John 20:1-9
Note: This sermon accepts the centuries old view that John was the “other” disciple.
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The other day Pat and I walked into one of the busiest malls in central Ohio where we were greeted with a sign announcing the mall would be closed on Sunday, March 27th. While many businesses will be open today, many others will be closed to observe the Easter holiday.
I can appreciate that—even though I know that on the first Easter things were pretty much business as usual. In fact, after the hectic Passover things were settling down to a more normal pace. The first day of the week had dawned and promised to be uneventful. Of course, most people were aware that the once-popular teacher from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, had been crucified; gossips were whispering about charges of blasphemy and sedition. And, now that he was dead and buried his followers had made themselves scarce. Most of them hadn’t been seen since before the crucifixion.
Who could blame them for hiding? The Romans might have decided they were dangerous too. Probably not, but you could never be too sure with the Romans.
Yet, not all of Jesus’ followers were remaining behind closed doors. A handful of women, including Mary Magdalene, were determined to visit his grave and anoint his body with perfumes and spices to show their respect. John mentions only Mary but the other Gospels name the others who went on this errand.
Instead of finding the tomb sealed and guarded they found it open, abandoned, and empty.
Things started happening pretty quickly after this. Because each Gospel writer had his own purpose in writing and choosing his material, they weren’t always clear about the sequence of events. Fortunately, it’s not absolutely necessary to know the order in which things happened to grasp the gist of the story. Furthermore, there are several ways to harmonize the known events. With that in mind, let me offer what may have been the sequence of events leading up to Peter and John’s visit to the tomb.
o The women arrive at the tomb and discover it empty. (All Gospels)
o Mary Magdalene may have broken away from the others to report the discovery to the Eleven.
o Meanwhile, angels appear to the women to tell them that Jesus had risen as he had promised them. (Luke 24)
o In response to Mary Magdalene’s report, Peter and John set off to see to the tomb.
o Along the way or just before they leave, they encounter the other women who are returning to tell their story.
o This prompts Peter and John to quicken their pace and literally run to the tomb.
Now, back to the story.
John, perhaps because he his younger or perhaps because he can run faster, gets to the tomb first. He looks in. Peter arrives and, being the bolder of the two, actually enters the tomb and looks around. What they see plays an important part in John’s account.
The Bible says they say, “the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen.”
In accordance with Jewish burial customs strips of linen had been tightly wound around Jesus’ body. In this case, some seventy-five pounds of spices had been wrapped up with the cloth. The body would then resemble a mummy, although the wrapping did not cover the head. A separate, turban-like cloth covered the head and face.
Within the tomb of Jesus, Peter and John saw this burial cloth, looking for all the world as if it had just collapsed upon itself. It bore the general shape of a human body but none was there. The cloth looked like a deflated balloon. Add to this the fact that the head wrapping was neatly folded and set aside, away from the rest of the wrappings.
John uses several verbs to describe how the two men saw what was in that tomb.
Peter saw what was there in the sense that his eyes took in what was before him. The presence of the wrappings and the head cloth registered on his consciousness so he could later report to the others what was there and report accurately.
John saw what was there in the sense that his eyes took in what was before him. But not only did the presence of the wrappings and the head cloth register on his consciousness, their significance did as well. With humility John refers to the “other” disciple and says, “He saw and believed.” The two remnants of Jesus’ burial clothes pointed to the Resurrection.
Lenski lays out the thought-process that the wrappings must have inspired.
No human being wrapped round and round with bands like this could possibly slip out of them without greatly disturbing them. They would have to be unwound, or cut through, or cut and stripped off. They would thus, if removed, lie strewn around in disorder or heaped in a pile, or folded up in some way. If the body had been desecrated in the tomb by hostile hands, this kind of evidence would appear. But hostile hands would have carried off the body as it was, wrappings and all, to get it away as soon as possible and to abuse it later and elsewhere. But here the linen bands were. Both their presence and their undisturbed condition spoke volumes. Here, indeed was a sigh to behold. Jesus was raised from the dead!
Peter saw what John saw, John saw what Peter saw. But they saw differently. Both saw the same data—the same linen wrappings and head cloth in a condition they shouldn’t have been in if the body had been stolen.
Peter saw this and went away puzzled. John saw this and something clicked. He suddenly knew what it meant: Jesus had risen from the dead.
John’s Easter way of seeing led him to an Easter faith.
John’s faith may not have been robust; he’s not recorded as sharing it with anyone, although he may have. Still, he possessed at least a glimmer of faith and that appears to be more than Peter did at this point.
Yes, Peter would become a believer in the resurrection but why didn’t he experience the same birth of faith at this time? We don’t know precisely but let me offer what I hope are some reasonable suppositions..
1. John may have possessed a more intuitive mind than Peter.
I don’t mean to suggest he was more gullible or more credulous, but that he may have simply been better able to discern the inferences from the facts at hand.
Some people can look at the facts and see what others overlook. In the short story Silver Blaze Conan Doyle depicts Sherlock Holmes with this type of intuition.
Holmes is asked if he had found anything significant in the reports regarding the events leading up to the theft of a horse.
Holmes then alludes to “the curious incident of the dog in the night time.”
His companion responds, “The dog did nothing in the night time.”
Holmes comments, “That was the curious incident.”
Most of us know a dog barking sometime during the night a theft occurs might be significant. It takes a unique mind to conclude something significant about the dog not barking.
John may have been able to draw inferences from the grave clothes that Peter just wasn’t able to see.
Are you one of those people who feels outrun by others, those who seem so spiritually insightful? You struggle for the insights they seem to grasp immediately. Don’t despair. People like us just have to work harder.
2. Peter may have been more bound by his prejudices than John.
Luke tells us how the disciples responded to the story the women told. He says they thought “…the story sounded like nonsense, so they didn’t believe it.”
There response to the women’s story is hardly surprising. In first century Judea a woman wasn’t considered to be particularly reliable. Women weren’t even allowed to testify in court. Yet, all the gospels agree the women were the first witnesses to the Resurrection.
Now this is significant, especially when we encounter those who insist the Easter story was spun out of the imagination of the early church. If the writers had been making the story up, they would have inspired more credibility if they had cast men in the role of the first witnesses. That they kept women in that role gives their accounts a note of authenticity.
Anyway, both Peter and John would have been culturally disinclined to believe the women. Yet, John, when confronted by the empty tomb and the evidence within, cast his lot with the women.
My goal is not to suggest John might have been more enlightened than Peter. I just want you to keep in mind that prejudice can keep a person from faith.
The prejudice may be against the persons proclaiming the gospel. The early church sometimes encountered those who would not believe because of the low social status of the evangelists. Others allowed cultural or racial prejudices to close their eyes.
Perhaps the most deadly and persistent prejudice is a bias against the supernatural. Those who deny the very possibility of miracle, who insist there is no God to do the unprecedented in human history, will never be persuaded to believe in the Resurrection—no matter how powerful the evidence.
Instead, they will believe any number of even less believable alternatives:
o That someone other than Jesus was crucified,
o That Jesus didn’t really die on the cross,
o That a frightened band of disciples stole the body from under the noses of the Roman guards,
o That Jesus’ enemies, for some unexplained reason, stole the body that was just where they wanted it to be, put it somewhere else, and then forgot where they had put it when the Resurrection stories started spreading,
o That the women and the disciples all went to the wrong tomb and concluded Jesus had risen (an explanation which assumes the opponents of the gospel never thought of pointing out the right tomb once the Christians started preaching about the Resurrection),
o That hundreds of men and women all shared the same hallucination of the Risen Christ (a psychological phenomenon which has never been repeated),.
There are other “alternative” explanations just as fanciful. One of these was cited in Time a couple years ago; it was the product of its author’s imagination. He suggests that Jesus’ body was buried in a shallow grave. His body was then eaten by wild dogs. The disciples, upon finding the body missing, jumped to a conclusion that included a resurrection.
Those who cling to anti-supernatural prejudices will believe almost anything.
If you reject the Easter story outright, you need to examine how you approach the story. Are you approaching the story with a truly open mind or with a mind determined beforehand to exclude the possibility of God acting to counter the power of the grave?
Some Observations On An Easter Way Of Seeing
John didn’t include this story to remind his readers he could run faster than Peter. He didn’t include this story to show he was more spiritual than Peter. He didn’t include it to demonstrate—as some in centuries past argued—the deference paid to Peter in the early church. I believe John included this story of how he came to have an Easter way of seeing to show us something about the nature of faith.
John’s purpose in writing his Gospel was to call people to faith. Naturally he wants us to understand how faith is born, how it develops.
So, what does he tell us?
1. The foundational truth of Christianity is open to scrutiny.
Of all the gospel writers John offers to most explicit invitation to consider and weigh the evidence regarding Jesus. When he uses “signs” as his favorite word for Jesus’ miracles, it’s as if he wants us to ask, “What do the signs point to?”
As he took us on a tour of the Empty Tomb, he lets us see it really wasn’t empty. He shows us some forensic evidence and asks us to begin to evaluate it.
All the New Testament writers share this perspective. They invite their readers to consider the evidence backing up the claims about Christ.
If you’ve never weighed the evidence for Jesus’ claims or if you’ve begun to question what you’ve been taught about Jesus, don’t be afraid to dig deeper. Read the Bible carefully, seek the help of good writers who fairly consider the tough questions, let the evidence lead you.
You don’t have to fear losing your faith; in fact, it may become stronger.
2. The path to an Easter way of seeing will vary from person to person.
As John brings his Gospel to a close he will tell the story of several people who come to possess faith in the Risen Christ, who begin to have an Easter way of seeing. Each story is unique.
As you seek to have that Easter way of seeing, don’t expect your experience to be a copy of someone else’s. You’re an individual. Be open to God leading you step by step to faith.
3. Remaining blind to the Easter way of seeing is the greatest spiritual tragedy.
John wrote his Gospel to encourage people to believe, but he never forgot there would be those who steadfastly refused to believe.
John never treated these people with disrespect; he saw them as the victims of a spiritual struggle in which they allowed prejudice, selfishness, and arrogance to keep them from faith.
Their refusal to believe meant they were lost. They would not share in Jesus’ Resurrection victory.
If you’re resisting that look that might lead to faith, give up your foolish pride and seek God’s help. Pray to see the truth, the truth that transformed history. Pray to understand the significance of that empty tomb.
