John 20:10-18 – Sight Unseen
Today I am preaching 2 different sermons on the same passage of Scripture. That’s really the power of the Bible – there is so much good stuff in there. Two different people can preach on the same passage and get 2 completely different sermons out of it. The same person can see more insight years later into the same passage after he or she has experienced more about God and His ways. And even on the same day, by the same person, the same passage can yield completely different results. Today’s other sermon on this passage is about things that cause us to be distracted from recognizing Jesus. And this message is about faith. Let’s read John 20:10-18.
Now, since Easter Sunday on April 16, we have been looking at various angles of the Resurrection. Here we are, several weeks later, and we still haven’t found the risen Savior. Well, we’re finding Him today. I say that but in truth, really, Jesus finds us. In today’s passage, Mary Magdalene went looking for Jesus, but she didn’t see Him until He met her. Every time, people went looking for Him, but He showed up when He meant to. Same today. We go looking for Him, and we should, but we find Him when He reveals Himself to us. In effect, He finds us.
And we see Jesus finding Mary Magdalene. Mary had been a devoted follower of His for a long time. She had been healed of demon-possession. I don’t believe that’s just a fancy name for mental stress. I don’t believe that people were just more superstitious back then, and that’s why they blamed mental health on demons. I believe there really are demons, and they really cause havoc in people. I find it easier to believe that people can be deceived and misled by invisible evil forces than to believe that people can be really evil by themselves.
At any rate, Mary Magdalene was demon-possessed, and Jesus healed her from them. Part of that, um, condition, was to be ostracized by society. That is, shunned, not accepted, kept at arms’ length from other, so-called normal people. But Jesus showed her love and compassion, and she showed Him devotion because of it.
Catholic theology says that she was the woman caught in adultery in John 8. Protestants usually reject that bit of Christian folklore, but even still, it’s a touching scene in The Passion of the Christ, when Mary is wiping up Jesus’ blood. She remembered Jesus standing up for her, and so she would stand up for Him. She stayed by Jesus’ side as He hung dying from the cross. She wasn’t afraid of publicly showing allegiance to a known criminal. She knew very well Jesus was no criminal, and she wasn’t afraid of the mob. This woman loved her Lord.
And so, it’s somewhat baffling as to why Jesus said what He said to her. Mary Magdalene had seen the open tomb, ran to tell the other disciples with the other woman at the tomb with her, and finally she returned to see the empty tomb again. When she got there, she was alone. She peeked into the tomb, and 2 angels asked why she was crying. She told them that she didn’t know where Jesus was.
At that moment Jesus appeared, and she noticed someone in the corner of her eye. She didn’t know it was Jesus, even when He asked her, “Why are you crying? Who are you looking for?”
Mary figured He was the gardener and she said to Him, “If you’ve taken Him, can I have Him back?” She would try with all her might to carry Jesus out of wherever He was.
At that point, Jesus opened her eyes and spoke her name. She turned to look directly at Him, and suddenly realized that the gardener was no mere weed-killer – he was the Author of Life!
And she ran towards Him, I’m assuming, and Jesus said these words: “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father.” The KJV says, “Touch me not.” The NLT says, “Don’t cling to me.” However you word it, in the original language, it still means, “Don’t hang on to me too tightly.”
Well, hold on a second. There were other times as the Risen Savior that Jesus allowed, even encouraged people to touch Him. Matthew records the story of the women, including Mary Magdalene, to cling to His feet and worship Him. That same night, as Luke tells us, Jesus told His followers to touch Him and make sure He was no ghost. The next Sunday, a week later, Jesus told Thomas to touch His side, even put his finger in the wound in Jesus’ side, where the spear had driven through His ribcage and pierced His heart.
But here, to His most devoted of followers, Jesus says, “Don’t hang on to me too tightly.” Don’t cling to me. Why? Well, imagine what Mary was thinking as she saw her Lord. Her agony had just been turned into tremendous joy. Jesus had disappeared from her view and was lost, so she thought. But now He was back, and she probably thought, “I must never lose Him again. I can’t do again what I just went through. I can’t lose Him again. I will hold Him forever.” No more separations, no more Fridays like she just had, no more graves.
And Jesus saw this. Jesus saw that Mary wanted things the way they were before: sight, sound, and touch. And He said, “Don’t hold on to me too tightly. I will be with you forever, yes, but not in the same way. Not as a flesh-and-bone body as you’ve always known Me. I must ascend to the Father. The time for the old ways of knowing me through your five senses is over. I am here for a little while, and then the way of knowing me will be through faith.”
You see, Jesus wasn’t going to stay on the earth forever in a flesh-and-blood body. He was going to return to heaven, but was going to send the Spirit in His place. In fact, for reasons I’m not quite sure of, the only way to have Jesus’ presence to remain on earth was for Him to leave and send the Spirit in His place. What Jesus was saying to Mary was this: the only way you can be with Me, after these 40 days on earth, will be to let Me go. Don’t cling too tightly to my body, or else you will miss out on something better. A life of faith.
Jesus saw that Mary’s desire to possess Him, to hold Him, was so overpowering that it crowded out a purer faith and trust. Mary’s desire to touch and cling was stronger than her desire to trust. She wanted what she could see and hold and touch, not what she had to have faith in. And when you put it that way, it seems that we all have the same condition as Mary Magdalene.
We want what we can see and understand, instead of what we can’t see but what we have to believe in. We try to keep Jesus in our sights or in our hands. We try to keep Jesus within our arms’ length. We try to keep Him where we can understand him, where we don’t need a lot of faith to stay put. Frankly, we generally don’t want to be where we are living by faith. It’s much easier to live by sight, to understand what’s going on, to act on what we can see. It’s much harder to live by faith, to trust in things unseen, to be led by a gut feeling instead of by traditional common sense or wisdom that the majority of people consider wise.
But it’s living by faith that God rewards. 2 Corinthians 5:7 says that we live by faith, not by sight. By faith Noah built a monstrous boat and preached that it would rain, when it had never rained before. By faith Abraham left all he knew to follow God’s call for his life. By faith Moses allowed himself to be mistreated because he knew suffering for God was better than living for yourself. By faith the Israelites marched around Jericho – not because it made sense but because God said He was in charge of the situation. Like it or not, understand why or not, God rewards the life of faith.
Let me share with you a story from Mark 10. Jesus and his disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city of Jericho. As they were walking along, a blind man named Bartimaeus was sitting by the roadside begging. When Bartimaeus heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth walking in front of him, he began to shout, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"
Now, the Bible says that many people rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me!"
Jesus called him to come to him and asked, "What do you want me to do for you?" Bartimaeus said, "Rabbi, I want to see."
Bartimaeus said that he wanted to see. His problem was a vision problem. Then, Jesus said, "Go, your faith has healed you." The Bible says that immediately Bartimaeus received his sight and followed Jesus along the road. Did you catch that? Bart wanted to see, and he did, but it was because of his faith. Yes, it was Jesus that healed him, but Jesus said that Bart’s faith was what did it. Bart could see because he believed. Not the other way around.
I think of the song “Sight Unseen” by Christian group Petra. It says: For so long I was dependent upon my senses and fences I’d tried to ride on. And trusting in things that could never be seen was always a crutch on which others could lean. Thinking if I could see I would believe; then somebody said, “Believe and you will see.” Sight unseen, sight unseen, you have to take it sight unseen. Blinded by the darkness only faith could come between, you have to take it sight unseen.
Well, there will be times when God asks you to do something that you don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense, it defies logic, it’s unpleasant and uncomfortable. God asks you to give a certain amount to Him, to the church, to accomplish His purposes on earth. But you don’t know how you can do without it. By faith you can give.
God may ask you to trust that His plans are best, no matter how much you wish that things were different. But God does not expect you to get your own way in life, and you should stop expecting it too. God does not promise an easy, uncomplicated life. But He expects you to believe that He is still passionately in love with you and He wants the best for you. The best is not always the easiest. By faith you can trust.
God may ask you to do something that feels so much like walking the tightrope with no safety net, or jumping into thin air with no view of what’s down below. But that’s how it’s supposed to be. Romans 1:17 says that we are right before God with “a righteousness that is by faith from first to last”. That verse also quotes the OT prophet Habakkuk when it says, “The righteous will live by faith.” Paul sums up his whole mindset when he says, “The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
From first to last, through good times and bad, through joys and sorrows, through smooth sailing and hard roads, Paul lived by trusting in God, doing what He said, and leaving the results up to Him. He believed that since Jesus loved Him and gave Himself for Him, He could trust that God was always looking out for him too. That’s living by faith and not by touch or sight. That’s a hard road but it’s the best road.
