In the Easter narratives of the four Gospels, Jesus suddenly appears to His followers — the apostles, the women at the tomb, Mary Magdalene, the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and to 500 people at once, according to Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 15:6).
These visits are short, joyful, mysterious, and luminous. His friends do not recognize Him immediately, until the Lord says or does something characteristic and self-revelatory, i.e., calling Mary Magdalene by name, showing His wounds, blessing and breaking the bread.
If the risen Lord remained on Earth for 40 days after Easter before ascending to Heaven, where was He the rest of the time and what was He doing when He was not appearing to His followers?
The Scriptures offer no answer to this intriguing question, and like so many mysteries and particulars of our faith, we are left to ponder what we cannot see or know directly through the eyes of faith.
Seemingly, those brief glimpses, those way too short encounters with the risen Christ were enough for those who loved Him. Knowing that He had risen from the dead, and was with them once again, was enough knowledge to sustain their joy and hope, even if they could not see Jesus all the time. This appearing and disappearing of the Lord, this seeing and not seeing, serve as a fundamental paradigm and example of faith in action.
Divine moments in our lives
Hopefully, we have all had epiphany moments of the divine in our lives, when God broke through the curtain of silence and mystery to reveal His luminous and comforting presence. Experiences of grace in the Eucharist or the confessional; unexpected encounters of mercy, love, and forgiveness; surprising help from the most unlikely of places; an ability to recognize Jesus in the poverty or suffering of another. These experiences are signposts along the pilgrim route of faith for which I am always grateful, for they sustain us on our journey home.
As I get older, however, I have come to appreciate the other moments, when God seems to hide Himself from me, those times of not seeing, not knowing or understanding, those places where I simply must stand in the dark and trust.
While such obscurity can be uncomfortable or even disconcerting to our intellect and senses, I liken it to the lingering presence of the risen Lord, just after He has disappeared once again.
The friends of Jesus must have longed for Him to remain with them always, but they came to realize through these divine and abrupt appearances and departures that He was giving them enough of Himself to sustain their faith and discipleship, as their capacity to receive and believe increased, without overwhelming them, or taking away their need to trust and hope even beyond understanding.
Faith is believing
A beautiful meditation in this April’s issue of Magnificat, (“He Saw and Believed” by Pierre-Marie Dumont, pp.6-7), focuses on John and Simon Peter running to the Lord’s tomb on Easter morning, after Mary Magdalene’s dramatic announcement, as narrated in John 20:1-9. The two apostles stoop to look into the empty tomb, seeing nothing but the burial and face cloths which had wrapped the dead body of the Savior. John saw and believed. But what did he actually see? A seeming emptiness. An abandoned shroud. A place where a corpse should have been lying, but was not. The Beloved Disciple comes to believe, more by what he does not see than by what he does.
Faith is like this often. In the Eucharist, we do not see Jesus in bodily form. In prayer, we do not hear an audible, divine voice speaking to us. In moments of suffering, we do not always feel consolation and peace. In the experience of the mystics, God seems more present in His apparent absence than in the warmer moments of spiritual embrace. In the end, we come to belief in the risen Christ not through some intellectual proof, or the experience of our senses, or a compiled list of miraculous encounters, but through a grace which leads us to look beyond what we can apprehend, see, or understand, to a stance of hope and trust in the truth, power, and love of the One who loves us beyond all imagining.
If John comes to believe by not seeing, so we look at the world around us, the people in our lives, the mystery of our existence, and the joys and sorrows locked in the memory of our hearts, and dare to see the truth, purpose, and glory of our created being through the lens of the Resurrection. This vision sustains us in the moments of obscurity, pain, darkness, and loneliness which come to us all.
There is so much more than what meets the eye.
I give thanks to the Lord for those experiences of deep consolation and joy which He gives me, but I have also come to appreciate the graces of savoring His lingering presence, even when He just seemed to vanish from the Upper Room of my struggling heart.