“Unbelievable”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Saturday, April 6, 2024
Mark 16:9-15,20 (Forward, p. 68) CEV p. 1052
There are some things that are, to put it bluntly, simply unbelievable. Here, I think of an encounter I had at a ministerial gathering in Calgary. Who do I meet there but a former drummer from a rock band from back home. What astounded both of us were that we were now Christians—and pastors to boot! Neither of us would have imagined it of the other person. It would have been unbelievable.
We see this in the Biblical story as well, in the life and career of Saul of Tarsus, the later Saint Paul. As an ardent Pharisee and persecutor of the church, he was the very last person who’d ever suspect of ever becoming a disciple. And yet, as a consequence of his encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, he was changed. Unbelievable.
And, of course, at the heart of such unbelievable things must be Jesus’ resurrection. At no time in previous history had a person been crucified, certified dead and buried, only to return to life and vitality three days later. Empty graves were known to exist, but never a fully alive ‘walking and talking’ corpse. It was simply unbelievable.
And so, I don’t really fault those earliest disciples having trouble believing—even with the eye-witness testimonies of Mary Magdalene and the two disciples on the Emmaus Road. It was indeed unbelievable, far beyond past history and far beyond any expectation. It simply had never happened before.
I suspect that we, you and I, would probably have reacted in similar ways. I know that we are initially quite sceptical when someone abruptly changes his or her ways, his or her behaviour, for the better. How much more, then, something so radical new and unexpected as the Resurrection!
However, underlying all this hesitancy, this inability to believe, is a rather small concept of God, or of what God might be able to achieve in our world. We have lowered expectations of God and so we have trouble believing.
Forward notes: “And he said to them, ‘Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation” (verse 15).
“On Good Friday every year, the rector of my childhood Episcopal church invited pastors from the various congregations to preach on the seven last words of Christ. It was an ecumenical group that included the pastor from our Hispanic congregation and, my personal favourite, the Black preacher who had a way of pulling us into Jesus’s words. I don’t remember specifically what any of these preachers said, but I well remember their inspiring presence in our then predominantly while community.
“I think about those Good Friday experiences when I reflect on these words from Jesus to go into the world and proclaim the good news. For many, evangelism can be an uncomfortable topic. [American] Presiding Bishop Michael Curry reminds us that evangelism is about building a better world. It is about relationships, truth-telling, racial reckoning, and healing. I believe my childhood church offered an early model of Bishop Curry’s vision and Jesus’s directive to proclaim the good news to the whole creation.”
Moving Forward: “What is your own sense of evangelism?”
A concluding comment or two: Yes, indeed, it is about building a better world, and yes, it does involve those things, relationships etc., but the world is only made better when God, Jesus, is in it. Self-help, whether personal or corporate, is limited indeed. The Good News that we are to proclaim is about God and God’s work in our world. There can be no other Good News, no other Good News at all, if it is not about God in Christ Jesus.