Something Solid--November 11, 2020

 Something Solid--November 11, 2020

The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, "Sir, we remember what that impostor said while he was still alive, 'After three days I will rise again,' Therefore command the tomb to be made secure until the third day; otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, 'He has been raised from the dead,' and the last deception would be worse than the first." Pilate said to them, 'You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can."  So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone. [Matthew 27:62-66]

"Facts are stubborn things," as the line attributed to John Adams goes, "and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

I know it may be strange, here just a month and a half out from Christmas and in the late days of fall, to be thinking about a moment from the Easter story.  But in the course of this whole year, and the focus we've been returning to over and over again on God's resurrection work, it's worth remembering that our faith in a God who raises the dead isn't just wishful thinking.  The story we call the Gospel is a story grounded in something solid, something real, something true, and at the heart of that solid bedrock is the stubborn fact that there was a tomb in Palestine that had been sealed shut with an imperial Roman seal, and that it was broken open in the resurrection of Jesus.

The Gospel writers, for all of the different nuances of the ways they tell the story, all come back to this solid and stubborn fact: there was a tomb, which held the body of Jesus, and everybody in power did all they could to keep that body in there... but the stone was rolled away, the body was missing, and the tomb was empty.  The Christian faith, from its beginnings when Mary Magdalene preached the first Easter sermon to this very moment twenty centuries and change later, is rooted on the stubbornness of the fact of the empty tomb, rather than on what the powers of the day, then or now, wish had happened.

I want us to be clear on that for a couple of reasons--reasons I believe are vital for us in this moment.  One is that Christian hope always has to be more than the mere power of positive thinking--that just boils down to wishful thinking.  And while I don't mean to sound like a Debbie Downer, that means the challenges, the struggles, and the hurts of our lives and of the world around us cannot be wished away because we don't want to have to face them anymore, or because we got bored of them, or because we want to be distracted by something less unpleasant.  Maybe one of the casualties of a culture where we can endlessly scroll social media feeds and skip past the things we don't like, or where we can fast-forward on a digitally-streaming TV show or movie to skip the credits or a boring scene, is that we end up thinking all of life is like that, and that we can avoid wading through the hard parts, or slogging through the tedious times.  It means, too, that problems like a pandemic don't just vanish because we wish they would go away or we've gotten tired of them.  It means that we can't give up on the work of feeding hungry neighbors or helping families out of homelessness just because it's not always fun.  It means, too, that the work of being church isn't just for the times when they're singing my favorite songs, but in the times when we're doing the unglamorous work of cleaning tables, balancing budgets, or washing feet.  We can't make the tough stuff go away just because we wish it would.  And the news of the resurrection is NOT merely wishful thinking because death is unpleasant--the earliest witnesses make a point of that.  They tell the story of the tomb sealed shut, and they expose the conspiracy theories that were floating around even in the first century, about how it got opened.

That's the other thing we may need to remember especially in this moment:  because our faith is rooted on the insistence that the resurrection of Jesus is a fact and not merely a myth, we are supposed be fact-people.  Christians are supposed to be people who can face the truth--even unpleasant and inconvenient truths--and who think evidence is important in what we believe and how we act.  We, of all people, can have the courage to insist on actual facts and solid evidence, because our faith itself springs from the stubborn fact of an empty tomb over against conspiracy theories old and new.

This is one of the reasons it may be helpful for us, six months away from Easter, to consider this moment in the story of Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection.  In Holy Week, we are so used to focusing on the cross and on Easter Sunday that we don't make time to consider why we are given this scene from Holy Saturday.  On the day between cross and resurrection, the power-brokers and the Respectable Religious Crowd conspired--literally--to concoct a false narrative about what happened in case it turned out that Jesus really did rise from the dead.  The Religious leaders, of course, had bet all their chips on Jesus staying dead, and they knew they would lose face, lose influence, and lose power, if the rabbi from Nazareth actually rose from the dead, or even if it looked like he had risen from the dead.  Rather than face a fact that would have blown their worldviews up and forced them to re-think everything, they wanted to cover up the fact of the resurrection (they go even further and start bribing the guards at the tomb to say that the disciples stole the body later on in Matthew 28:11-15).  They literally invent a conspiracy theory because it is easier for them to keep their tidy picture of the world intact than to consider a fact that they don't like.  And so, without evidence, they construct a parallel story--that Jesus' disciples will come and steal the body, because certainly he can't rise from the dead!  T.S. Eliot was right: humankind cannot bear very much reality, and so our recurring strategy in the face of stubborn facts we do not like is to invent alternatives, no matter how far-fetched, that comfort us because they let us keep our old picture of the world and continue unchanged.  From the body-snatching theory of the religious and political leaders on Holy Saturday to the nonsense of QAnon or Flat-Earthers today, it is always tempting to invent a story that will allow us to ignore facts we don't like, because facing those facts will mean rearranging everything in our lives.

Christians have a stake in saying that facts matter.  We have an obligation to say that evidence should back up the claims we make.  There were plenty of myths, fables, and mystery religions in the ancient world that all told fantastic tales of gods who died and rose from the grave, but none of them offered any stubborn facts that rooted them.  By the first century, everybody knew deep down that Zeus and Hades and Mithras and the rest were all just captivating stories, and over against those the witness of the first Christians was that there really was an empty tomb, and that the powerful and well-connected folks had a vested interest in inventing conspiracy theories that would allow them to ignore those facts.

It's worth us saying again that we are fact people.  We are called to use the minds and reason we have been given by God to make decisions and arrange our lives on something solid, and we are convinced that the resurrection of Jesus is itself more than a campfire ghost story, but a blessedly stubborn fact.  It's worth the work in every area of our lives to ground what we say and do in confirmable facts, reliable sources, and even inconvenient truths.  The Gospel depends on such things.

Lord Jesus, root us in the solid reality of your resurrection, and give us the confidence to know that our faith is more than fable, and truer than any conspiracy theory.