Do you believe that Jesus is alive? Alive like the person sat next to you, or across the aisle, is alive? That kind of alive? Actually alive? A living person, that if you were in the right geographical space at the same time, you could shake his hand?
It’s a good question. Do you actually believe he really is alive? Quite possibly you don’t, because you can’t see him. It’s much harder to believe in things that you cannot see, and when it comes to people that you cannot see and have never seen, it can feel a little bit like having an invisible friend, who is therefore an imaginary friend. It may be he does you some real good, but he doesn’t actually exist. I can see how you could think like that. When you can’t see someone, it’s hard to believe they are alive. It’s why you get the cliché moment in films whenever there’s a hostage situation. The hostage-takers want you to do something extremely costly, illegal, risky, to get back the person that they have captured, and what do you always do? “I’m not going to do this thing unless you put them on the phone and I can speak to them. I want to know they’re still alive.” When you haven’t seen them for a while, you start to wonder: is that person actually still alive, or not? How do you know someone you cannot see is alive?
But before we answer that, let me ask you another question. Does it actually matter? Does it matter if you believe that Jesus is alive, or not?
Well, for those of us who are Christians, being a Christian is all about a relationship with Jesus, who is a living person. So yes, it does matter. And yet it’s perfectly possible to be a devout Christian, to read your Bible, to pray, to come to church, to receive Holy Communion, to care for the needy, and either never actually believe he is alive, or gradually drift to the point where your Christianity becomes a routine — possibly a genuine and life-sustaining routine — but one that no longer needs Jesus to be a living person, one that is no longer centred on Jesus as a living person. It’s just the Christian things that I do. That’s how easily we as Christians drift from actually believing in reality that Jesus is really alive.
For people who are not yet Christians — and most weeks there are some folk here who are still investigating the claims of the Christian faith; you’re most welcome if that’s you — all of us have friends and family members who are in that category. It matters if those folk believe that Jesus is really alive. It’s easy to get talking about all kinds of other questions, around which the truth or not of the Christian faith seems to hang. A couple of weeks ago I got talking to somebody about dinosaurs. I mean, interesting discussion, but hardly the crux of the matter on which the whole Christian faith hinges, is it? See, if you believe that Jesus rose from the dead and is alive today, how exactly you date some dinosaur bones from Nevada doesn’t really matter, because Jesus is alive and that changes everything, no matter what you can or can’t explain to do with dinosaur bones. But if you don’t believe Jesus is alive, if it’s just a story, then dinosaur bones also don’t matter — because, well, so what?
So whether you’re still looking into the Christian faith, or whether you are now a Christian who has been one for years, whether you’re a brand new Christian, it matters hugely whether you believe that Jesus is alive — alive like the person sat next to you.
But how are you supposed to do that when you can’t see him? Well, the Apostle John, who wrote John’s Gospel, did see the risen Jesus for himself — not in the passage that we’re looking at this morning, but in the one we will get to next week. But he wrote his book for people who would not get the opportunity to meet the risen Jesus in person on earth. And so in this passage, and in the rest of chapter 20, he wants to lead us to believe Jesus is alive without seeing him for ourselves. The passage that I just read for us is the first stage of him leading us to that point.
He brings us three eyewitnesses — three people who, if it was a court of law, could be brought into the witness box to testify to their experiences that first Easter day. And John invites them to tell their stories, that we who have not seen him might believe.
Mary Magdalene
First into the witness box, we have Mary Magdalene. She was first on the scene. Her role in next week’s passage becomes supremely important, but I won’t spoil the story — come next week and find out what happens to Mary. But early in the morning she goes for a walk. My guess is she hasn’t been able to get an awful lot of sleep. She’s distraught at the Jesus she loved having died. So as it gets towards dawn, she cuts her losses, thinks, ‘I’m not going to get back to sleep now, let’s go for a walk,’ and she finds herself walking in the direction of the garden within which Jesus was laid.
It’s still dark. In John’s Gospel, light and dark are important themes. Mary’s understanding is still dark. She’s walking in the gloom of a Jesus who died and who isn’t coming back. And so she walks to his grave, she walks to where his body is, and what she sees astonishes her and upsets her and panics her. The stone has been removed. She assumes that what has happened is grave robbers have struck. This was a sufficiently common problem that there were specific criminal offences in the Roman legal system about grave robbing and disturbing graves, so it’s not an unreasonable assumption on Mary’s part. She just cannot believe that of all the graves the robbers chose to desecrate, it was the one of her Lord. The stone’s removal needs explaining. Mary’s instinct is: grave robbers have struck. The question is, is that instinct right? Well, we will find out. But for now, Mary exits the scene running. She runs to find Peter and John.
John — the disciple whom Jesus loved. John — the disciple who wrote John’s Gospel. Second into the witness box is the Apostle John. John tells us he wrote John’s Gospel in chapter 21, verse 24: ‘This is the disciple who saw these things and wrote them down.’
So Peter and John go to the tomb. When Mary went to the tomb, it was a gentle walk, an early morning stroll. Peter and John don’t walk to the tomb — they run to the tomb. Mary ran to tell them that Jesus had been stolen; they run to find out what has happened. John is the younger of the two, and so he’s fitter, and so he beats Peter to it. And because he’s the one who gets to write the story, he gets to make sure that all of his readers know that he was younger and fitter and beat Peter to it. He sees the entrance is open, but he peers in from the outside. He sees something else: not only is the entrance open, but inside are the strips of cloth that were wrapped around the body of Jesus.
John
Witness number two is John.
Time for witness number three. Ten minutes later — it doesn’t say that, I made that up — a number of minutes later, Peter arrives, all out of puff. And you know Peter’s personality, to read the Gospels, don’t you? Does he ever hesitate and do anything by halves? He does not. So John arrived and just peers in through the gloom; Peter arrives and he’s straight in. He sees the stone has been removed. He sees the cloths that were wrapped around Jesus’s body. And he sees one more thing: the separate cloth from Jesus’s head, that John records was still separate from the other cloths — which either means it’s exactly where Jesus’s head would have been, one neck-length separate from the other cloths, or it means it’s been folded up separately, in place neatly, like pyjamas under a pillow.
Peter
There’s witness number three: Peter. He saw three things — the stone, the cloths, and the cloth around his head.
John
Time for witness number four. Or rather, time to summon John back into the witness box to testify a second time, because we’ve already quizzed John about his arrival on the scene as a whole. But finally, John himself goes into the tomb. So it’s time to get John back into the witness box and ask him about that second entrance of his, when he enters not just the scene but the tomb itself.
And John sees four things — it’s like a children’s story, the way it builds up, isn’t it? It’s good. He sees the stone that’s been rolled back. He sees the cloths that were wrapped around Jesus’s body. He sees the separate cloth that was lying by itself. And he sees what has happened. There is a light-bulb moment, when the lights come on in John’s heart and brain. John records that he saw and believed.
He sees what has just taken place. That doesn’t mean that Peter didn’t believe — John is not commenting at this point about Peter’s faith. He writes the account, so as an autobiographical detail he wants to make sure that we, the readers, know that this was the moment he believed Jesus was really alive. The stone, you see, was open. The cloths were left behind, which were the only thing of any value. Somebody had taken the trouble to remove the cloth separately from around his head, which would have taken some time, and placed it in a separate place, neatly, not in a heap. It could not be grave robbers — they would just have grabbed Jesus, still wrapped, and taken him out, or, if they had unwrapped him, they would have left the body and taken the cloths. Actually, therefore, Jesus must be alive. He saw and believed.
And note two really important things about John’s belief at this point. Firstly, from verse nine: he was not expecting this. It says, ‘They still do not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.’ The Old Testament Scriptures said that Jesus had to rise, but John hadn’t twigged that yet. By the time he wrote the book, he had got that — but at that moment he didn’t realise; he hadn’t understood from the Old Testament that Jesus had to rise. So what he witnessed was something that he had to interpret based on the facts before his eyes, not on any prior assumptions about what might happen.
And the second really important thing about John’s light-bulb moment is that he believed without seeing Jesus alive. Isn’t that good? Do you see — I’ll say it again — John will meet Jesus alive; no doubt that will strengthen his faith considerably. But John came to faith without meeting Jesus alive in person. That means so can we. He believed without the Old Testament to guide him, without seeing Jesus alive, but by seeing the stone, the cloths, and the separate cloth — and he realised this was the only explanation.
And so Peter and John go back to where they were staying, no doubt with a lot on their mind. If Mary Magdalene could not sleep, they were certainly not going to do so.
And so the story goes on. There’s more — we’ll come to that next week. But this scene is over. There’s a symmetry to the scene: Mary arrives in the dark, no doubt thinking — she rushes back in a panic; Peter and John rush to the tomb in a panic, and then they leave. Presumably by now it’s daylight, and no doubt they are thinking, and at least John, by the time he leaves, has been brought to believe by the things that he saw — what really happened.
Conclusion
It’s time to dispel all that fog. John came to see that Jesus is alive through the fog of grief, without actually seeing him alive. So it’s time to keep asking all the other questions that you have — let’s chat about the dinosaurs, if that’s on your brain — but not because Jesus is only worth following once all the other questions have been answered.
Let’s be Christians in the way we live. Let’s read our Bibles. Let’s pray. Let’s come to church. Let’s share together in Holy Communion. Let’s care for the needy amongst us. But let’s do those things as service done for the risen and living Lord Jesus — not just as things that we do for their own sake, and because they sustain us, and because they make the world a better place — because even just looking at the stone that was moved, at the two sets of cloths, it is clear that there is no other explanation than that he really is alive.