It is Good Friday, and the sky is gray and cloudy, spitting rain–the suitable backdrop for the occasion. But as with every year, I can’t possibly be mournful. It is the best day for humanity in every age and place. It is the best day because there is no way to walk through it without feeling, in the bones, the irrepressible amazement that the death of one man undid death itself. But you might still find yourself doubting. And so it is always nice to rehearse how you can know for sure the resurrection is true.
One
Peter and the other disciples are the perfect gift of certainty by God to the church, but especially Peter. Blustery, impulsive, unthinking, enthusiastic, cowardly. Jesus did not pick twelve men that anybody would ever trust to make anything up, and Peter puts this verity brilliantly on display. That all the facets of his flawed, broken, sinful character should be so full orbed in the text is a miracle. I’ve been mulling over and over all week what a remarkable thing it is to have Peter’s denial right there on the page in an era (which is every era) of every single person trying to craft not only the news of the day to say one thing or another, but a social media and online presence. I don’t want you to know me as I really am. I and everyone in the world over. The last thing I want for you to see are my failures, my despair, my devastation. Peter is the most obvious way you can know the resurrection is real.
Two
Pilate is the second way. I don’t know if he had the chance to read the gospels before his death. I don’t even know when he died. But he sits there in the narrative like a sore thumb, dithering around. He is shown in the most unfavorable light. But the text lasted. It would have had to be indisputable to last this long. Everyone could see and know that Pilate was jostled by all the different political pressures and desires to appease so many different people. I would bet that if he could have disputed the picture of himself, he would have, but couldn’t because everybody knew.
Three
The unbelief of the women also has to be high up on this list. I like to make much of the fact that the women were the first to see Jeus and know of the resurrection. And it is a lovely picture with the garden and the gracious reversal of Eve. But, unavoidable is the fact that they rushed along in the dark of dawn because they did not believe Jesus. They didn’t believe any more than Peter or the rest. They thought he was dead. They knew he was dead. They spent money on expensive spices knowing he was dead. And there it is, memorialized in the text forever, their unbelief.
Four
The miraculous and mysterious nature of scripture itself is another reason to believe the resurrection. I have gone over the Bible, back and forth and up and down, haphazardly and systematically both, and with every turn I take, I discover another strange kernel of the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is embedded into almost every word of the Old Testament, and proclaimed openly in the New.
And what a strange thing to do, to openly proclaim, but then to also hide the truth itself, into thousands of years of history and prophecy and circumstances and curious stories. That they would so perfectly, once you can see them, proclaim the cross and empty tomb is a strange mystery that compels me to belief against any doubt.
Five
The undoing nature of the cross is a reason to believe in the resurrection. The more I look at the cross, from every possible vantage point, the stranger it becomes to me. The claims of Jesus leading up to the cross, the way he himself framed what would happen–that he would be delivered up, that he would lay down his life, that he would be a seed that would fall into the ground–is a deeply unusual way of thinking about death. The finality of death–of a person who you know and rely on in the way that you even conceive of reality and yourself, being snatched away and never more seen again, is one of the more reliable but unbearable parts of human existence. We make up all kinds of stories about what happens when you die. You float into the mist and become nothing, you reincarnate, you become an angel, you sit around and haunt the living–the fact is that none of us know. But Jesus spoke as if he knew, to a bunch of people who were bumbling around in the text around him, and who clearly weren’t paying attention at the time.
Six
If you think about it, which I do often, the material world as we know it at all requires the resurrection. The redemptive work of Jesus is the thing that holds the cosmos together. I say this because no matter how much a person might try to avoid it, evil is obvious and blisteringly close at hand. It mounts up in each person’s life. The longer you live, the more evil you know, the more bad things you see, the more trouble you discover. Evil is both small and great. It is a thousand small things, and every single big one. And we are always running around trying to solve it, trying to beat it back–culturally, individually, systemically.
But the fact that we want to do this, that we have an understanding of good at all, of the idea that things should be right, finds all its energy and source at the cross. If Jesus didn’t die, didn’t rise, didn’t return to the Father, the world wouldn’t be spinning and orbiting and clunking along in the universe right now. Some deep primordial good, some deep cosmic good has to have held everything together, and said something about evil, even if we don’t want to see it.
Seven
The best reason to believe in the resurrection is the empty tomb, of course. The fact remains that there tomb stood on Sunday morning, when clearly there had been a dead body in it the day before. There’s never been a good answer to the emptiness of the tomb. Nobody ever produced the body, which would have the obvious and clever thing to do, if you had it. Instead all the people who knew Jesus wrote down and proclaimed the most unflattering things about themselves, and went desperately out into the world to speak and then to die, because they had seen their friend, alive, with their own eyes, and were compelled along by the powerful force of God himself. Looking for evidence of the resurrection today? The fact that Christians gather every Sunday and admit to God and each other how evil they are, how wretched, how dying. The fact that Christians, true Christians are constantly, but without any fanfare, taking the lowest place. The fact that Christians, true Christians, are unwilling to let go of this strange thing–that a man who died stood up out of his tomb and walked away alive in his body.
Go check out more Takes, and a blessed Good Friday and Easter to you all!
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