Have you ever thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to see a miracle’? How about the wedding at Cana in Galilee? You would be sitting there, noticing the wine was running out and thinking you had better keep a bit in your glass for the toast, when suddenly great jars of the stuff become available. Wow! But I bet the next morning, when you got up a bit later than usual, you would be thinking, ‘How did he do that?’ I bet you would be a bit confused about what happened as well. In fact after a few days it might be a distant memory. You can make too much of miracles. It is the significance of these events that keeps them alive, not what actually happened and this applies most of all to the resurrection. As David Jenkins notoriously said when he was bishop of Durham, the resurrection is not a conjuring trick with bones. Don’t worry about whether the tomb was empty or not, think of what the resurrection means.
Unfortunately, people today are very literally minded. They think the point of the resurrection is in what actually happened and unless they get direct evidence they can trust, just like Thomas in our gospel today, they will not believe. Well, after 2,000 years, there is no way anyone is going to get any evidence which would stand up in a court of law, still less in a scientific experiment. So if you think this is the basis of belief, then you are not going to believe and it would be silly to ask people to become Christians on this basis. There is evidence for the resurrection all right, but it is confusing evidence – it is not at all clear what is going on and the gospel accounts are contradictory.
Because of this, some people regard faith in Christ as a sort of test, along the lines of, if you can’t believe ten impossible things before breakfast, you can’t be a Christian. Faith is not a work. When Jesus said, ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’, I don’t think He meant they were getting extra Brownie points because they are believing something extremely unlikely. He meant they were not getting hung up on practical details and therefore received a blessing because they could see the significance. In a way, it was harder for the disciples to believe, just because they knew Jesus so well. Faith is not about believing that something physical happened. In fact I would be inclined to say that it really doesn’t matter what you think went on, from a position of extreme scepticism to one of complete belief in angels and the Turin shroud. That is not what faith is about. What went on is interesting, and I would certainly say that something miraculous happened at the Resurrection, but when you are talking about that, you are talking about history, not belief.
So what is faith about? The first thing I would like to say is that faith is expressed in life, not words. Just because people say they believe in the resurrection, doesn’t necessarily mean they are following Christ. And if truth be said, we are all guilty of this to some extent. Every time we see need and do nothing about it; every time a less than kind word escapes our lips; every time we are economical with the truth; and every time we shrink back from making a sacrifice we are deviating from the path of Him who said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’. Faith is not about words, or creeds, or what you wear, or where you go on Sundays, it is about how you live.
Now I have thought a lot about this and it seems to me you can encapsulate this idea in two words, values and goals. Our faith is about the values and goals we live by. The values we have define how we choose between good and evil, or putting it less starkly, how we make decisions in life. Many of the day to day choices we make are not religious, they are essentially morally neutral and they don’t involve choosing between good and evil. But in surprisingly many cases and in nearly all the major and life changing decisions we make, there is a moral element and faith enters in. We can offer that decision to God and in the light of what we understand about Him, we can choose to do good.
The other word, goals, is like values, because our goals affect how we live. We use goals to set out aim in life: to decide whether to make money and lead a comfortable life or to change the world and make it a better place. Goals are what we set our heart on and Jesus taught us that our hearts should be set on the kingdom of God: and where your heart is, there your life will go.
But having chosen those two words, we are not a lot further forward in deciding how we are actually to live. It has been a philosophical problem for thousands of years, How do we live a good life? People answer it in various ways. The Greeks and the Romans set great store by military valour and in enduring the changes and chances of this life with stoicism. Others seek to become one with nature, while in some societies honour and shame are the two great motivating forces. Throughout history there has always been an element of loyalty to the tribe, or nation, or local group coupled with hostility to strangers and anyone outside the group. Our modern society is characterised by the pursuit of sex and material goods – whatever makes you happy, people say, is what you should do.
Out of all these conflicting values and goals, the teaching of Jesus stands out like a light in darkness. But let us be quite clear about this. There is no logical reason for choosing any one of these patterns of behaviour. They are usually taught, or imbibed in family and society, not chosen. Choosing our values and goals to live by is a question of faith. There is no reason or evidence behind it to back it up. We choose to follow Jesus as a step in the dark, because we believe that in Him, we see God. The words we use are that we believe that Jesus is the Son of God. The meaning is expressed in our lives as we follow Him.
Well, that’s fine for the theory. What about the practice? How do we set values and goals in this modern world with all its complexity and powerful, persuasive voices? Jesus has certainly left us some teaching and that teaching is wonderful and illuminating. But first century Galilee is not 21st century England. Jesus did not leave us a rule book and I expect we would have spent all our time arguing over it if He had. But what has happened is that people have spent time thinking about Jesus’ words and then trying to put them into practice. And in this, they were guided, not by rules and regulations but by an idea of a person. There’s that phrase that people use, What would Jesus do? You can’t answer the question, but in trying to answer it, reflecting on what we have learnt of the person of Jesus, we are probably going to get closer to the truth than following any kind of written rules. Jesus often said that He had not come to replace the law, but to fulfil it. I think that what He was getting at was the need to maintain continuity, to see how our actions can be seen as being of a piece with the past, a logical growth following our greater understanding of God.
And that can all be summarised as a desire to follow the risen Lord. In the words of the hymn, “Jesus call us: o’er the tumult / of our life’s wild restless sea / day by day, his sweet voice soundeth, / saying, ‘Christian, follow me.’” And following that call is what believing in the resurrection is all about. May God give us the grace to hear it.