John 20:1-18
April 8, 2007
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
As worshipers gather on Easter morning, the question that is on our minds is “What does it mean?” Before arriving at church, many families have already looked for jellybeans and colored eggs. People have gotten dressed up as nicely as they can. Yet as Christians around the world gather in sanctuaries this day and listen yet again to the discovery of the empty tomb, the basic question remains: “What is it supposed to mean?” Is all of this merely focusing on hocus pocus? Hocus pocus—meaningless words used to deceive us. Are we being tricked by all this talk about an empty tomb?
Our modern world is convinced that nothing is real except what we can see, taste, smell, hear and touch. If you were to survey any group of people on which of the five senses they feel they cannot go without, the majority would say, “seeing.” The modern world is dedicated to the principle that there is no reality other than what we can see. We see an empty tomb but can we believe that the dead is not dead anymore?
It’s like picking out a cantaloupe in a supermarket. You might have a fruit salad for your Easter dinner today. For some unknown reason, some of us would knock on it before we would buy it. Others would smell it. Some people would press on the end to see how hard or soft it might be. But ultimately with no indication whether the cantaloupe inside is sweet and juicy or not, we make our selection based on how nice the outside skin looks. On top of this, most of the time when we serve a cantaloupe, people don’t even see the outside skin! There’s a lot of hocus pocus in selecting a cantaloupe!
What You See is What You Get
But what if we can’t find a cantaloupe nice looking enough to buy? You go to green grocer and ask, “Do you have any more cantaloupes?” The green grocer says, “Well, what you see there is all there is, either take it or leave it.”
This is like a summary of how we understand the world. We look at the world. There are some things about the world that don’t seem right to us. A number of aspects about the world, and ourselves, displease us. We see things that we don’t like but we hold our tongue.
But growing up and becoming a mature adult means to be the sort of person who is able to say, “Well, this is all there is. What you see is what you get. Either take it or leave it.”
Most of us, as we grow up, learn to take it rather than leave it. We pick up that cantaloupe even if it didn’t look that pretty on the outside. We go about in the world, asking only that we have the guts to take the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. What we see is what we get. And there is a certain dignity, a kind of courage to not whine, to not console ourselves with fairy tales, and living on the basis of what appears before us to be what it is. For example, we know Disneyland is fantastic but we also know that there’s another world that is behind Cinderella’s Castle—all the machinery and hard workers that keep the fairy tales alive. This is all there is, we say. Live with it. In time, we learn to not focus on the hocus pocus.
Out of Focus
And yet this approach does not do justice to the complexities of vision. How do we see? You don’t have to live very long before you realize that what you see might not necessarily be what there is. The brain filters out so many of the visual impressions we see. What we see seems to be connected to some sort of template in the brain. When sensory images are fed in through the optic nerve the brain sorts through its collection of previously experienced images, makes matches, fits what we see into a pattern, and we are led to say, “There it is! That’s a chair.” If you have seen one chair, that enables you to see them all.
See the sentence printed in your bulletin, “In raeding a wrod, the olny neceassry tihing is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. Yuor mnid suppleis the wrods form tohse cules alnoe. It tnues out all tohse wornly pacled lteters.” At first glance, it might appear that those sentences are merely a jumble of random letters. After a moment or two, the actual meaning appears. You are able to match these misspelled words with previously understood words and therefore able to make sense of them.
And yet what does the brain do with things that don’t fit into previously experienced patterns? What if our vision is out of focus? What if our seeing is sometimes limited to what we expect to see, or have the courage to see? What if it is not so much a matter of “you get what you see,” but also a matter of “you see what you have already gotten?”
Mary Magdalene
Mary Magdalene appeared at the tomb of Jesus early Easter morning. When she saw that the huge stone at the door had been rolled away, and that the tomb was empty, she immediately thought she saw what had happened. Obviously someone had stolen the body of Jesus and she did not know where they had put him. Mary must have had some previous experience that matched this Easter morning—that tombs don’t suddenly become empty when someone has died. When an angel appears and asks her why she is weeping, Mary says that someone has stolen the body of Jesus. Mary was still unable to see that something miraculously is happening in front of her eyes.
It is not until Jesus himself appears to Mary and calls her by name that she begins to see. Even then, she at first thinks that the risen Christ is a gardener. Mary just can’t get out of her mind that she is at a cemetery, a place of death, weeping and loss. She can’t refocus her eyes, even when an angel and the risen Christ are standing right in front of her.
In the rest of John 20, we see the disciple Thomas. When he hears the report that Jesus’ body is missing and that Jesus has appeared before some of the other disciples, Thomas says that unless he sees the wounds that killed Jesus, he won’t believe. After all, the one believable thing about Jesus is that he is dead, crucified and buried, with large holes in his hands and a gaping wound in his side. That’s reality.
And then the risen Christ appears, tells Thomas to touch his wounds, and Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God.”
I don’t think it’s fair to call him “Doubting Thomas.” It wasn’t that Thomas refused to believe. He believed. But he believed in what he could see. And what he could see was death, failure, and destruction. Mary was the same. Until Jesus called her by name, her vision was out of focus. Until the risen Christ asked Thomas to touch his wounds, Thomas could not see.
Seeing Beyond the Hocus Pocus
What does it take to get us to see what is there? Preaching on Easter is both a joy and a burden. It is a joy to preach to a sanctuary that is fuller than it usually is. But at the same time it’s a burden because some of you have come with possibly a ham baking in the oven, looking for an inspiring story to take home. You have a previous experience of what Easter Sunday needs to be and you have come looking for that.
Easter is more than those Cadbury chocolate Easter eggs and wearing your Easter best. Easter is more than determining reality only based on our five senses. Easter is even more than the hocus pocus that we assigned to the mystery of the resurrection in the sense that we just don’t understand it so therefore, “What we see is what we get.” It’s more than all of these.
About a week ago, Lauren, Sage and I were taking a walk down in Sausalito to enjoy the outdoors, the sights of docked boats and to get some Lappert’s ice cream. Along the boardwalk, we tried to see our house. At first, I couldn’t see it. Lauren said, “Look over there to the left of that black utility pole and down from that fancy house on the top of the hill.” It’s a frustrating experience. The thing is so obvious, so apparent. But even with my ion high definition eyeglass lenses, I just couldn’t see it.
There’s a matter of failed vision, inadequate perception. We’ve all had that frustrating experience at some distant point across the landscape and our friend beside us, gesturing as she speaks, “Look, over there!” It’s very frustrating.
What enables us to see? What is it that can grab our heads, turn our eyes in the right direction, and bring everything into focus?
For Mary and for Thomas, it was the risen Christ. He did not leave them to their own devices. He did not expect them to build upon their past experiences. He did not rely on their misperceptions, but rather he came to them. There was nothing in either Mary’s or Thomas’ past experiences that the resurrection would fit into a pattern for them to understand. Jesus spoke to Mary and then he encouraged Thomas to touch his very body. He turned their focus away from what was expected and what they were accustomed to and moved them toward what was being revealed.
That’s the reason why we call Christianity a revealed religion. You can’t see it until it is revealed, given to you, until one has experienced the gift of the presence of the Risen Christ, and then one’s eyes get in focus. We might at first think that all this resurrection talk is merely hocus pocus. But when we experience the gift of the presence of the Risen Christ, this hocus pocus is Easter focus!
Most of the time, we “see through a mirror dimly” as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians. Occasionally, by the grace of God, things come into focus and we see, “face to face.” We get to see what we have already gotten from Christ himself.
Easter is not just that Jesus was raised from the dead. Easter is that he was raised for us. He returned to his friends, revealed himself to them, and enabled them to see and to believe.
“I Have Seen the Lord.”
After Peter and the other disciple went into the empty tomb and saw the linen wrappings lying there and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself, they must have wondered that something strange was happening before their eyes. If robbers took the body, why would they have taken the time to roll up the cloth so neatly?
The Scriptures said that they saw and believed but they did not understand what the meaning of resurrection was when all they have known was that the dead stayed dead. The disciples must have been afraid because they returned to their homes and locked their doors.
In this sermon, I could have tried to argue and reason with you into believing in Christ. If I had the wits to argue you into the belief in the risen Christ, someone smarter than I could just as easily argue you out of belief. The deep, life-changing belief in Christ is not based on arguments and reasons but upon an encounter with the risen Christ. We believe simply because he comes to us and gives us that which we cannot give ourselves—a reason to believe, a way to go on, a path out of doubt toward faith.
Paul Tillich said, “Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.” If we are honest with ourselves, we would acknowledge that there are certain aspects of faith that cause us to raise questions from time to time. Even those first disciples raised questions as they heard the women’s report about the empty tomb. The presence of questions does not hinder our ability to ultimately come to faith.
Will you let your mind believe today now that you have seen how all these people sitting around you have set aside their previous experiences of what life they have come to believe with their five senses and like Mary announce to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord?”
The decision about whether to believe the truth about the resurrection is perhaps the central question concerning the Christian faith. If we believe the resurrection is true, we are able to commit ourselves without reservation to the cause of Christ, trusting that not even death in God’s service is an obstacle to us.
Are you fully committed to believing that all the hocus pocus talk of an empty tomb at Easter is actually focusing our lives exclusively on Christ? Are you willing to give your life to God in the name of Jesus Christ because of what he did for you and me on that cross?
It’s like the story of a pig and a chicken that were walking down a street together and came upon some poor, hungry people. The chicken said, “Look at all those hungry people. We should give them some ham and eggs for breakfast because it’s Easter.” The pig interrupted, “Wait a minute! For you, it’s a donation. For me, it’s a sacrifice.”
As we gathered together here this Easter morning, we are the body of Christ. Life is not “what you see is what you get.” It’s not “Either take it or leave it.” Just like Jesus gave his body as a sacrifice to take on all the sins of the world upon himself, we are to become living sacrifices today. We have a new vision of seeing the world that is different from how others see it. Not only was a dead Jesus raised from the tomb, but that a crucified Jesus was raised. It’s not that we got from Palm Sunday when Jesus was praised as King of kings to Easter Sunday with glad tidings that Jesus is now alive without anything in-between. It’s a crucified Jesus that was raised because of the events on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.
We choose to believe what the world has called Easter hocus pocus because it wasn’t just that Jesus was raised from the dead, it was that he was raised for us. He returned to his friends, revealed himself to them, and enabled them to see and to believe.
Jesus reveals himself to us too. Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit by breathing on us. When we see the sacrifices that followers of Jesus Christ make for others, we can see who they were meant to be. That can happen to us too. For the first time, we can focus on a new reality—an Easter hocus pocus that is not an idle fairy tale, that is not some trick or deception after all but is for real—Jesus Christ crucified is risen today. He is risen indeed!
Let us pray.
Dear God, reveal to us the truth and power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Help us to see beyond our previous life experiences that prevent us from seeing miracles happening all around us. We pray that you would walk with us side by side just as you revealed yourself to Mary, Thomas and the other disciples of God’s love—so powerful to conquer death itself. With our eyes focused on Easter, bless us, O God with your love and grace. Amen.