Things that don’t have a “rational explanation” put us into a state of unsettledness and confusion.  

I find that fear and doubt kick in most strongly when I am confronted with something that seems too good to be true.  Why is this lane empty when the lane next to it is jammed with cars?  Who is the Nigerian prince who sent me this e-mail and why does he want to give me 3 million dollars?  Why did my son clean his room without being asked?  Why is the scale telling me that I lost 3 pounds?  Surely it is a malfunction.  And so on.      

We doubt good news because we don’t want to appear to be idiots who just fall for every scam, who will credulously swallow everything, no matter how irrational, supernatural, or fake, who can be so pathetically swayed by obvious flattery or mindless wishful thinking.  We are used to doubting things until we have amassed the requisite proof that explains them.

So when the disciples are confronted with the truth that Jesus, their friend and teacher, whom they witnessed being gruesomely executed by the Romans three days earlier, does not stay dead, some do not trust it.  They do not understand what they are seeing.  Maybe they don’t even see it!  It does not fit into their normal ways of thinking and perceiving.  They try to cram it into familiar categories, even if fictional.  They tell themselves that he must be a ghost.  At least a ghost is something they have heard of.

II.

This is what can happen when we are dealing with the ultimate reality that Jesus reveals.  We do not necessarily see it.  Over the course of our existence, our minds have been trained to perceive and comprehend our world in a certain way.  But when we encounter experiences that do not fit into this pattern, we can get confused, and we explain them away in categories we can understand.

With the resurrection of Jesus we are dealing with something that does not compute, something for which there is no precedent.  Even here, when Jesus talks about how his death and resurrection is prefigured in the Scriptures, it is not prefigured in any obvious way.  There is no place in the Old Testament that says explicitly and in so many words that “the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”  You cannot get that out of the text if you’re just reading it with your normal mind.  Just as these disciples could not recognize the living Christ with their normal minds either.

In order to recognize and know and experience Jesus, we have to get out of our normal minds.  We have to get beyond our regular way of thinking.  We have to open up our reasoning to accept something new and different.  If we stay in our regular mental processes, we fall into fear and doubt.  We have no clue what we are looking at.  We get confused, and we dismiss the experience as something else.

For us Modern people, our normal mind is conditioned by the literal, historical, factual approach in which we decide that only that which can be measured, quantified, and objectively verified is true for us.  Our normal minds will interpret this experience as just that, a historical event, something that is alleged to have happened at a certain time and place, long ago.  That is what we will accept.  If something can’t be authenticated by objective evidence, we will reject it as subjective and therefore unreal.  It is fiction.

This approach also has the added benefit of making it completely irrelevant to us and separate from us.  It gets reduced to an objective fact which we can have an opinion about, like any other historical event.  Did it really happen? we ask.  And invariably our normal Modern mind is led to conclude that, well, probably not.  It doesn’t fit any of the criteria we use for truth or factuality.  Dead people do not rise and mysteriously materialize in locked rooms.  That is not part of our common experience.  It cannot be explained scientifically.  Therefore, it is not true.  We remain comfortably ensconced in our doubt.

III.

  

But to believe in Jesus’ resurrection is more than merely having a cognitive opinion about something that happened a long time ago.  Faith is not objective knowledge but a personal trust.  We come to believe not by having an opinion about something “out there,” but by becoming someone “in here.”  To believe is not to prove by means of assembled evidence; it is to ourselves be the proof.  It is to witness to the effect of something in our own hearts.  The proof of the resurrection of Jesus is not a careful marshaling of historical testimony, but a changed and healed life.

This is why the New Testament talks so much about repentance.  Repentance means having a new mind, thinking differently, and therefore living in a different way.  It means letting go of our normal mind, and acquiring what Paul calls the mind of Christ.  We need to change our way of perceiving and reasoning, get out of the fear and doubt mentality, and see within a deeper truth.  

The whole point of the resurrection is that it is about all of us and each of us.  His resurrection is the revelation of who we really are.  It is our nature and destiny as human beings made in God’s Image that gets revealed in the resurrection.  

That is what is at stake here.  We don’t gather on Sundays to commemorate some past event.  We don’t gather so we can learn to be better people or to share common stories that bind us together like when we share memories in a family.  There are elements of all of that, of course, and this kind of remembering can be very good.  But the real point of the resurrection is that, in showing us who Jesus really is, it reveals who we are.  Jesus, the Son of Man, the truly Human One, is showing us our true nature.  Faith in him is trusting that in his resurrection he is revealing our own truest and deepest selves.    

In the Harry Potter books there is this magical mirror that reflects back a picture of one’s deepest desire.  The resurrection of Jesus is like this, except that when we look at him we see our true nature and destiny.  Like an X-ray reveals who we are under the surface, the resurrection of Jesus reveals us at our deepest place.  When God looks at us, God sees Jesus Christ, God’s own true and blessed and good Image, within us.  

It is realizing this that opens up the Scriptures for us, not the other way around.  This is what the Lord means by referring the disciples to the Bible.  The resurrection is not true because the Bible says so; the Bible is true because of the resurrection.  The resurrection, the revelation of new life beyond the power of death, becomes the lens through which we understand the New Testament, and then the whole of Scripture.  Once we realize this, yes, the Old Testament does indeed witness to Jesus Christ all over the place.

IV.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the ultimate and fundamental truth of human life.  And it has consequences.  Paul talks about walking in newness of life.  We cannot continue in fear and doubt.  Neither can we remain corrupted by ego-centricity that spawns violence, selfishness, greed, hatred, and lies.  We cannot treat the earth or people as inanimate objects to be exploited and used.  We cannot resort to retribution or punishment.  We cannot stand for injustice or inequality among God’s people.

To realize the truth of the resurrection as the revelation of our true humanity in Christ means living in his generosity and sharing, his forgiveness and healing, his peace and goodness, and his joy and blessing.

+++++++