Third Sunday of Easter

Acts 3.12-19; Luke 24.36-48

As we move through the Easter season we hear in the Acts of the Apostles the proclamation of the risen Jesus and in the gospels, the accounts of the disciples encounters with the risen Jesus. What comes across in all of these is the struggle to move from disbelief or doubt to belief. And so I guess that these readings sum up the struggle we all have, at some time with doubt and belief.

There's a common saying in our culture that 'seeing is believing'. Although it is so common, it actually goes right against normal practice and human psychology. It's a product of the Western 'rational' mind that, when we are honest, is not really very rational and when operating solely as a rational thing finds itself very limited. It is, in reality, the opposite that is true, that believing is seeing. In all human endeavour, belief comes before seeing. Men had to believe they could climb to the top of Everest, travel to the moon and back, run a 4 minute mile, all before they were achieved. Think of the great and indeed, the not so great things you've achieved in your life time. Isn't it true that you had to believe you could do them before you actually did? You might not have expressed that belief openly or overtly, but it was there all the same. You believed and then you saw.

So, if this is the natural order of things with us humans, why is it so difficult to believe that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead? His disciples actually saw him, heard him, even touched him, and still they found it hard to believe. They all had different and wide ranging responses to the good news. The gospels describe them as being filled with varying amounts of wonder, joy, amazement, fear, even terror. Not surprising, you might say, because they were responding to something that went right against their normal human experience. Going to the moon and back went right against normal experience and if you were around at the time you'll have seen some of the wide range of emotions in people around that endeavour - wonder, joy, amazement, fear, even terror. So, it seems that Jesus's resurrection, thought of in those terms, shouldn't, for us at least, living on this side of it and so many amazing feats of human endeavour, be so difficult to believe in, because we've all believed things that were very difficult to believe, things that in certain respects have been beyond belief before they've been accomplished. And it's the belief that's been the principle factor in their accomplishment.

It's that belief that enables us to cross an unseen boundary. Put another way, it's where that little word 'faith' comes in I think. These things are a matter of that ultimately indefinable and maybe ineffable something we call 'faith', which put another way, is belief and trust. And it's faith that takes us beyond the boundary of reason and rationality into a different dimension, into a different level of experience and consciousness, into a different world. And maybe that's why we hesitate as human beings, because we are being asked to enter an unfamiliar world where not very much is predictable, not very much is certain. When we are asked to believe something that is quite frankly, in rational terms, unbelievable we are being asked to leave all that is familiar and under our control and enter a new world, a world, possibly, that encompasses wonder, amazement, joy, fear and even terror.

But when Jesus stood before the disciples 3 days after they'd seen him die and not just die but be buried, he invited them to cross the boundary from belief in themselves to belief in Him, to belief in God. And they had to do that so that they could continue His work which was of His Father. And at the point of their believing, whether or not they could see, they moved over from the world of God being a good idea to His being a living reality, not just a probability or even a possibility but an actuality. And then, and only then were they able to step into the power of God and do all that Jesus had done, only then could they be baptised with the Holy Spirit, only then were they born again. Only then did they see.

And that's how God works. We have to step across the boundary. We have to believe before we can see. We have to believe and then we are anointed with the Spirit. We have to believe and then we are born again. We believe and then we see the risen Christ. The disciples were fortunate or maybe in reality not so, to have the risen Christ stood in front of them, bodily. It was for them more confusing maybe, because they probably began to think that maybe He hadn't died after all. But then the facts spoke for themselves and they conceded that He had, and discovered that He had risen.

We have no such confusions set up in our minds except what speculation surrounding the events of Good Friday and Easter create. We are simply left with the invitation to believe that Christ is risen and then to see all that God wants us to see, to be born again, to receive His Spirit, proclaim the risen Christ and do His work in the world. But it's simply a fact that to be born again, to receive His Spirit, to proclaim the risen Christ as Lord and do His work in the world, we have, first, to believe. It is, after all, the natural way with us humans.