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April 03, 2005
After Easter, What?
After Easter, What?
Daniel 7: 13-18 / Matthew 28: 16-20
April 3rd, 2005
Perhaps your heart was heavy yesterday, as mine was, as I watched the story of the Pope’s final hours unfold. I was recently in Poland, as you know, teaching in a Baptist seminary. The regard I felt among Baptist faculty and students for the Pope was intense. We might expect this because he is a favorite son in Poland. He was born there and educated there. He stood up to the Nazis as a young man. He served as a gutsy Archbishop in Krakow during the communist era.
The esteem for this man crosses not only Protestant/Catholic boundaries; he has won the admiration of non-Christian folk worldwide. The media that seems to be so fascinated with the misbehavior of celebrities had a subject to study who fascinated them with his virtues.
But when I think of this pope another attribute comes to mind. As “post-modernism” has replaced truth with personal opinion, Pope John Paul II steadfastly held to the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Gospel kept him humble, as he knew the eyes of everyone watched him with admiration. He demonstrated the outlook of the Apostle Paul who wrote, “I am crucified with Christ . . . the life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
This Gospel was the reason why the Pope apologized to the Jews for the Holocaust. This Gospel compelled him to apologize for the sins of the Medieval and modern Church, not just the Catholic Church, as it used its power badly, hurting those it was its calling to serve. How beautiful and rare were the Pope’s honest apologies.
This Gospel that is at the heart of the Christian faith made him reach out to Muslims and to Jews. The Gospel tenderized his heart making him risk making these gestures beyond the safety net of approval of his peers.
Last Sunday people packed the pews across our land to hear again that Jesus came out of the tomb alive two thousand years ago. We began our worship service with the confident declaration, “Jesus Christ is risen indeed.” We all said it, and then we sang it, “Christ the Lord is Risen today, Alleluia.” This sanctuary rang with the sound.
But the Gospels confess that not all Jesus’ disciples were proclaiming this on the first Easter. Matthew tells us that when His eleven disciples saw Him some doubted.
Mark’s Gospel says Jesus “scolded [His disciples] for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen.”
Luke tells us of the disciples’ response to word of Jesus’ resurrection, “but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”
John’s Gospel tells us that Thomas, one of the twelve responded to word of Jesus’ resurrection, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
Isn’t it interesting that all four Gospels tell us candidly that some of the disciples doubted? Why report this embarrassing feature of these first pillars of the Church?
Unbelief in Jesus’ resurrection persisted in the Church. Some years later Paul addressed the problem of doubt in the Church at Corinth. I Corinthians 15 is a passionate appeal not only that belief in Jesus’ resurrection is of “first importance,” but that without it, the preaching of the Gospel is empty. The Gospel is about the love of God, but we know of it through facts displaying the love of God. Jesus’ resurrection, His actual coming to life again is one of these facts. That is why it is important.
Paul would not have written this unless in the church people who considered themselves followers of a Jesus who had not risen from the grave. It is no new thing in the Church that people doubt the resurrection.
Some people seem to believe fairly easily. They hear and are filled with wonder and gratitude. Others cannot believe so easily. The twelve disciples fairly reflected the range of people in the world to whom the Gospel would come. Some believed easily. Some did not. The Gospels include Jesus’ response to those who struggled to believe as well as to those for whom belief came apparently more easily. He did not kick out of the circle of His disciples those who doubted. Patiently he waited for them to believe.
Thomas epitomized the inability to believe found in Jesus’ inner circle. But once he faced the chance to actually touch those nail prints and the fresh wound in Jesus’ side he bowed before Jesus and said, “My Lord and my God.”
Jesus replied to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” Yes, such people are blessed. But this blessing does not come as easily to some as to others. Indeed, belief was a new wrinkle in religion for Jesus’ disciples.
Part of the problem for the disciples was that belief in Jesus’ resurrection was a completely new “required” ingredient in their life before God. As Jews, their life did require an element of trust in God, but Judaism was largely a way of obedience to God. Moses gave God’s commands to His people that included offering sacrifices, observing three great feasts that celebrated the work of God in their behalf, and living obediently to the Ten Commandments. These were duties they could do regardless of what was going on inside their minds.
So when Jesus spoke of the importance of belief, His disciples had to fit this into a new scheme of life before God. It was a scheme that began when God told Abraham, “Leave Haran and go to a place I’ll show you.” But Abraham didn’t identify his trust in God as an ingredient in the process. God did, but he didn’t. Abraham didn’t see God standing before him as Thomas saw Jesus standing before him. Abraham heard a voice and his contribution to the world was that he believed it was God whom he heard was from God.
Time doesn’t permit us to remember how simple trust factored into the religion of ancient Israel. But it is the unseen ingredient all along the way, as later generations trusted the truth and significance of what they received, that it was from God.
After Jesus rose from death, belief, trust in the truth of Jesus’ resurrection became a key ingredient in a right relationship with God. Why? Because essential to receiving the Gospel is a recognition that we can’t on our own please God by obeying His law. Essential to our relationship with God is trust Him. Essential to our life with God and one another is being aware of the requirement that we appropriate this Gospel by personal trust. We must trust in the Good News of Jesus to appropriate it to ourselves.
Why then does belief come to some people with difficulty and to others apparently so easily? Is it automatically a good thing when people believe easily? Is it automatically a bad thing when they can’t believe easily?
Beyond question part of the reason for uncertainty for many people is how many competitors there are in the marketplace of truth. Coming to God almost looks like coming to a job fair at Purdue. The mall is filled with booths with smiling, attractive hawkers saying to Purdue’s finest, “Come work with us.” Likewise you and I see not only Christians who emphasize their own special take on God, but also many non-Christian religions saying, “We’re the real God-approved religion.” Some people retreat behind a wall of agnosticism. How can anyone tell which is the real product?
Others have been hurt in the church. Indeed, if I allowed myself to be overcome by the hurt I endured as a child, or even along the way as a pastor, I could say, as others have, “The Church is full of hypocrites,” and be done with it. The New Testament teaches us that we can’t love God whom we cannot see if we don’t love our brother whom we can see. When our brother or sister whom we can see hurts us, we may feel towards God the pain caused by this hurt. We’re not always logical in our thinking. When people ask God the question, “Why?” Sometimes their question was stirred by a person who hurt them.
Because hurt feelings are such a part of church life I must say that those who are hurt have to realize that they also hurt others. This is why mutual forgiveness is essential to the life of the Church. It matters that the Church be internally strong, a strength created by a network of forgiveness, because this strength plays an important role in helping people to trust in God.
Jesus warned those who would place too much confidence in their belief alone, “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of my Father in heaven.” Jesus said this for good reason. There are those for whom faith is a head-thing that doesn’t affect the life. Jesus expected that this remarkable Gospel would have life-transforming effect as we live under its spell.
But try as we may, we fail, do we not, to achieve this life-transformation. The Apostle Paul poured out his labors in the work of the Gospel concerned that after having preached to others he should be a castaway. By “a castaway,” he meant that God might cast him away for his failure to live up to the standard of the Gospel. In a way, it almost seems that his feelings and his theology were not in line. Paul’s theology said, “I am saved by grace not by works.” But his feelings said, “So much is expected of me because of the Gospel, and I’m not achieving it.” Our feelings and our head-knowledge are not always well coordinated.
He was confident in the Gospel, committed to a fault, but slender in his self-confidence. He saw at the same time that he was justified by faith, “as though he had never committed a single sin or ever been sinful,” but that he had to say as well, “Woe is me, for I am undone. Who will deliver me from this body of death? I do what I don’t want to do and don’t do what I want to do!”
This Paul whose knowledge of the things of God was so great that generations of Christians have studied him to understand the ways of God, wrote, “If I have all knowledge and have not love, I am nothing.” So Paul recognized that God intentionally keeps us off balance. The only reason we have for confidence is in Christ crucified for our sake. Which means that I must see myself as I am, needing such a sacrifice of so holy a Victim because in myself is no good thing.
All of this describes faith—a helpless grasping onto something God gives us. The gift is secure, but we who receive it are often insecure. No wonder that in faith there should be an element of doubt—self doubt, doubt to trust that what God offers me is actually offered me, because how am I even worthy of such a love from God? When this aspect of faith is lost we run the risk of forgetting the fact of our need. We may become proud that we believe, and this is hurtful to us and to the Gospel.
Jesus had both kinds of people in His chosen band of twelve disciples. Jesus kept both kinds of disciples. What makes a disciple of Jesus is not the confidence that brims in the mind but the faithfulness of the life in following after Jesus.
I learned when I was in Wroclaw, Poland a couple weeks ago that this was where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on February 4th, 1906. Then the city was part of Germany and was called Breslau. Outside one of the churches near the seminary where I taught I stood before a monument in his honor. My new faculty friends took me to see it. It was a bronze trunk of a man with evidence of a severe whipping on the body. Bonhoeffer was hanged at the command of Heinrich Himmler on April 9th, 1945, shortly before the fall of Berlin. It was a final gesture of contempt before the collapse of the Third Reich.
What a waste. So good a man. Such devotion. Such an exemplary life. So courageous and strong. Apparently so strong in his faith. Yet Bonhoeffer testified of himself a far less secure person. He wrote this poem in prison awaiting his execution:
“Who am I? They often tell me
I would step from my cell’s confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They also tell me
I would talk to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I would bear the days of misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself . . .
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today, and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.”
Whatever you think of yourself, the foundation of your faith is not your capacity to be self-confident, but in God whose love was poured out to you in a way no one can understand. The final act of God’s love was to raise His Son from death, ending the curse of sin and death. Perhaps your difficulty in believing is a benefit in that it will keep you from pride as you dare to trust God. In the final analysis, trust is response to our helplessness. A drowning person grabs in utter need for the floating doughnut of life tossed her way. Thus I respond to God, grasping helplessly to the resurrection of Jesus that floats above me on the surface of the water in which I am drowning.
A great part of the purpose of our life together is that those for whom faith comes hard should find help from those whose faith comes more easily. Very often people who struggle with their faith try hard by acts of service to find the sense of security they lack in deliberately serving God. Perhaps this was how Jesus’ little band of disciples lived together.
Jesus taught them that together they were His body. Not just after He was gone, but while He was with them. His Body was made up of those for whom trust came with difficulty as well as those for whom trust came more easily.
As Bonhoeffer served the underground Church in Germany that Hitler tried to suppress, he came to realize how “Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ . . . We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.”
Jesus Christ calls us to Himself with our various capacities, the weak with the strong, the confident with those lacking in self confidence, the doers with the thinkers, and we keep on keeping on, in every way that we can, keeping our focus on Him.
Let us keep on keeping on.
O Lord, in our various stages of trust and unbelief we come, thankful for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, whose love for us and whose death for us is our only hope in life. Help us to hold on to Him. In whose name we pray. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at April 3, 2005 09:30 AM