For as yet they knew not the Scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.
(Jn 20:9)
So the disciples went to the tomb, Peter, and John, and Mary Magdelene, of whom John and Mary had seen Jesus die two days before, and they found that Jesus was not in the tomb. And when Mary waited in the Garden she found that Jesus was in the garden, walking and talking. And when John and Peter returned to the house where they were used to gather, they found that Jesus was in the house, eating and drinking. And none of those (more than 500, Paul tells us [1 Cor. 15:6]) who saw the empty tomb, or the living Jesus, could stop talking and writing about this extraordinary event, this extraordinary man, as long as they lived. And it changed them all.
This dead Jesus walked the earth alive; this buried Jesus had walked out of the tomb; this crucified Jesus walked among them in the splendour of his divinity.
And it took them a while to get used to the idea. All four Gospels record at first the disciples’ negative reaction to the resurrection. Matthew remembers an atmosphere of fear, turning only afterwards to joy and confidence; Mark reports disbelief at first, then the change of heart, and at last belief; Luke writes of astonishment and puzzlement, then of knowledge and worship.
All this was very natural. But there is no cause for you and me to fear, no excuse to disbelieve, no call for us to be astonished. We knew this was coming, we have heard the evidence before, we have had access to the testimony, unchallenged for almost two thousand years, and to twenty centuries’ tradition of joy, of belief, of confidence and of worship.
And now for John. He too had a negative reaction, at first. It was not fear; nor was it puzzlement; nor disbelief. He describes himself (for he it is, thinly disguised under the title of ‘the beloved disciple’) running fearlessly to the tomb, seeing the grave clothes and drawing his conclusion, and [v.8] believing, just as we, on rather more evidence, also now believe.
What, then, is his negative reaction? It is lack of understanding. With the benefit of some years’ hindsight he writes [v.9] : “they (for he is too coy to say ‘we’) did not yet understand the Scripture” but that now, at the time of writing, he does claim to understand, “the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”
John’s is the gospel you and I need to hear at Easter 2006. He knew and believed from the first that Christ was raised from the dead, just as we were taught this from the first day we entered the Church. But he wanted to know, why? what difference has it made?
It makes this difference: he came to understand the Scriptures, to understand what God was saying to the world, or we might better translate, as the Authorised Version does, he came to know the scripture, to know what God was saying, with the regretful admission that really he did not know before.
Now when John, or any of the writers in the New Testament, refer to “scripture”, they mean, of course, what we call the Old Testament. And John, along with all the writers of the New Testament, is very clear about the subject of the Old.
The Old Testament does not exist to give John, or Paul, or Peter, or you, or me, information about Iron Age history, or Greek politics, or astrophysics, or whatever it might be. Sometimes Scripture does these things, but, as it were, accidentally. No, the Old Testament exists to give John, and me, and you, knowledge about Jesus Christ, the image of God.
Of course, the name Jesus does not often appear in its pages. So you have to box clever. When you read the Old Testament (which I know can otherwise be a baffling experience) read it, as John did, as Paul and Peter did, expecting to read about Jesus Christ. And you will find different people described variously as servants of God, as kings or as the son of the king, as priests or as prophets, or as perfect in holiness, or as truly righteous. And I want alarm bells to be ringing in your heads saying Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! For none of us, and doubtless none of those who lived before us, are any more than approximations to those descriptions, but they are perfect descriptions of Him. Ask yourself, What feature, what quality and what action of Jesus Christ is this Old Testament passage telling me about?
And what do we learn? We learn that the servants of God, the prophets of the Lord, those who do the will of the Father, suffer for it, and unjustly. Uprightness and faithfulness of heart leads to Job being selected for an unfair test in which he is dispossessed and diseased; Jeremiah tells the truth and is imprisoned and mocked for it; the psalmist, protesting his innocence, sees his enemies closing in on every side, the reward for the faith of Abraham is to be asked to sacrifice his well-beloved only Son..
And what is said partially of these men we say completely of Jesus Christ. He is totally faithful to the Father, he is the witness of the truth, he is innocent of heart as no other was from the beginning of the world. So we hardly need any narratives of the events of Good Friday. If we had understood the Scripture, we would have known what would happen. And added to this act of perfect injustice He is of course the true Son of the true Father, and we had on Good Friday one chance to make real the atheist’s fantasy, and kill God.
What else do we learn? We learn that these people, servants and messengers of God, prophets and priests and kings and holy ones, claim to tell the world what God is like. What do they say? They say that God is everlasting and almighty, that he loves his people and promises them all that they could desire, that he is faithful to his word, and that his promise is sure. And they record more mysterious phenomena: the commander of the armies of the Lord, the pillars of cloud and of fire, the presence of God passing through the camp (and I say to you again - alarm bells - it is Jesus, Jesus, and Jesus again); and all testify that the everlasting One is the protector of those he loves.
Now these claims are Christian doctrine, but they have almost passed, under the influence of centuries of Christian history, into the definition of the word “God”. Is there a God? Does He last for ever? Does He want you in heaven? If He made a promise, could you trust Him? Many pretty non-religious people would answer “Yes” to questions such as these. Can you be confident in your answers? Would you bet your life on it? I might get fewer “yeses” to those questions.
God says, you can be confident; you can bet your life. He says so in the Scripture, and confirms it by raising Christ from the dead. That is John’s faith, and it is ours.
John does not claim that the scriptures say that Christ would rise from the dead. The Scriptures are not in the business of prediction, of fortune-telling. John says - look at the text again - that the scriptures say that Christ must rise from the dead. If we knew that what the messengers of God had said was true we would know that the Son of God could not come to such an end as Friday‘s. We would need no record of Mary’s and John’s and Peter’s visit to the tomb, nor record of their meeting the risen Christ.
An al-mighty God is not defeated even by something so final to us as death. A promise given by a faithful God will come to pass. You may kill an everlasting God, but he will come back. How could he not, if his everlasting-ness, his al-mighty-ness, and his faithful-ness are true?
John, then, at least, did not know, nor understand it: but he does now, and so do we. The almighty, everlasting, all-loving, trustworthy God is a supposition for the world; a theist’s fantasy, if you like; the sort of God dismissed as wishful thinking, the best of all possible Gods..
But the song of we who have believed that Christ is risen from the dead is this: “we’re not guessing any more”. We know and have seen that the faithful God has done a great work on our behalf, has fought a great battle and has triumphed, and proved his nature to be unconquerable. For the Lord is risen from the tomb, and everything we have said of God is wonderfully true. Therefore we can and will and must exult, and rejoice and give him the glory, whose is the majesty and the dominion, even unto the ages of ages, and world without end.
Alleluia, Christ is risen:
he is risen indeed, alleluia.
Alleluia, Christ is risen:
he is risen indeed, alleluia.
Alleluia, Christ is risen:
he is risen indeed, alleluia.
