The story is told of someone visiting a building site and asking some of the people there what they were doing. The answers were varied. One said, ‘Can’t you see what I’m doing, I’m carrying cement’. Another said he was working to pay off his mortgage. Another said he was only there because he couldn’t find another job. The last said that he was helping to build a nice home for a family to live in.
In our gospel this Easter morning we accompany 3 people who make their way to the tomb, expecting to find the corpse of Jesus. First on the scene is Mary Magdalene. She sees the stone rolled away from the tomb and immediately presumes the worst. Jesus’ enemies have stolen his body. She doesn’t even check to see if the body is gone.
The next to arrive at the tomb is Peter. Actually he arrives second but because of his rank among the disciples he is allowed to go in first. He sees not only that the body is gone; he also sees Jesus’ burial cloths, but we are not told how he reacted, if at all.
Finally a third disciple arrives, who is not identified by name. When he had first arrived he had noticed the burial cloths lying on the ground but he had waited for Peter to go in to the tomb. When he eventually goes into the burial cave he sees something else, the cloth that had been placed over Jesus’ head, and, says the Evangelist, he believed.
What did he believe? He believed that Jesus had risen from the dead.
But what made the difference between him and the other two? Why did they see yet not believe?
In Mary’s case, Mary loved Jesus dearly, but she had seen the hostile forces lined up against him, in the end killing him. She had seen so much evil that she could only think of the worst case scenario. Bitter experience had affected her mind and spirit. Her spirit was so bruised by evil that she was in no position even to wait for good news, let alone receive it.
What about Peter? Peter had a good heart. He had promised Jesus he would even die for him, but Peter relied on a kind of false bravado. When the crunch came he denied that he even knew Jesus. Peter had not yet come to terms with what he had done. His guilt left him unreceptive to good news. So he sees more than Mary saw, but he makes nothing of it, and returns home.
In contrast to the other two the unnamed disciple looks into the tomb, then goes into the tomb, and sees something he had not seen before, the cloth that covered Jesus’ face. Seeing that veil triggered something within the disciple that led him to understand what had happened to Jesus. What it triggered was an old memory from the Scriptures about how Moses, after encountering God at Sinai, used to wear a veil over his face when he was with his people, because his face radiated the glory of God and this was too bright for the people to bear. But when he went into the tent to encounter the presence of God he would take the veil off.
When the disciple saw the face veil that covered Jesus’ head taken off and carefully laid aside he recognised that Jesus had now taken off the veil that was his physical flesh in order to go to God and receive the glory that was his, as Word of God since before the foundation of the world. The disciple may also have remembered that when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead Lazarus came out of the tomb still wearing his face veil, while the veil of Jesus was carefully put away. So whereas Lazarus was temporarily revived, only to die later, what happened to Jesus was altogether different. Now the disciple began to understand what Jesus meant by rising from the dead. It was not a coming back, in the same form, like Lazarus. Jesus had passed through death into a radically new life, the life of God, a life which still connects with our lives through the Holy Spirit.
Seeing is believing, we say. But is it necessarily so? In today’s gospel three people see, but only one believes. Only one recognises the real meaning of what he sees, the disciple who is not named. He is also called ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’, not in the sense that the others were excluded from Jesus’ love, but in the sense that this disciple allowed Jesus to love him. He allowed Jesus to teach him. He hung on Jesus’ every word and gesture until he understood it. And so, on that Easter morning, his heart was prepared to recognise the signs.
St Augustine once said, ‘Show me one who loves, and I will show them the resurrection’. The resurrection of Jesus cannot be conclusively demonstrated. It is only revealed in signs to those who have faith. Faith comes from outside of us and leads us in the direction of the signs, but we must also work on ourselves interiorly in order to be able to read the signs and recognise them. So faith is a gift of God, but it requires a human response.
Today our signs of the resurrection are the Scriptures, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and our communal experience of being the Church. All of us here, praise God, have been given those signs. But the signs will only speak to us if we are disposed to read them.
Let us deepen our appreciation of the signs God has given us, so that we may enter into them, as the Beloved disciple entered into the tomb, not just when times are good and we feel close to God, but especially when we suffer, or when faith is hard, or we are made conscious of our weakness. Lord, we believe, help our unbelief.
