Transforming Doubt

SSJE

In Luke’s account, we hear a gradual unfolding of the mystery of the Resurrection. First, the empty tomb and two men in dazzling clothes, the witnesses’ accounts initially disbelieved. Then two disciples joined by the Risen Lord, who walks with them on the road, opens their hearts to the scriptures, and vanishes from their sight after blessing and breaking bread. The mystery is gaining physical force.

Today, this physicality, the reality of Jesus’s bodily resurrection, is the focus. The disciples think at first that they are seeing a ghost; Jesus has them touch him. They still disbelieve; Jesus eats a piece of broiled fish in front of them. Crucified, dead, risen—this is the core of the mystery of Christ, the “good news” that the apostles come now to realize, and to proclaim.

I am struck by a curious phrase in the middle of Luke’s account today: “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering” (Lk 24:41). Jesus the Risen Lord appears to them in a physical body; they exclaim in joy—and yet, there’s a part of them that reserves some doubt, some questions. As though they want this so much that they wonder if they are maybe fooling themselves.

In the high emotion of our own Easter joy—amid the organ and flowers and candles and singing—how many of us nevertheless harbor our own doubts, our own reservations? Maybe not about Jesus’s resurrection, but rather what this great mystery of our redemption—of the world’s redemption—means? We are joyful, but are we fooling ourselves? Is the joy we feel perhaps like a false face when we step outside the doors of our church and back into a world teeming with wrongness simply held in abeyance by our celebration?

This is the discordant reality that we must face—that the Resurrection happened and that we still live in this world marked by so much suffering.

So how are we to respond to the way the Risen Lord meets us, here and now? Our primary response, in bearing witness to the Resurrection, is to be transformed—to recognize ourselves as having passed through death with Christ into a new life, a life marked by mercy, peace, love, truth, and hope. To believe that this joy we feel is real, and not just us fooling ourselves. And to hold this fact as primary, and thereby to meet all the wrongness and all the suffering that surround us as a transformed, Easter people.

Amen.