THE first disciples experienced shock, fear and disbelief as they tried to come to terms with the extraordinary and unique event we know as the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
They simply could not cope with the possibility that after Jesus was publicly executed and entombed he could possibly be alive to them and come to them and commune with them. At the human level that is understandable because the resurrection takes us beyond the limits of our own life experience, beyond what we know and are familiar with to something that far exceeds human expectations. Of course if it did not do that then there would be nothing to celebrate, because Easter is about celebrating something that is almost unbelievable. Without that dimension it would not be worth celebrating.
Because of that some people reject the idea altogether while others try to explain away what they consider to be the less believable parts of the story to make it more acceptable. The late Robert Runcie, one-time Archbishop of Canterbury, in an Easter Day sermon stressed the uniqueness and importance of Easter and warned against any attempt to weaken its message. “One of the great difficulties which people find in our time when they consider the claims of belief is the way in which the vocabulary of Christianity has been gradually diluted into a mere series of ethical truisms and made to mean what it never meant before. When the resurrection is simply a spiritual event within the hearts of the disciples and when everything else is translated into non-historical terms then the gospel becomes one more fairy tale. The gospel which brought the Christian church into being is proclaiming something which is beyond us and which has the effect of widening our vision at times beyond the bearable.”
He suggested that some people cannot accept the fact of the resurrection of Jesus because they either don’t understand it, or cannot explain it or control it. It is simply beyond them. “Men are always tempted to live out the lie that they are gods. They try to live as if they are the centre of the universe; like medieval astronomers, they are tempted to believe that the sun revolves around them. God if he has a place at all is a Sunday secret for those people who have a taste for religion as a hobby.”
When the archbishop spoke of the gospel proclaiming something that is beyond us he was referring to the limits of our understanding but Fr Thomas Merton, the American monk, warns against thinking of God as being beyond our experience – “out there in the vague beyond, a stopgap for the holes in our knowledge of the world. God is not simply the one whom we reach when we are extended beyond our limits. He is on the contrary, the ground and centre of our existence and though we may conceive ourselves “going to” him and reaching out to him beyond the sphere of our everyday existence , we nevertheless start from him and remain in him as the very ground of our existence and reality.”
That is the God, the intimate, near at hand God, that Jesus reveals in his dealings with his followers after the resurrection. They are not alone, especially as tomorrow’s gospel reading points out when they are startled, terrified, disbelieving, wondering.
He speaks to them of peace but it is knowing that he is present that gives the assurance. In that reading Jesus asks them: “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? The simple truth is that we all struggle at times to be aware of that presence, especially in times of distress or anxiety. But that is our problem and our problem does not alter the reality, the certainty even, that the unbelievable is in fact the believable: The Lord is risen; he is risen indeed.