14. The Empty Tomb

The most difficult part of faith to me, is the part where you have to actually have faith. Consider this definition, and think of the implications of it against the backdrop of our world today:

By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. (CCC 143)

Think about what is being requested here. If I completely give my intellect and will to anything, wouldn’t that just make me an automaton or a robot? How gullible do you think I am? You know, blind faith is how cults get started! The definition above always seemed too extreme. I could not subscribe to without a very compelling reason to do so, with ample evidence and reason behind why I would ever submit wholly to anything.

First, to even bring me to the table to consider this deal, the product or service needs to offer an amazing deal, a prize that cannot be gotten anywhere else through any other vendor.

I have already written about the efforts I’ve given toward things of this world, such as alcohol, knowledge, work, and exercise, but in those pursuits I didn’t give complete power over myself. You might say I divided up my intellect and will between a few pursuits at a time, but never fully to any single thing. While drinking I never reached anywhere near the point of alcoholic nihilism like that of Leaving Las Vegas. I certainly never won my age group in any marathons or foot races, proving that I could have trained harder. At work, I may throw myself into tasks but eventually I slack off or burnout. I don’t know that I’ve ever given myself completely to anything.

While I pursued those things, I imagined that I could still be good, or more specifically, virtuous. Obviously I was more virtuous with exercise as my highest priority rather than alcohol, but what I want and desire to be is to be vigilant in staying virtuous. From the self-help books of today, to Stoicism and Epicureanism, to Confucianism, to Buddhism, a code of ethics can be found in a thousand flavors. Each can be applied for living virtuously and righteously, to a high degree of success.

For a time I was enamored with Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. In fact, I still am. He recorded an amazing list of thoughts on living righteously, as he simultaneously tried to halt the rise of a rival Christian ethics that was catching fire among citizens of the empire. Today, a modern Stoic movement’s rise is gathering steam among the secular world, as its core teachings fit into a inward looking self-reliance, meditation, and “mindfulness” (which seems to be the secular term for prayer that we use today). To this day, I refer back to certain passages in my dog-eared copy of Marcus Aurelius’s thoughts. For instance, this passage is powerful to me:

Whatever anyone does or says, I must be a good man. It is as if an emerald, or gold or purple, were always saying: ‘Whatever anyone does or says, I must be an emerald and keep my colour.’ (VII.15)

The book contains an amazing set of ideas for living, many of which you can find strong parallels in the Gospels in the words of Jesus. Verses on forgiveness, kindness, strength, and the fleeting nature of life jump off the page. Marcus Aurelius’s writing contains a remarkable worldview that works well, but, in my opinion, there is one crack in the Stoic concrete that the ice of life wedges apart: the Stoic looks for help from within, while the Christian looks for help outside, from God. The inward vs. outward gaze makes all the difference.

I have already learned the hard way that my willpower alone does not work, or does not work for long whenever I have tried. Willpower and discipline come from the self, but without connecting the mind and body to the external God, we cannot overcome our own built-in flaws. I have character flaws that cannot be unwound from inside because they are written on my bones and brain. The power to overcome these flaws cannot start from within me, because the power doesn’t live in me. The power is outside of me, and I need to let it in to be there. If I don’t let it in, I can’t find it. Once I let the Holy Spirit in, then I can create a “little chapel in the heart” where I can go for strength and trust, to remove anxiety and fear. In addition, the Stoic method works best for the strong, not the weak, ill, or elderly. It approaches life’s problems from a position of strength. Emotionless love and shades of forgiveness exist in Marcus Aurelius, but nothing like the forgiveness that Jesus commands. The best example is when Peter asks Jesus how many times we should forgive someone, and he throws out a number, seven. Is seven times enough?

I can hear the wheels turning in Peter’s head: “Hey, Jesus, about the whole forgiveness thing, what’s the actual maximum before we can hate or discard the person again without feeling bad?” I can almost hear him thinking about someone that he’s irritated with as he’s asking, probably his brother Andrew or one of the other apostles.

Jesus delivers one of his greatest one-liners on forgiveness, shooting down Peter’s question. “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”* Probably not what Peter was looking for in the answer but the one he needed. Again, I can imagine him nodding and thinking, “Wow, I was almost to seven times forgiving Andrew. I mean, I was thinking that in basketball after seven fouls you get the bonus and free throws, but I’m not even close. He gets to commit seventy more fouls and I have to keep forgiving him.” I don’t think anyone is as relatable as Peter, since his weaknesses and eye for shortcuts do not seem that far off from my own.

If anything makes the Christian message stand out from all others, it’s the approach. Rather than coming from a position of strength, the message of Jesus comes from a position of vulnerability and humbleness. Jesus comes to serve the weak, not the strong. This unexpected twist on power flips the script on all deities. We do not gain God’s favor by our ability, but by our need for God. And God gives the grace if we only ask for it. We used to joke, “What is the best kind of beer?” The answer was “Free beer.” This grace from God is free and it really is much better than free beer, because there is no headache. I just have to ask for help and God fortifies me against anything. I need to be weak, and need help, to be strong. Admitting this is hard, asking for help goes against much of our worldly instincts. This message reverberates through the entire Christian era, even in a recent homily from Pope Francis.

“Be reconciled: the journey is not based on our own strength. No one can be reconciled to God on his or her own…What enables us to return to him is not our own ability or merit, but his offer of grace…The beginning of the return to God is the recognition of our need for him and his mercy, our need for his grace. This is the right path, the path of humility. Do I feel in need, or do I feel self-sufficient?”*

If a code of ethics is all we want or need, then Christianity would never have got off the ground. Even the ancient world had plenty of self-help philosophies. What sets Jesus apart from others is the claim that he is God, but he serves everyone, forgives everyone, and suffers. All of this from a position of weakness rather than strength. This is a wild claim to make and either puts him into one of two categories: he is either telling the truth, or he’s insane. If he is insane, then he’s lying about being the son of God. If he is lying, the resurrection is bogus. If the resurrection does not occur, then all of the New Testament can be thrown out. St. Paul said this very clearly, that all is in vain without the resurrection. Even the ethics and morals are moot because the ancient world already had plenty of moral teachers, ones that were not insane. If virtue is the sole goal, then options already existed.

Thus, it all comes down to the resurrection. All of it: every miracle and parable, every clever comeback and turning of the cheek. If the resurrection does not occur, then the whole New Testament is a tale like any other mythology. As I mentioned earlier, one of the turning points in my loss of faith came from asking questions about the empty tomb and that it seemed easy to remove a body and claim resurrection. Not only that, but the different Gospel accounts of the empty tomb still conjure up those old doubts in me. Were there guards posted at the tomb or not? Who did the women see there? Was it one man, or two men? Or an angel? Exactly how many women came to the tomb and can we get the names please? Was the stone still in place or already rolled back? How heavy was the stone? How were the women going to roll back the stone for anointing if it was sealed? Were they at the wrong tomb? Did Mark add the resurrection paragraph after his first writing, and if so, did he think the empty tomb spoke for itself or did he add it to “fix” his story later on? Where is this tomb?

This can go on and on. It has gone on among scholars, for a long time. I am not going to go any further into my former doubts on the tomb, because I stumbled across a used book in a Goodwill thrift store called Who Moved the Stone? which addresses all of these questions. I’m glad someone else already did the heavy lifting. I just needed to read this short book in a single sitting to soak up the answers I was longing for regarding the tomb.

I’m also not going to go further on the tomb because of one other major reason that I cannot explain away: I cannot fathom the immense drive and spirit of the apostles, who tended to waffle, quibble, and argue. The flaws and frailties of these men make them clearly human, not fiction. And they went from cardboard to steel alloy in conviction, strength, and boldness. Their message never wavered in the aftermath. The only explanation to me is that they did indeed experience and confirm the resurrection of Jesus. All of the apostles were fearful and had fled to hiding places during and after the crucifixion, but then become recklessly fearless and willing to suffer any amount of pain to tell the world what happened.

These first Christians didn’t give their lives for a philosophical system…they died to uphold what they knew because they had seen it with their own eyes. Had it been a lie, then why die for it? … One after another these eyewitnesses gave up their lives defending the truth they had seen: Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead. (The Search, p.119)

Suddenly, somehow, Peter goes from being weak and furtive to a fortress of faith. He is crucified upside down thirty years later, having preached the message his entire life, with no education beyond that of a fisherman. The other apostles fare the same. That is, badly, as they are stoned, burned, stabbed, beaten, boiled, clubbed, and crucified. All the while they are relentless in spreading this message, alone, in different areas of the known world, telling the same story. If they were up to clever tricks about the tomb or Jesus’ body, someone would have cracked and tattled. Moreover, if the authorities, Jewish or Roman, had stolen or hidden the body, they would have just produced it and ended this tall tale.

Something happened, something profound, mysterious, impossible and life-changing for these people. Robert Barron says it best:

“That this dejected band would spontaneously generate the faith that would send them careening around the world with the message of Resurrection strains credulity. What is undeniably clear is that something had happened to Jesus - something so strange that those who witnessed it had no category to describe it.” WOF Bible, p.280).

With daily readings I have come to believe. My faith has come by effort and truly needs continual conversion to stay strong. I did not fall off a horse, like Paul did. The Church talks about continual conversion and the need to restore the belief, and this is true. In coaching there is a saying that you need to refill your “E-tank,” your “Emotional Tank,” from time to time. That is true of coaching, and it’s true of faith. Belief can feel like a gas tank that needs a fill-up, which is why daily prayer is so beneficial to it. Faith is also like fitness, where as soon as you stop exercising the backsliding into sloth and muscle atrophy begins. Whenever we lose focus, we start to slide, and the world has many distractions to pull that focus away. In fact, modern technology is entirely based on pulling our focus away, which is why programmers and marketers have “focus” groups and A-B advertising tests to figure out how to pull your focus away from life so that instead we will focus on their products and services. All of this drains the E-Tank of faith.

As an example of losing that focus, and how quickly and easily it can happen: this morning I had spent time reading and praying and felt ready for the day, both in spirit and body. I got into my car and started driving. At the first stoplight a driver didn’t realize the light had turned green and I almost knee-jerkingly wanted to honk and call the man an idiot. I find this remarkable, as I had just spent time reading about humility, and the lack of it among the Pharisees. “For they preach but they do not practice.”* I’m such a Pharisee. How easy it is to be moral and righteous when alone, and how difficult in real interactions with people. So many of us today, particularly in our cars, leap to anger almost instantly, over minuscule events and perceived insults. I’ll apply that same sentiment to social media, which is the greatest poison to our peace of mind of all modern invention. At least in my car, only I can hear whatever cruel whim flits between my ears. Not so on Facebook and YouTube comments, where we are all free to spew angsty discord to the entire world.

The human heart and mind so quickly drift from intentions and hopes, and so I cannot imagine the remaining eleven apostles, who were ordinary men, sticking to their wits and resolve with such commitment unless they were utterly convinced of the rising of Jesus. This accomplishment was not completed behind closed doors, by reading and writing, but by interaction in the world in the face of monstrous opposition. They did not bring the message by the sword, but rather the sword was put to them. These ordinary people did not flinch or crumble, as if their sign of the cross made their spirit, if not their bodies, impervious to the slings and arrows of this world.

Now, if they had solely come up with a great idea or story that satisfied our hearts, they might have convinced only gullible people to believe. If that were the case, then the powers of the world wouldn’t have worried about them. But the apostles took this idea of the risen Jesus into the heart of the intellectual world of Jerusalem, and shockingly, won the argument. The eleven didn’t flee to the hinterlands to start proclaiming, they returned to the very location of the trial and death of Jesus, where witnesses lived and where the events occurred.

[There is]…the indisputable fact that Christianity was gaining adherents at a prodigious pace. The movement was spreading beyond all reasonable expectation...The terrific persecution of Saul, involving an inquisition to places as far distant as Damascus, shows that four years later it had grown to really alarming proportions.*

Put this fact together with who first witnessed and started to tell of the risen Jesus. The women at the tomb were first, and Mary Magdalene explicitly is mentioned. The very first voice that recognizes and announces the missing body and resurrection is a woman who had “seven devils” driven out of her and was a “sinful” woman. If spinning a yarn, the Gospel writers would have posted someone of political or worldly significance. Perhaps someone like Caiaphas, the high priest, might have come to the tomb and said, “I was wrong. I can’t believe it, but it’s true,” and thrown himself into prayer. But no, the witness to the most important event in history is a “fallen” woman, who would not have clout, nor even enfranchisement among women. Yet she is the chosen witness, fitting with the “last will be first” of Jesus’ teachings. The empty tomb, as seen by the women, is undisputed. There seems to be no one arguing that the body is gone and the burial clothes were left behind. The only argument seems to be about what happened to the body, but not about the empty state of the tomb and the women being the first to discover it.

The second voice is Peter’s, the fisherman, and his first proclamation starts with something funny, assuring that he and his cohort are not drunk. “These people are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.”* That he needed to say this suggests that he knew this message sounded radical and insane. Without any education or platform to deliver knowledge, he begins by telling people, “Really, people, I’m not on drugs.” But the message is not aimed at simpletons, rather he delivers it to “devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem.”* This implies both uneducated people and intellectuals. If this were all a charade and tale, the leader would need to be someone steeped in rhetoric and debate, to handle the rebuttals and logical criticisms that surely came immediately. But it’s a man who catches fish for a living, who somehow convinces thousands upon thousands that what he has seen is true, in the city where the event occurred. Peter is not a genius or shrewd salesman, but after Jesus’ death his character is altered dramatically. I often think of the saying, “The truth requires no rehearsal.” This is why salespeople and lawyers need to rehearse arguments, demonstrations, and pitches: because there is a roundabout angle to getting to the “truth.” Peter is able to speak plainly, from the heart, and people believe him, unrehearsed, because he’s telling the truth and wouldn’t be able to convince anyone if he were telling a contrived fiction. He doesn’t have the training and toolkit to do that. His transformation is unexplainable without the Holy Spirit filling him with grace. The same can be said for the others who became warriors of faith after having so recently been trembling and afraid at the crucifixion, hiding out, even returning to their old jobs after being devastated at the death of Jesus, thinking that he had not “redeemed Israel” after all.

“It took an objective encounter with the risen Jesus to crystallize the disciples' faith in Him and cause them to proclaim His resurrection. Visions and subjective experiences would not have done it. Something had been seen. Something real.”*

“Gethsemane's cowards became Pentecost's heroes. This is inexplicable without the Resurrection. Had prestige, wealth, and increased social status accrued to new believers when they professed Christ and His resurrection, their profession would be logically understandable. In fact, however, their "rewards" were of a different type, eventually involving lions, crucifixion, and every other conceivable method of stopping them from talking.”*

I spent many years refuting and mocking the idea of the resurrection of Jesus. I have made many rude thoughts about it, siding with the doubters and logicians, writing off miracles as artifacts of an age where the world was haunted by demons. In reality, I guess my abandonment of Christianity was one response, because if you do not accept the resurrection, then the only answer is total abandonment of the faith. St. Paul has said the same, as have many others. Without the resurrection, what’s the point of it all?

I cannot explain how resurrection can occur, nor do I need to, because I believe now that events can happen beyond our comprehension, that science does not and will never explain everything. Even if life is discovered on other planets, or our physicists take us to the depths of the quantum world, and biology cures the last disease, and psychologists can explain away and prescribe solutions for all mental ailments, nothing can replace the need for God in my heart, as I have followed it all the way down to the end of the line, and I know that the answer to all questions is through faith, by surrendering my will and intellect to belief in the resurrection of Jesus. The flaw of humanity is real, and I find nothing more convincing than the resurrection of Jesus as the cure, for the forgiveness of me and my enemies, as the only way to live in the world and hold on to one another for the promise of the next. There is only one path to removing hate, and that is forgiveness and love, and that is why the power of the Christian message never dies. Right now the world may be called “post-Christian” but it’s not, as nothing the secular world can offer will ultimately replace the message of love and forgiveness through God. The United States and Chinese empires of today will fall away like every other empire before it, like the USSR, the Third Reich, the Austro-Hungarians, the Ottomans, the Hapsburgs, the Holy Roman empire, the Romans, the Greeks, and a thousand other willed sand castles of mankind, yet the truth of faith will endure. People have in the past and will again in the future use, abuse, and twist the faith to make it a tool of worldly power, but the center will hold because love and forgiveness shine through any lies in the end. Straying from that cannot go forever because the believers are like yo-yos, who must come back to the starting point. Nothing could shake the power of the message that empowered the very first believers of Jesus, and time and again those who hold steadfast to the Golden Rule correct the errant ways of a drifting faith. To this day the power of the Word remains fully charged, and this is because of the resurrection. From a position of weakness, forgiveness, and love, we are saved from death, and the faith will carry that forward and never end. While we quibble over traffic, split our families over politics, moralize over sexuality and death, obsess with celebrities and materialism, entertain ourselves with movies and music, and distract ourselves with phones and computers, the righteousness of Jesus’ message and resurrection remains unbothered. Even if Christians go back into hiding for a thousand years, and the followers are once again hunted down, as they are today in parts of the world, the faith will never die - because there is nothing better on offer, nothing like resurrection and the forgiveness of sins, nothing above it, nothing with more truth, and nothing more satisfying to the heart. We are the inheritors of the greatest mystery of all time. We are the same as those originals, lost and found, over and over again. We may start out like Saul, but end up like Paul, unable to explain how or why it happened, just as we can’t fully explain the resurrection. Once you choose to believe it, you don’t have to explain it. I just know that it is real and that I have changed.

“The phenomenon that here confronts us is one of the biggest dislodgements of events in the world's history, and it can be accounted for only by an initial impact of colossal drive and power…a habitual doubter like Thomas, a rather weak fisherman like Peter, a gentle dreamer like John, a practical tax gatherer like Matthew, a few seafaring men like Andrew and Nathanael, the inevitable women, and at most two or three others…seriously, does this rather heterogeneous body of simple folk, reeling under the shock of the Crucifixion, the utter degradation and death of their Leader, look like the driving force we require? Frankly it does not…Something came into the lives of these very simple and ordinary people that transformed them.”*