Scripture text: Luke 24:36-49
One of the guilty pleasures I’ve been indulging in these post-Lenten days is I’ve been binge-watching Arrow on Netflix. It’s a TV show based on the old DC comic book character Green Arrow. In the story, Oliver Queen is this billionaire playboy (echoing, in that, several other famous comic book characters) who gets shipwrecked on an island near China. He spends five years there, being chased by villains, captured, tortured, escaping, before finally being found and brought home.
The whole world thought he was dead and the series begins with his return to his family and his city. Of course, being not-dead-when-everyone-thinks-you-are is a pretty common trope in comic books. In fact, in the TV series as I’ve seen so far, Oliver has been joined by at least three other characters who likewise are believed dead and yet are discovered to be alive.
That’s comic book reality and there are other fictional genres that jump on the dead-but-not-really bandwagon as well (I’ve used the trope myself in some of my own fiction writing.) But the real world doesn’t really work that way. Occasionally, there will be a news report of some missing person being found years or sometime even decades after they were presumed gone forever.
But those events are exceedingly rare (hence newsworthy). More often, the story is more like that of a man who went missing in Davis just before I moved away. Several of his relatives who were acquaintances of mine, would post to Facebook periodically over the weeks and months that followed: Have you heard anything? Have you seen anything? They would ask everyone they knew. And then, some hikers found his remains in the woods some two miles from his home.
Unfortunately, in the real world, when one is thought dead, they usually are. And that’s in those cases that are somewhat ambiguous: a runaway, an abductee, a missing person, etc. There is no ambiguity facing the disciples on Good Friday. People don’t come back from crucifixion. You can’t fake your way out of that. Jesus is dead. There is no question in their minds about that.
So imagine then their confusion when reports start coming in that people have seen him alive. That’s impossible. That delusion. Desperate words from despondent people. People so overcome with grief they’ll believe and say anything.
“I have seen the Lord.” says Mary Magdalene. As sexist as it is to say, and given the time in history this would not have been uncommon, she was probably dismissed as little more than just another hysterical woman.
But she’s not and, as if to show up the narrow-mindedness of the disciples, Jesus shows up in person. He comes into the locked upper room and surprises everybody. Today we have as our Gospel lesson Luke’s version of that famous encounter. It differs slightly from the one we heard last week from John, but some things are the same.
John points out that Jesus shows off his injuries as a matter of course to the assembled disciples. Luke gives us some insight into why he did that: the disciples do not believe it’s him. They think they’re seeing a ghost. They think Jesus has become something undead (as the phrase is typically used in our pop culture), some manner of monster come back from the dead.
But he is not and he has to do a number of things to prove this to the disciples. Not only does he show the wounds and allow them to touch him, he even eats some food. All things that ghostly monsters are not supposed to be able to do.
We pick on Thomas for not believing the reports of Jesus’ resurrection when he is told, but the truth is, none of them got it. Not a single one. And it’s hard to blame them. What Jesus has done is impossible by everything that we know about how reality works. People do not rise from the dead. It just isn’t done. As another character in another favorite bit of pop culture says “This is the really real world. They’re ain’t no coming back.” [Warning: There is profanity and violence in the linked YouTube video]
Except that’s why we’re here. We’re here because those disciples took what Jesus told them and ran with it. “Look,” Jesus says, “you’ve heard my words. You know the Scriptures of old and you’ve seen how I have brought all of it to fulfillment. Now go! Go and tell others.” And they did, beginning in Jerusalem and across the Middle East. They went to Europe and Africa and Asia and eventually, as the generations of history passed, to America. And we are the inheritors of their legacy.
Two thousand years removed from the events of that upper room, we could be very much like the disciples at first: convinced that all this is impossible. But we don’t. We believe and we believe because they believed. We hope because they hoped. We trust God because they did. And all those things have been passed down to us across the span of time by faithful Christians who likewise believed because they did.
Faith is a funny thing. It asks us to place our trust in realities we cannot see, in truths we cannot prove, in events that should be impossible. Many would say that’s nonsense. But I don’t. You don’t and a hundred generations of believers across history don’t either. And perhaps most importantly, neither does God himself. This is what was meant to be. A plan of salvation brought to fulfillment through impossible events.
And that was intentional. Because if it was something provable, if it could be verified without any doubt or question, where would the faith be? Where would the trust be? God wants us to place our hope, our trust, and our faith in him, not in some verifiable fact.
All too often that’s what we try to do. We anchor our faith in the tangible, the provable, the verifiable. We cling to buildings or institutions, to traditions and cultural tropes. But these things change, these things are vulnerable to the passage of time.
Five hundred years ago, people thought the world flat and only 6000 years old. That’s been proven wrong and we’re still dealing with the fallout of that. Church buildings and institutions are dying out across our country. The Church (Big “C”), the body of believers, is doing just fine, but that doesn’t stop the propagandists and pundits from fear-mongering off of a supposed “war on Christianity.” Far too many confuse patriotism and civil religion for Christianity and as our nation transforms, calls grow increasingly louder for a vigorous and sometimes violent defense of our “Christian nation” that practices very little of what Jesus taught (and never has).
Where is our faith? Is it in the things of this world or is it anchored on the God who promised, the Christ who fulfilled, and the Holy Spirit who passed it on through the words and deeds of those gathered in that upper room and their inheritors? God’s promises may have no proof, but they are also unwavering in the face of time. Jesus’ work may have been impossible, but it is finished. The Holy Spirit should have failed miserably in the face of times far darker than our own, and yet the faith has still come to us. All these impossible things and yet it’s still happened. Nothing stops true faith. Nothing can destroy it. Time erodes the things of humankind. But God’s word, and the promises contained within, last forever. In which will we place our trust? Amen.
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