By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, April 17, 2022
Upon seeing that the tomb was empty, Jesus’s
disciples said to themselves:
“Huh?”
I sometimes suspect that Our Lord intended to demonstrate
His omnipotence by choosing as His followers the dumbest and most useless
people in all of Judea, entrusting His eternal work to that half-organized gang
of fools and miscreants. This seems to me the most straightforward explanation.
Think of Peter, the rock and the most prominent of the
disciples in the earliest days of the Christian faith. We all know the story
about Peter getting into a knife fight at Gethsemane: “Simon Peter having a
sword drew it, and smote the high priest’s servant, and cut off his right ear.”
Do you know what the three most interesting words of that story are to
me? Having a sword. Peter had by that point already been for some
time a student of the man known as the Prince of Peace, who taught His
disciples to turn the other cheek, who told them “blessed are the meek” and
“blessed are the peacemakers.” And when the Prince of Peace asked Peter to go
with Him to pray, Peter apparently thought to himself:
“Better get strapped in case I have to stab somebody in
the face.”
Peter does everything wrong that he could possibly do in
that story: First, he literally falls asleep on the job. Second, he starts
lopping off ears (as one does). Third, he denies that he ever knew Jesus in the
first place. After watching Peter’s jackass shenanigans, Jesus must have felt
like denying He ever knew Peter, either — at least once, maybe three times.
“And you, Simon, shall be known as Peter, the rock,
because your head is full of rocks.”
Mary Magdalene is the first of Jesus’s followers to
discover that the tomb is empty. It is she who is honored as the “apostle to
the apostles,” given the great privilege of being the first to know of the
Resurrection and to report it to the other disciples. (Not that they believed
her and the other women: “And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and
they believed them not.”) The empty tomb discovered by Mary Magdalene is the
great glorious symbol of Christian redemption, the dramatic illustration —
because we are kind of stupid and need someone to draw us a picture — that even
death shall not prevail against the gospel. Mary Magdalene, upon seeing that
miraculous scene, has no idea what it means. She thinks somebody stole the
body, or that it was somehow misplaced. And then she encounters Jesus, a man
she has known for years, the Risen Christ Himself, the Messiah, God Incarnate,
the Creator of Heaven and Earth.
And she mistakes Him for the gardener.
But not seeing what is in front of us is what we
Christians do. Mary Magdalene’s own subsequent career as a legend is as good an
example of that as any. Pope Gregory I, who seems to have been a not especially
diligent student of the Scripture, apparently confused Mary Magdalene with two
other gospel characters, Mary of Bethany and the unnamed “sinful woman” who
anoints Jesus’s feet. And so, for 1,378 years — from A.D. 591 to 1969 — popes
and theologians and believers and fabulists went back and forth on the question
of whether Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. Christians fought about it during
the Reformation. Why? Because while we Christians say that we
believe that everyone is a sinner, that everyone falls short of the glory of
God, that everyone is in most dire need of a redeemer, we don’t really believe
it. “Oh, sure, I’m a sinner, too,” says the pharisee in each of us, “but she’s
a prostitute!” We human beings are very strange creatures. If there
is a man stranded in a desert and dying of thirst, 1,000 miles from water, he
will count himself better off than the man dying of thirst 1,001 miles from
water. A man who has fallen 100 feet down a well will comfort himself that he
hasn’t fallen 101 feet like the poor demented bastard right below him. “Sure, I
deserve judgment and eternal damnation, but at least I’m not a prostitute.”
Pope Gregory I was canonized and is celebrated as Saint
Gregory the Great. Great in general? Sure. But not what you’d call a details guy.
The rest of Jesus’s most prominent followers were about
as useless as Peter. Thomas? So pigheaded that he won’t believe his own eyes.
Matthew? Nobody really knows what ever became of him; he just kind of falls off
the map. Paul? Have you read Paul? Insufferable. But while
there were thousands of witnesses to Jesus’s life and ministry, most of the New
Testament is written by Paul, who never laid eyes on Jesus during his life.
Why? Because the rest of the guys either couldn’t write or didn’t think it was
worth taking the time. “Mysterious ways” doesn’t begin to cover it.
And it came to pass, that, while
they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with
them.
But their eyes were holden that
they should not know him.
And he said unto them, What manner
of communications are these that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are
sad?
And the one of them, whose name was
Cleopas, answering said unto him, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and
hast not known the things which are come to pass there in these days?
And he said unto them, What things?
And they said unto him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet
mighty in deed and word before God and all the people:
And how the chief priests and our
rulers delivered him to be condemned to death, and have crucified him.
But we trusted that it had been he
which should have redeemed Israel: and beside all this, to day is the third day
since these things were done.
Yea, and certain women also of our
company made us astonished, which were early at the sepulchre;
And when they found not his body,
they came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels, which said that
he was alive.
They didn’t know how the story ends. They didn’t even
know that they were in a story.
Christians haven’t got any better since those early days,
either — far from it, if we’re being entirely honest. From Rodrigo Borgia to
Robert Jeffress, through heresies, schisms, wars, and witch-hunts, from
Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Baptists to Orthodox, Anabaptists,
Anglicans, Hussites, and Methodists — we
keep getting it wrong. We keep getting distracted. We keep chasing our tails.
We are called to be a light unto the nations, but we set the worst kind of
example: When we are at our most energetic, we spend that energy fighting among
ourselves — and then, when that energy has been used up, we go limp, slumping
into idleness and comfort and resignation. Our faith is frenzies and spasms separating
long periods of complacency. We lurch between fanaticism and decadence. And
then there is politics — the ultimate golden calf. Of course we put our faith
in princes: If there is a way to get it wrong, we will find it — and we will
lean into it. Yet somehow, we manage to remain just heroically smug in
the face of all that. When the time comes for us to face judgment, we will not
have anything to say for ourselves.
Except that the tomb is empty.
Then opened he their understanding,
that they might understand the scriptures,
And said unto them, Thus it is
written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the
third day:
And that repentance and remission
of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
And ye are witnesses of these
things.
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