John 20:1 - 9
Today’s gospel is from the gospel of John, and describes the discovery of the empty tomb. The four gospels are fairly consistent in that -- that the realization of the Resurrection of Jesus began in the dark, with a woman or women discovering an empty tomb. We see Mary Magdalene running to tell Peter and “the disciple Jesus loved” and they in turn run to the tomb. Although the disciple Jesus loved gets there first, he waits. But he witnesses the burial cloths neatly folded up. Peter goes into the tomb and ses the same thing. The story is straightforward and doesn’t present much in the way of difficulty, until you get to the last two sentences: “Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed. For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead.” Do you get the feeling something is missing here? If you do, you aren’t alone. What is it that the beloved disciple believed? Saint Augustine said he believed what Mary Magdalene had told them, that the body had been taken from the tomb. I guess that makes sense, but why didn’t the author say that Peter believed it as well? It isn’t a big stretch if you are staring at the evidence. Saint John Chrysostom thinks that the beloved disciple had a supernatural infusion of grace so that he believed in the resurrection. But why go on and say they did not yet understand the scriptures? Why not, “They finally understood the scriptures..” There are a couple of ancient copies of the gospel where the writer made sense of it by putting the word “not” in there -- the beloved disciple did not believe. And then there is a fourth possibility, suggested by still another translator -- the beloved disciple believed that Jesus had returned to the father, as he had predicted -- but didn’t understand that he would be returning to the earth in bodily form. Professor Scott Hahn tells us that when we come to one of these kinds of passages, it’s a speed bump; It’s supposed to wake us up, make us pay attention.
If you’ve ever seen pictures of the Last Supper, you see a young man sitting next to Jesus, or reclining by Jesus’ side. That’s the beloved disciple, the one who asks Jesus which of the apostles is going to betray him? Does it surprise you to know that the majority of scripture scholars don’t think this person is the apostle John? I won’t go into all the reasons for this, but one of the most popular alternative ideas is that the beloved disciple mentioned only in John and never given a name is the gospel writer’s invitation to his readers to be present in the events starting with the last supper and ending on the shores of the lake of Galilee after the resurrection; in other words, the gospel writer has given his readers a sort of first century stations of the cross.
And that idea is appealing to me. As John unfolds the story, you and I are there. We hear Jesus at the last supper predict to us that Judas will betray him; we are the ones to whom he offers his mother -- making us his brothers and sisters. We are the ones who believe in the Resurrection before even Jesus’ closest friends do; and we are the ones about whom Jesus says to Peter, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me.” and the text goes on to say, it is this disciple who is bearing witness to these things … and his testimony is true.”
If we are Christians, one of our fundamental beliefs is that we will rise from the dead, not as ghosts, not in the memory of our loved ones, but in a new and improved body, a real body, like Jesus had. That is an astounding belief when you think about it. You could argue all day with a disbeliever and never convince that person from the evidence we have that this is a fact. As far as we can tell from a purely scientific point of view, when you are dead, you are dead. But you and I are told to believe in the resurrection of the body on the word of Jesus, and belief, in the writings of the New Testament, always means more than simply agreeing with a factual statement. And belief in the resurrection of the dead, in my own resurrection after I die, is no different. If I am going to rise again, it really matters what I do during this lifetime. If I am going to rise, so will my worst enemy, so I better not have any. If I am going to rise, so is that person on the street pushing a shopping cart full of her earthly belongings, and we will meet someday, and Abraham may say, my child, you had the good things during your life, and now it is her turn. And I will meet all those lives snuffed out by abortion who will ask, you could have made it possible for me to become a saint. We believe in the Resurrection; do we believe in it enough to die for it, as so many of our ancestors in the faith did?
And that’s what I think happened in this gospel scene; the beloved disciple believed. And like the beloved disciple, because we are all beloved disciples, we are the ones who have to bear witness by our lives that the resurrection of Jesus is real, and our own resurrections will be real as well.
