Together on the Journey: A Weekly Blog from Fr. Andrew Sheldon

As a young adult, I was compelled by a Christian author named Josh McDowell who wrote a book called Evidence That Demands a Verdict. The basic premise of this particular book, and of the field of Christian apologetics in general, is that the claims the Bible makes about God, Jesus, and events that take place in the scriptures can be empirically proven to be true. In other words, the evidence is clear, and the verdict is a resounding yes to the literal claims of holy writ. At that time, I embraced this way of thinking and felt it was my task to convince the non-believer and skeptic of the veracity of these Christian claims, thus using this overpowering logic as a means for them to embrace Christian faith for themselves.

One of the claims that is most strenuously forwarded in the book is regarding the various proofs for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Again, with the premise that if somehow it could be proved that Jesus knew life after death then all objections to faith would be dropped and anyone with any sense would embrace Christian faith for themselves.

But as my younger self realised, it doesn’t actually work this way. And it didn’t actually work that way for the earliest followers of Jesus either. Because the bottom line is that we don’t know what happened.

The resurrection is the one and only event in Jesus’ life that was entirely between him and God. There were no witnesses whatsoever. No one on earth can say what happened inside that tomb, because no one was there. They all arrived after the fact. Two of them saw clothes. One of them saw angels. Most of them saw nothing at all because they were still in bed that morning, but as it turned out that did not matter because the empty tomb was not the point.

As I said on Easter Sunday, the real miracle of the resurrection is not that the tomb was empty but that this church is full. And the church was full on Easter Sunday for precisely the same reason that those earliest followers proclaimed the resurrection; that even in the face of a recognisable bodily absence, Jesus was still very much present. Those early followers were not compelled by arguments, proofs, or evidence; the verdict they came to – that Jesus was still alive – was based on experience, a profoundly spiritual encounter with Jesus and a knowing of him in a whole new way. And that is why to this day there are those who proclaim this truth. Because we too who never walked with Jesus in bodily form, who did not chance upon an empty tomb, who did not see or touch a post-resurrection Jesus, still believe and proclaim Jesus’ presence in our midst. That is resurrection, that is Easter, that is all the evidence I need.

Andrew+