Sunday After Easter 2023
A couple of years ago, Rasmussen surveyed Americans and found that seventy-two out of every hundred Americans believe that Jesus is Son of God and raised from the dead. Seventeen percent definitely deny that. Thomas the Apostle, after being told of Christ’s physical rising from the dead when he returned from his journey home, declared in so many words that he was part of the deniers. He even got really scientific–demanding that he be able to feel the nail holes and the wound in the side of Jesus from which the Precious Blood and Water gushed at His death. For Thomas, going into the next weekend, the Resurrection story was a fable worked up by hysteria or wishful thinking.
Today’s situation is like saying the people who spray-painted “Frodo lives” in 1969 on their campus retaining walls refuse to believe a story that took the world by storm in the five hundred years after Jesus rose. Frodo from Lord of the Rings is great fiction, but Jesus is the Risen King of the Universe.
How do we know that this is a fact, not a fable? Look at the story from the Acts we read earlier. The Apostles, including Thomas, testified that Jesus is the Risen Messiah and Lord, demonstrated the power of the Holy Spirit by their preaching and miracles and by the witness of their new community centered around Jesus, service to others, and right worship–including the Holy Eucharist. They were constant in that witness despite arrest and imprisonment, torture and even murder. Of the Twelve–Matthias being a late addition–eleven died as martyrs, and John the Evangelist underwent all kinds of torture and exile instead. They would not give up believing and testifying that Jesus lives.
And throughout their lives, these new Christians, Jew and Gentile alike, rejoiced in the Spirit, realizing that Jesus promised their own new life and resurrection after this life, and also promised that before winning through, they would have to suffer, have to be tested like precious metals in the purifying fire.
So that’s it, isn’t it? I have an explanation for the seventeen percent or so who refuse to believe, despite the overwhelming evidence of the Truth that is Jesus. They know that professing faith in Christ in the Church will have a cost–a cost they may be unwilling to pay. But at the end of your life, do you want to go out with a hope of glory, or not? If you allow yourself to be united with Christ in the Church, as many thousands did through their baptism and chrismation and Eucharist last weekend, then you have that hope. At the end of a life of faith and charity, we all can have the hope of union with the Risen Christ forever.
