When I was a little boy, my grandmother had a large conch shell. I don’t know where that old shell came from. I’m not sure if she ever went to the beach, or if someone brought it to her from their beach trip. What I remember is holding that conch shell up to my ear and being told I could hear the ocean in it. As a child, I believed it. I’d hold that shell up to my ear, cup my hand over my other ear, and listen to the soft roar coming out of the shell. Sure enough, it sounded just like waves crashing on the shore. It was cool for a little boy who had never been to the beach. It wasn’t a life-changing experience, but it was a first lesson into the mysterious nature of our world. Yes, as I grew up, many of the mysteries of life were explained through the scientific method, and the roar in the old conch shell was easily explained. Yet, there is something awe-inspiring in those mysteries…something that makes us say, “Wow!” One such mystery that still remains is the resurrection…that which we celebrate on Easter.
There is much that is mysterious in our world. Perhaps it goes beyond the mysterious almost to the point of, dare I use the word, magical. Think about it. Trees lose their leaves every winter, and grow new ones every spring. How does that happen? Flowers, too, know when and how to grow from seeds. The azaleas are in full bloom, and they’re magnificent. It happens every year (except in my yard, of course) like clockwork. Caterpillars withdraw into a cocoon and emerge as a butterfly. Babies, started from the meeting of two individual cells, know just how to divide into the individual parts and organs that make up a human body. At a specific point in that development, a heart-beat begins. How does it know to begin? It’s mysterious and magical. And, who knows what the signal is that causes labor to begin? Science can tell us how those events happen, but still, there is a mysterious nature that lies behind them. What brought about these things to be the way they are? What makes the world operate as it does? What determined the building blocks of life in our universe?
Yes, I know science has an answer for all of it, but save your scientific jargon. I know there are processes and theories, but any and every attempt to explain them is incomplete. They fall flat. They cannot explain the mysterious, magical part of what happens in any of those things. Perhaps because they fail to explain the purpose of the phenomena in the first place, explanation and facts are only half the story and never really account for all that we experience.
You may tell me the physical, scientific reason for the sound I hear in the sea shell. The shape of seashells just happens to make them great amplifiers of ambient noise. Any air that makes its way into a shell's cavity gets bounced around by its hard, curved inner surfaces. The resonating air produces sound. Yes, tell me that, but the ocean is still in that shell, just the same. It’s still just as mysterious and magical to me. It still makes me say, “Wow” when I hold a shell up to my ear.
Luke’s Gospel today finds us at the grave of Jesus. It is early on Sunday morning. Jesus had been laid to rest on Friday afternoon. Saturday was the Sabbath, and so it was not until this morning of the third day that the women who had followed Jesus, and who also had prepared the necessary spices and ointments to embalm him, were able to return to the tomb, in order to prepare his body. Imagine their surprise to find the tomb open. Imagine their reaction to find his body gone. Imagine their response to the two men standing by the tomb. “Why are you looking for the living among the dead?” they say. “Remember his teaching in Galilee?”
Yes, well now that you mention it, we do. We remember that Jesus taught “he would suffer at the hands of sinful men, be crucified, and on the third day he would rise again.”
It was for the women one of those mysterious/magical moments when “Wow” would be an understatement. No matter what else happened, at that moment, they heard the ocean in the seashell. They saw, and they believed. Their almost instantaneous belief is interesting. Did they ask or wonder how it could be? Did they stop to puzzle the impossibilities? No, they just rejoiced in the moment. They ran back to tell the disciples and everyone else what had happened. It wasn’t until they got back to the disciples that they meet with skepticism. “Impossible!” “Unexplainable!” “It can’t be.” The disciples called it nonsense, and they didn’t believe it.
That seems to be the condition of our world today. So many people refuse to believe what is not tangible, what cannot be explained. For so many years, our ability to reason anything out has been so emphasized, that we have no trust of anything without a reasonable, logical, scientific explanation. This is compounded by reason’s failure to explain everything for us. Logic and education has let us down. The mystery still remains. It is not logical. The resurrection cannot be explained.
Assuming that God exists, it is not logical to believe that God and humanity could mix together in the form of one human body. It can’t be explained or determined. Neither could one return to life after death for three days. Life can’t begin again once death is complete. And, it isn’t only the resurrection of Jesus that people have trouble with. The Bible, itself, is a nonsensical book, full of inconsistencies, improbabilities, impossibilities, and some would say, fairytales.
I’ll be happy to suggest this morning that such people can’t experience the mystery or magic of the resurrection. Just as it was to the disciples, it doesn’t make sense. I wonder if the ability to believe has dried up from years of influence on society and the progress of science and technology at rapid speed. The mystery of the resurrection requires reclaiming our ability to have faith in what we can’t explain or understand. We have to begin with the tangible (the teachings of Jesus Christ) and move to the unbelievable—the resurrection.
Notice, though, what Peter does. He falls somewhere in the middle. He doesn’t quite go all in with this tale the women share, nor does he jump on the nonsense bandwagon with the other disciples who don’t believe what the women tell them. He simply decides he has to see for himself. He goes to the tomb, looks inside, and I imagine he reaches over and fondles the linen grave clothes lying there. Then, he returns home, as Luke tells us, “wondering what had happened.”
Can you imagine his footsteps as he makes his way back to the upper room? Awe-struck, I bet he’s playing the events of the last few days and the last three years over in his head. And, he is remembering (just as the women were called to do) what Jesus told them concerning events that would happen in Jerusalem. Oh, his heart wants to believe he’s hearing the ocean in a seashell. Logic makes him afraid to do so.
I think Peter’s attitude reflects where most of us find ourselves here this Easter morning.
Peter most emphatically believed in Jesus during his ministry. Yet, it is also true that Peter experienced doubt and turned away during his three denials just two short days before. Luke indicates that it is with hesitancy that Peter begins to believe in the resurrection, and it seems to be with hesitancy that we believe in the resurrection, as well.
I wonder if our hesitancy is what makes the difference in our celebration of Easter and Christmas? We LOVE to celebrate Christmas, and we go all out with lights and tress and decorations and endless gatherings. Our celebration of Easter is more subdued. Maybe it’s because of Good Friday, but I suspect it has more to do with refusing to hear the ocean in our seashell. I’ll admit that without Christmas, Easter morning could never have come, but it is even truer that without Easter morning, the meaning of Christmas would be forever changed. Christmas loses its purpose without Easter, yet we seem to let Easter slip in and out so quietly. It seems that we let it be just another day. We don’t seem to proclaim it as loudly. Our celebration in its meaning seems subdued compared to Christmas. Are we wanting to believe in the impossible, but afraid to really do so? Are we afraid to make a big deal about it because we can’t really explain it? Yes, we believe in the resurrection, but we say it with quiet voices.
Think about the wonder of it all this Easter morning. Perhaps like Peter, our hearts beat faster as we begin to contemplate the implications of the resurrection. If we were there this morning, standing beside the tomb, what would our reaction be? Would we rejoice and share our experience with everyone? Would people be able to see a difference in us because of our experience? Or, would we be skeptical? Would we be looking for reasonable and logical explanations? Would we try to explain it all away? Could we begin to tentatively believe in the mystery of the discovery? Would everything that we had come to know with our mind as truth and reality take on new meaning because of what we now believe with certainty in our heart?
The invitation this morning is simple. Claim the mystery of the resurrection as your own. Don’t try to explain it. Don’t even try to understand it. Just believe it, and you might discover there’s an ocean in every seashell.
Childish, you say? Probably so, but I remind myself that Jesus said, “Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children. I tell you the truth, anyone who doesn’t receive the Kingdom of God like a child will never enter it” (Mark 10: 14 – 15 NLT).
He is risen! He is risen, indeed!
