John 20:1-18
I want to begin with one of my all-time favourite stories for Easter Day.
There once was a man who was convinced he was dead. He told his wife he was dead. He informed his work colleagues he was dead. He said to his friends, “I’m dead, you know.” He told the neighbours he was dead.
Everyone became concerned about him, and his friends and family arranged for him to see a psychiatrist. The man agreed, and at their first session the psychiatrist showed the man all sorts of learned medical literature which proved that dead men don’t bleed.
Eventually, having read book after journal after book, the man agreed. “All right, I believe you,” he said, “Dead men don’t bleed.”
At this point the psychiatrist suddenly took a lancet and jabbed the man in the arm. Watching with horror as blood spurted from him, the man gasped, “Good Lord! Dead men do bleed after all!”
Such is the problem with people who will not let the evidence change their minds. Yet that is one of the charges that many of the militant ‘New Atheists’ level at people of faith. In the case of some Christians, it is sadly true.
But the Christian faith is founded on an incident where people of faith did change their minds due to the evidence. That incident is the Resurrection.
It’s not unusual to hear that it must have just been gullible ancient people who came to believe in the nonsense of Jesus coming back from the dead. They talk about myths of gods coming back to life, and assume that’s what the Christian belief in the Resurrection was – desperate and distraught disciples lifted these myths and applied them to Jesus.
But that couldn’t be more wrong. The first witnesses of the Resurrection were all Jews. There is very little about life after death of any kind in their Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. The only solid text is in Daniel chapter 12, and Daniel is a book that only found its final form in the mid-second century BC. Any kind of belief in resurrection was relatively recent in Judaism, and even then not all Jews believed in it (the Sadducees didn’t) and those who did believe in resurrection only thought it would happen at the end of time, when God judged the world. Not a single one of Jesus’ followers would have been expecting a resurrection in the middle of history.
We get a feeling for this in our reading this morning. Mary Magdalene’s first reaction is to say to Simon Peter and the disciple Jesus loved, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!’ (verse 2) An empty tomb doesn’t mean resurrection to her. When Simon Peter and the other disciple run to the tomb, the other disciple does believe (verse 8) but immediately after that John says, ‘They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead’ (verse 9). When Mary does encounter the risen Jesus, she thinks he is the gardener (verse 15). These people may not think scientifically in the way that many people today do, but they are not gullible idiots who will either fall for any old nonsense or who will invent an account to support a set of lies. Why? Because they don’t believe in resurrection in the middle of history.
Something changes them. They have to change their beliefs – and they do so because they become convinced that they have met the risen Jesus. Nobody, friend or foe, doubted that Jesus died. Roman soldiers were expert executioners and knew they would suffer the death penalty if they failed to ensure that the prisoners entrusted to them died. Therefore Jesus could not have merely resuscitated in the tomb. If the tomb was empty and Jesus’ body were elsewhere, an opponent of the Jesus movement could soon have produced the body. The resurrection appearances are not easily explained as hallucinations, since hallucinations are usually solitary and several of the resurrection appearances are to groups. Furthermore, there is a sense of expectation about hallucinations, and as I’ve already said, they weren’t expecting it. And if this were a concocted story, it’s an odd decision to make women major witnesses in a culture where women were not allowed to give evidence.
So in fact here is a group of religious people who find that the evidence does make them change their minds. And that evidence is the Resurrection of Jesus.
The Resurrection makes us change our minds in all sorts of ways. ……
We change our minds about hope, because now we have a sign that death is not the end.
We change our minds about the present, because that hope of God renewing all things makes it worth us working for goodness, love and justice now. Indeed, it’s the best reason. Richard Dawkins says that the universe reflects exactly what you would expect if there is no Creator – he says it reflects a sense of ‘pitiless indifference’. Can you live by pitiless indifference? The Resurrection says no, there is meaning and purpose in this world and it’s worth working to change things for the better.
We change our minds about the way we live, because the Resurrection shows us God’s future. It makes sense to align ourselves with that. We have a word for that particular change of mind. There is a Bible word for a change of mind that leads to us living differently. It’s the word ‘repentance’. The risen Jesus calls us to think again about the way we live our lives.
But – what we have here that leads to our change of mind is this. We have evidence, not proof. We have the best explanation for what happened, and with it the best explanation for life. What we don’t have is watertight proof. Nobody has that, whatever their view of life. We have evidence, rather than proof, because God shows us enough on which we can trust him. If he gave us outright proof, there would be no room for proof and no sense of relationship with God.
This Easter, then, let’s consider the possibility that there is enough evidence to lead to a change of mind in every part of our lives and a relationship of trust with God through Jesus.
Big Circumstance 
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