For the last several months, we have been experiencing some real world encounters with Jesus in the Gospel of John. Like many of you, I have been challenged, renewed and assured. Today we end this series by looking at John 20 and 21, where we discover the good news of Easter morning. We have been looking for something to offer us a word that everything is going to turn out ok … that life has purpose and meaning . . . that there is hope even in the face of death. Then just about the time we were about to give up on our search … doubting even the answers we thought we knew … what we were searching for finally found us.

Prayer

Searching is a common theme in the Gospel of John. It’s not so much stated with words, nor does the search linger close to the textual surface. But when we look back at the encounters with Jesus in this Gospel, John has presented us over and over again with portraits of people on a searching journey. In John 1:35, we see how the disciples begin following Jesus before He calls them to “come and see.” In chapter 3, Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night to have his questions answered. In chapter 4, a Roman official with an ill son goes up to Galilee to find Jesus because they have heard of his healing power. In chapter 11, Mary and Martha seek out Jesus to heal their ailing brother Lazarus. And on Palm Sunday, the crowds have come out to greet the one they believed would be their political and spiritual Messiah. They said true things of him, even though days later, they would crucify Him. And then in the midst of these events, some Greeks come to Philip and say to him, “Sir, we would see Jesus.”  

All of us are on a search, but in most cases, we have not found what we are looking for. We are looking for answers to our deepest questions about truth, the meaning of love, and the possibility of forgiveness. We sense that our lives should have more purpose than we have discovered so far. We wonder if there is a way that good will defeat evil, that peace will reign over violence, and whether, in the end, that it will all be ok. We look for a cure for our physical ailments and our emotional scars. We are searching for someone who will unconditionally love us and accept us. Surely such possibilities exist, but so far we have come up empty. That was … until we first met Jesus. He seemed to offer everything we were looking for – a way to God, a life of purpose, forgiveness, and love. 

Then one day something happened. Maybe it was a Christian parent whose morals seemed legalistic and unbearable. Maybe it was a minister who disappointed you. Maybe it was a church that seemed to hate sinners and not love them. Maybe it was that Jesus and church just did not seem too relevant to the daily demands and struggles of your life. Maybe someone close to you died, and you felt like God had abandoned you. Perhaps you suffered a great illness, and you prayed, and healing never came. All of us at times have been disappointed with Jesus. All of us have stood before the cross and seen the death of what we thought would be our messiah. So, we stopped searching, gave up on a life of meaning or hope, and just returned to our daily lives trying not to think about deep things like the meaning of life or the reality of death. Perhaps those things are just mysteries. Perhaps God has abandoned us. Perhaps that is the end of the story.

We come to the events of Good Friday, and no one is searching for Jesus that day. They all are running away from Him in fear. It was only a few who remained, and they were not the people you would expect. Nicodemus –the man of the night – he was out there in the light preparing the body of Jesus for burial. And Joseph of Arimethea, a Jew who came to the side of Jesus despite his fears. And some women. They never left Jesus, even at the end. Even when some go away in doubt and disappointment, there are always some who remain because they just can’t leave. Not all of their questions are answered either. They are disappointed too. But they just wouldn’t know what else to do … where else to turn … and so they stay near.

The Gospel of John presents us with four final scenes of people searching for Jesus, and how that search finally came to an end. 

Scene One: Mary Magdalene (vv. 1-18). It was women who were the first to discover the resurrection, and it was a woman that Jesus first found. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb in the darkness of that Sunday morning. When she got there, she discovered that the body of Jesus was no longer in the tomb. And so she went running to Peter and John and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!” Peter and John then raced to the tomb too, searching for Him. But when they arrived, their search again ended in grief and crisis. He was not there. So, they believed the testimony of the women that Jesus was not there, but they were filled with fear and disappointment that they went back home. But again, Mary stayed and grieved the loss of her Savior and friend.

Two times in this text Mary is asked, “Why are you crying?” Once by the angels and once by Jesus. Grief is the first response we have to a faith in the ruins. Just when you gave God the benefit of the doubt, He stiffed you. Or the church turns out to be hypocritical. Sometimes we do not so much grieve a loss of our expectations of what Jesus could do for us so much as we grieve what we expected life to be. We expected that life would be full of joyful relationships and it turns out that we are lonely. We thought we had found a relationship or a marriage that was not going to disappoint us, and turns out that it did. We thought someone had finally told us the truth. Then we learned it was false. We thought we understood some of the answers that had only eluded us before. Then we only had more questions. For the first time, we actually thought what we were doing mattered. And then we lost the job. And so we grieve and cry too because it was so good, and now all seems so lost.

That is until Jesus calls your name. “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it that you are looking for?” That is the key question for us when we are disappointed with God, and when we are disappointed with life. What are you searching for? What is it that you really want? Often, the One we’ve really been looking for is standing right before your very eyes. He is not dead.  He is risen!

How do you know this? How will you know that your hopes are not dead, and that your savior has not been taken away by the thieves of your doubt and despair? You will know it because you will hear Him call you by name. Among the first words of Jesus in John after his glorious resurrection is the name of a person. “Mary.” When He calls out your name, no matter how much you have grieved the loss of a Savior or your dreams, you will know the voice when you hear it. You remember that voice that you heard as a child when the preacher mentioned his name, the Jesus that drew you when you sang those hymns at the church of your childhood, the Presence you felt when you were baptized. It’s a voice you know too well but you have tried to forget it because Christianity no longer makes sense to you, or the church burned you, or God disappointed you. Perhaps many of you are like the women -- you have stayed near the cross, but your hearts are no less bowed down. You still wonder if there really is forgiveness for you. You question if anyone really loves you. You doubt that there really is Truth. But then He speaks your name on this Easter Sunday, and you know that something burns within you – something feels alive. 

Scene 2: The Disciples (vv. 19-22) The women run and tell the disciples the news that Jesus is alive. It is not really clear in the text whether the disciples believed them or not. The testimony of women was not considered credible evidence in first century Palestine, so perhaps they did not. If they did know he was risen, it certainly had not calmed their fears. They feared that the Jews might seek them out for persecution and death because they had been so foolish to believe in this one who called Himself the Messiah. So, they locked themselves together in the room of their fears. 

Fear is another barrier to the glory of Easter. Fear is so paralyzing because it concerns itself more with what might happen than with the glory and truth of what is. The truth was that Jesus was risen. A new age had begun, and they were the first to know it. Even death had been defeated, so that the fear of death is no longer even a hurdle to living a life given over to God. But the disciples could not see any of that. They feared their opposition outside. They imagined crosses, and swords, and flames. And it was the imagination rather than the truth that led them behind the false shelter of locked doors.

The locked doors of fear always keep you from Easter because it shuts out the possibilities of an alternative way of being that has another take on the way things really are. Fear will imprison you in a room of doubts about your standing before God, about your salvation, and whether you’ve done enough to earn the favor of God. Most importantly, fear keeps you from imagining a world where the fear of death no longer holds you hostage. When you live in the fear of death, you cannot be fully alive because you are too focused on not dying rather than on truly living. The only way you can ever really live is to move past the fear.

You can’t do that on your own. You will always end up back in the dark, locked room of insecurity, threat and fear. There is only One who can break through. Of this One the Hebrews writer said, “He himself likewise shared all things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” (Hebrews 2:14-15). Jesus comes and stands right in the midst of the things you most fear and he says to you, “Peace be with you!” And the doors unlock. And then you are sent back out into the world a free person, to proclaim the possibility of forgiveness and an end to the fear.

Scene Three: Thomas (vv. 24-31). The disciples set out on this ministry of forgiveness to first find one of their own. They told Thomas that Jesus had arisen and had appeared to them in the room, but Thomas did not believe them. Real people don’t come into room without opening doors or a window. So Thomas said, “Until I see the proof, I will not believe.”

Doubting Thomas reminds me of Thoroughly Modern Thomas. His basis for determining whether something is true or false, real or not real, is factual evidence. Thomas wanted proof that the Jesus of history really was the Christ of faith. And so do we. It’s what we want in every other search: DNA evidence, evidence of a WMD, evidence that dinosaurs once roamed the earth. Witnesses are helpful, but data is how we determine the facts.

But the Bible is short on data about the resurrection. One of the things I loved about Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of Christ, was how little time the movie spends on the resurrection. We see the risen Jesus leaving the tomb, and the movie ends. It is not because the resurrection is so unimportant that the movie shows so little. Like the other Gospel writers, John gives us little detail about how it happened. He shows us how that the truth is not known by evidence but by encounter. Jesus appears to each of these people, and it is only in encountering Him that they come to believe. That is how you too will come to believe what is impossible to believe – when Jesus comes to meet you. It is then you will know that it is true, and the best news you’ve ever heard.

Thomas doubted, but at least he kept meeting with those who had faith. I wonder if there was a part of him that thought it might just be true . . . or wanted it to be true. So he showed up at the Sunday night gathering the next time. Once more the doors are shut, and Jesus appears to pronounce His blessing, “Peace be with you.” Then Thomas gets his evidence, “Come touch me,” Jesus says. We do not know if Thomas actually did those things or not. What we do know is that in the moment of that encounter, Doubting Thomas made the confession that no one else to this point in the story has been able to make – the confession that it is the one John wants his readers to make – the One God wants you to make when you look upon this risen Jesus, “My Lord and My God.” There is no evidence that can eliminate the mystery. But you can believe because Thomas did. And if that’s not enough, Jesus will come and find you. Blessed are those who have not seen but believe and confess “My Lord and My God!”

Scene Four: Peter (Chapter 21). Peter already had made his way back to work as a fisherman in Galilee. He had spent three years doing something that he thought really mattered. Jesus had even told him that he was going to be the foundation of a new community. Then Peter denied the one that he loved – not once, not twice, but three times. Finally, it all came tumbling down that Friday afternoon in Jerusalem. On Sunday morning, Peter saw that the body was missing, and he ran back home to Galilee in shame, guilt and despair. Even if Jesus were alive, there was no way that Jesus could forgive Him and love Him again. So he just got busy catching fish.

It was an early morning at work, and the fish were not catching too well that day. But then saw a man standing on the seashore who told him to try one more time. The nets came up full. Could it be? John told him it was the Lord. Peter dove in to that sea of grace and swam as quickly as he could to the One who had come looking again for Him. The first invitation of Jesus to his disciples in the Gospel of John was to “Come and see.” Here, the invitation is “Come and eat.” Jesus had prepared a feast of forgiveness, and his invitation was to come and eat. It’s the same for you, and the guilt and shame melt away when you taste and eat the meal around this Table every Sunday that Jesus has prepared for you.

In every one of these cases, people like us were searching for purpose, life and hope. They looked for a love that is a real, and for a forgiveness that was lasting. But more than anything, they were looking for a God who actually lived up to the life he promised and the hopes he inspired. And so, they came searching because they believed that such a God just might exist. In the end, all of them found what they were looking for. Not because of their search though. A search is the place to begin. But sometimes a search can lead you down some disappointing roads. Sometimes it just ends in mystery.

The good news in the Easter story is that it doesn’t matter where your search has led you so much as the fact that God is searching for you. To people who feel like that their hopes have died, or that faith is implausible, or that forgiveness is an impossibility, there is still one other truth to know. The Lord is risen! And He is coming to find you!

There are two great experiences of life. One is to be on a great search for something until you find it. The other is to be found by the thing for which you are searching. It is fulfilling to look for treasure; it is the best thing in the world to find out that you are the treasure and someone is looking to find you. Blaise Pascal once wrote, “Before we were born, Christ died for us.” You were loved even before you were born. You were loved from the foundations of the world. God so loved the world that He gave his only Son … .” You were loved when the tomb opened, and the stone rolled away, and Jesus walked forth to call your name. That’s the end of the gospel of John. It’s the end of the movie. But it’s only the beginning of your story with God.

If you’re just starting your search today, or you’ve been on it a long time, we invite you to join us on our common journey. We are glad that you are here. Whether you are returning to church for the first time in a while today, or you are new to church, or you’ve remained right here near the cross every Sunday, searching will never be enough if you are to meet the risen Jesus. You will have to be found, and the news of this day is that the One for whom you are searching has found you.

Happy Easter!

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