“…and he saw and believed” (John 20:9)
By Fr. Adam Laski
The encounter with the Lord Jesus starts with an empty tomb. The externals of the Resurrection’s Gospel: an empty tomb, a boulder rolled to the side, the burial clothes, and men-of-God (angels) on the sides attesting to a fact. The disciples encounter them at first and do not know how to proceed. They are in the dark in their ability to know and understand what they should believe. The externals are symbols of something more.
So many people saw Jesus being crucified; they looked at him and shouted at him, mocked him. Even the man crucified next to him said, “If you are the Son of God, save yourself and others.” Seeing can lead to disbelief. If they encounter Jesus with hardened hearts, they simply remain in their disbelief. They see the facts of his death and the details of the open tomb, but they mistake this for one tomb among billions. Dead bodies all throughout human history—each ancestor of Jesus—has died and has stayed in the tomb. And if the onlookers have no faith, the tomb is just one more sad fact about the death of men.
So many others bumped into Jesus during his public ministry. Some were disinterested gawkers looking for entertainment, who saw what they expected—an insignificant man. Others came away with healing of body, mind, and soul. John, the beloved disciple, is the one who is acquainted with Jesus from leaning on his breast at the Last Supper and staying at the cross until Jesus’ brutal crucifixion ended in a torrent of blood and water. John sees each of these mysteries and believes.
Then John encounters something different. He goes into the tomb with Peter; he runs toward the mystery Jesus had taught them: “I am the Resurrection and the life.” John had been the one to account for the conversion of the woman at the well, the opening of the eyes of the blind man, and the raising of Lazarus. It was in his attentiveness to each of these that he was instructed in the new thing that God was doing in Jesus: dead bodies now leave their tombs.
He is being led to belief, instructed in a new way of believing—why? Because this isn’t the way human beings think. We think very linearly: Jesus left the tomb—isn’t that nice for him? But God left his tomb so that we might be free from our slavery to the tomb. God crushed death so that death might no longer have the final say.
The last word of death is to rage in the here and now. Satan makes us want to lose our faith while we are here on earth. He tempts us, when we see the suffering of others, to abandon our hope. He threatens our trust that there is a good God who cares about us. He tempts us to walk away from the sense of God’s goodness when we see family and friends carrying their crosses. It is a struggle in faith to see God present in the death of a loved one. Many experience their families and friends one step away from their funeral and are tempted to step away from the thought that a good God could be present in this, not understanding why He would allow it.
When we see our loved ones’ bodies sick and decaying; when we look to the face of a lifelong friend and see a forgetful look, we are being tempted. Tempted to say: “This is the fate of all of us. None of this really matters. This life is all that there is, and then you die.” Why do we need faith in the Resurrection? Because without this faith, the suffering we endure would threaten to be meaningless. We need faith because Satan would love us to abandon hope in the power of Jesus to rise from the dead and the promise of our Resurrection—the power of an empty tomb.
To believe in the Resurrection as St. John did—to see it and to believe in it—sets suffering on a different trajectory. Christ’s sufferings do not end in death forever. The suffering of our families and friends will end too—and then what? They will rise again from the dead. They will leave the grave and be free again to live with God forever. We will be united to them again by faith. This is the hope of Easter Day.