THE RESURRECTION IS NO BIG DEAL

John, the Apostle and Evangelist, in his Gospel says this about his and Peter’s encounter with the empty tomb on Easter morning: “Then the other disciple [John}, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.” (John 20:8-10)

When I first read this passage years ago and even many years past that time, my first reaction was that I didn’t believe it. I did not believe that John immediately “saw and believed”; nor did I believe that he and Peter simply returned to their homes as if what they saw, an empty tomb, meaning that Jesus had been raised from the dead, was really no big deal.

It certainly was a big deal. And why would John declare that he, for one, immediately believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead when, later on in that same passage he basically takes Thomas to task for not believing that Jesus had been raised and that he and the rest of the Apostles had seen him in the flesh? Was he simply giving himself a pat on the back?

Maybe he was. Even sainted Apostles can have egos. However, to cut John a break, what I think he was saying was, yes, the resurrection was and is no big deal, nothing to get excited about, so just go home, if, and this is a big “if”, if we believe. If we believe that Jesus is the son of God, why, of course, he was raised from the dead. Is there any doubt that he would be? He said he would. The tomb’s empty. He’s risen. Might as well go home and wait to see what Jesus wants us to do next. What John is saying is that for a believer the resurrection is no big deal.

For a non-believer, it is a big deal because that person will simply state that a bodily resurrection of some dead-as-a-doornail-as-Jesus-was could not have been bodily raised. It is simply impossible. But we are believers even if we have no way of understanding what happened or what the resurrected Jesus looked like or how he got from one place to another, like entering the room where the disciples were even as the doors were locked.

We believers don’t waste a lot of time trying to explain the unexplainable. What we are supposed to do is, well, go home, think about what we believe, and then get on with living out that belief as best we can. We’ll never prove to a non-believer that Jesus was raised from the dead, not in a way that such a person can understand.

But we do, in fact, prove our belief in the resurrection by living out our faith each day, especially in those instances when a non-believer would tell us that we are foolish to do what we are doing: like turning the other cheek, forgiving when we should be asking for justice and vengeance, giving the shirt off our back. The resurrection? No big deal.