5: Meditations on the Resurrection, Part 1: Let's Give 'Em Something To Doubt!

The Bible contains some strange passages, and it would be difficult to pick the strangest one of them all. But the gospels’ accounts of the 40 days between Jesus’ resurrection and his ascension would definitely be high contenders.

The resurrection is Christianity’s great feast. It marks the triumph of life over death, of good over evil, of whatever epic struggle you want to insert here. It is the epic epic. It seals Jesus’ identity as the Son of God, and our identity as overcomers in him. Without Christ’s resurrection, as St Paul reminds us, “our faith is futile”.

Considering all of this, it seems that the resurrected Jesus goes about things in exactly the wrong way. He’s the walking, talking Body of Evidence to silence all his critics and detractors, to convince skeptics and convert unbelievers. Also, he’s got the ultimate last laugh.

But he doesn’t silence critics or convert unbelievers, and he only convinces those skeptics who, in easier times, were already convinced. And he doesn’t ha-ha anyone. He is usually not immediately recognized by the people he appears to, and he does not hang around for very long once they do recognize him. The first witnesses of his resurrection are people whose testimony would be considered invalid in a court of law at that time. He is apparently doing his best to make the accounts of his resurrection as unbelievable and discreditable as possible.

Is this the same Jesus who told us not to hide a light under a bushel, and not to bury the talent we’ve been given? Why is he treating his resurrection like classified information, like an inside joke, like, like… well, like a light that he’s very effectively keeping under a bushel?

He had said it himself: unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces great fruit. He may have been talking primarily of his own death and resurrection, but it is a fundamental principle of his teaching, and of our lives, especially as this death and resurrection becomes our guiding spiritual reality: we lose what we try to hold on to, and we gain what we voluntarily forfeit. And we gain it hundredfold.

Jesus voluntarily forfeited his life to find it again, but he also voluntarily forfeited something else: the most logical means by which to “bring great fruit”, to draw the great masses of humankind to himself. He knew the nature of doubt better than the doubters themselves did. He knew that “if they do not believe Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe when someone rises from the dead.” He knew that the sort of people who would shout “Hosanna” one day would shout “Crucify him” by the end of the week. He knew that true faith would have to make a much more subversive entrance, that the most valuable treasure would have to be carried in earthen vessels.

But this may be even more important: Jesus knew that faith is not what you have before you doubt, just like hope and joy are not what you have before you fall into despair. Faith, hope and joy are the Promised Land, and doubt and despair are the river, the desert, and the sea that must be crossed to get there. He knew that what skeptics and doubters often need is not less doubt but more. Doubt to the point of unbearable discomfort. He knew that the sort of openness we need to arrive at if we are to step out of ourselves even for a moment will never be achieved as long as we have the luxury of “letting facts speak for themselves.” He knew what he was saying when he told Thomas, “blessed are those who believe without seeing.”

Glory be to you, O Christ! “Surely you are a God who hides himself.”