Pacific Currents - Easter 2009

RESURRECTION

by Rev. Dr. Mary Susan Gast, Conference Minister, Easter, 2009

Seeing is believing.

On Easter morning, before dawn, three women went to the tomb and saw that it was empty.  They believed.  Mary Magdalene met the risen Christ in the garden.  She believed. The women told the twelve, and the twelve didn’t believe.  But Peter and John saw the empty tomb—and believed.

Seeing is believing.

Words of encouragement and support for those ministering "in the fields."

On Easter evening, Jesus appeared to the disciples who were hiding behind locked doors.  Those disciples believed.  But Thomas wasn’t there with them.  [Maybe he wasn’t fearful enough to have been hiding?  Maybe he had other business.  Who knows?]   Anyway, he hadn’t seen so he wasn’t about to believe.

In that regard, Thomas wasn’t any different from any of the other followers of Jesus. Over the centuries, though, it seems that preachers and teachers of Scripture have really liked to dump on Thomas.  However, to talk about “doubting Thomas” seems unfair unless we also talk about “doubting Peter” and “doubting Matthew” and “doubting Cleopas” and all the rest of them.  Until they saw with their own eyes, they doubted.

Seeing is believing.  Yet , the Gospel contends,  there are those who have not seen, but have come to believe. Consider these words scrawled on a wall of the children’s section of Auschwicsz:
      I believe in the sun, even if it does not shine.
      I believe in love, even if I do not feel it.
      I believe in God, even if I cannot see God’s face.

Believing does not require seeing.  More likely, believing requires courage. Courage to go beyond the world of manageable size we have constructed for ourselves in our spiritual blindness.  Courage to use the sight we have been given.

Most of us feel that we’ve seen too much.  Even those of us who had managed, for much of our lives, to be insulated against the driving winds of poverty and despair, garbed in the Kevlar-like protective coloration of white privilege, strangers to capricious violence and malice have come to sense the fragility of fortresses, the elusiveness of security.  Will we have the courage to see that our salvation from want and woe is not an individual pursuit, nor is it within our control.

At Christmastime we told the story of how, in the bleakest hours of the night, during the season of the shortest days, while the peace of the Roman Empire fell like a shroud over Europe and Western Asia and Northern Africa, muffling the cries of conquered peoples, and, at their expense, building up the freedoms and wealth of Roman citizens, there came glad tidings. The people who had walked in darkness—the darkness of oppression; the shadowlands of grief; the gloom of despair; the dusk of depression; the fog of loneliness—saw a great light, the beaming of extravagant love from the core of creation. That’s the light shining through the Savior who exasperates us by talking about needing to die in order to live; giving up everything, so that we can have abundant life; putting our trust in God rather than anything earthly.  This is counter-intuitive, non-sensical, virtually unbelievable stuff.  But, seeing is believing.

We are all made in the image of  the One who loves us whole-heartedly and irrepressibly.   We follow a Savior who exasperates us by talking about needing to die in order to live; giving up everything, so that we can have abundant life; putting our trust in God rather than anything earthly.

Have you seen?  Do you believe?

                                                                                                        ~ Mary Susan