Faith and the Hidden Resurrection

One of the best internal arguments for the authenticity of the Gospels as historical accounts is their utter freedom to include details that any good public relations professional would avoid. If they were cooked up to sell a tale in which they did not believe, they would never have been written the way they are written.

Take Jesus’ closest followers, the disciples, or the twelve. These men, whom the first hearers or readers would know, were the shepherds of this upstart branch of Judaism. They are not depicted as heroic, particularly wise, or even necessarily virtuous characters. Many of the stories involve them failing to believe in the man they were following around, failing to understand what He was driving at, and failing to pursue the course he followed. Jesus calls the twelve as a group “men of little faith” multiple times, refers to the leader as “Satan,” and has to rebuke the next two closest disciples for fixating on their own place in the cosmic hierarchy. Oh, yeah—one of them betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver.

One might observe that, with friends like these, who needs Pharisees and Sadducees?

Even if one can rationalize these portrayals as designed to draw a contrast between the Lord, who is alone good, and those who recognize his grandeur, other parts of the Gospels have a TMI problem. They give too much information to have been included (much less invented!) by those trying to convince others of something they don’t believe. It is during the season of Easter that this truth hits us squarely in the nose.

In the Resurrection accounts, a good propagandist would have emphasized how convincing it all was. He would have recounted how those who followed the Lord had recognized that Jesus’ death was never going to be the end, either because they remembered his words or put together the hints from prophecy or from the truly convincing way in which those who did witness it recounted their encounters with the Risen Lord. Or something.

Nope.

What do we find instead? Everyone knows about Thomas, who fails to believe even when the other disciples had told him about the Lord’s appearance to them. Sadly, his fate is to be weighed down two millennia later with the epithet “Doubting” attached to his name. Let us say that Thomas was not the only one to exercise a vicious skepticism on the third day.

In Mark’s Gospel, which many scholars think is the earliest (you don’t have to believe that), Mary Magdalene encounters the Lord, believes, and tells the Disciples about it. “But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her,” Mark informs us, “they would not believe it” (Mark 16:11). When two more of his followers see the Risen Lord, they tell the others. The result is that “they did not believe them” (Mark 16:13). And when Jesus appears to the remaining eleven, “he upbraided them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen” (v. 14).

The same pattern happens in Luke’s Gospel. Initial reports of the empty tomb are regarded as “an idle tale, and [the disciples] did not believe them” (Luke 24:12). Even when Christ is among his closest disciples, we find out that they “were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a spirit” (Luke 24:37). Even when the Lord shows them His hands and feet to disprove the ghost theory, we hear that they “still disbelieved for joy, and wondered” (v. 41).

True, I have only told the very earliest part of the story. In all the Gospels, the disciples get around to believing, even if they require the Lord to teach them or, in Thomas’s case, allow an inspection of His hands and side.

But it’s significant that all this unbelief is there. The Lord who spoke in the still small voice to Elijah, rather than the boom and blaze of earthquake and fire, reveals His Resurrection to individuals and small groups, usually in a form that disguises himself from them. Mary Magdalene’s encounter begins with her confusing Him with a common gardener. Even his dramatic appearance walking on water takes place late in the night and is capped off by… hints about the best fishing?

Perhaps the most amazing of these TMI moments comes in Matthew’s Gospel, when the writer reaches the dramatic ending. Jesus told the whole large group of his followers to meet Him on a mountain in Galilee. “And when they saw him they worshiped him,” Matthew tells us, “but some doubted” (Matthew 28:18, my emphasis).

Again, it’s not what a successful propagandist or PR firm would recommend that anybody write to convince others. A script like this one would have been sent back for a rewrite. The odds are that the Gospel writers really believed what they wrote. If they were telling the truth (and it’s rational to believe they were), it says something very important about the way in which belief is meant to be achieved.

Isaiah the Prophet says, “Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isaiah 45:15). Coincidence, it is said, is when God acts but prefers to stay anonymous, or hidden. We might say that even when some event seems much greater than coincidence, God does not necessarily show Himself to all comers, nor does He show Himself in such a way that there can be no difficulty in believing. Even his most wondrous deeds often have a degree of ambiguity. Was that thunder they heard at the Lord’s Baptism, or was that a voice? Was it the Voice?

Why is God like this? Why is even the Resurrection itself something that was not done out in the open and in such a manner that none could deny it? Why, we ask about our own lives, does the Resurrection not appear clearly in my own life? If Christ is raised and all things are new, why does this not appear to me? Why are things so hard?

The answer, it would seem, is that God is trying our hearts. Will we believe Him or not? Christ is Risen, but He is still the hidden God, testing our faith. Will we have the courage to believe and to hold on when others doubt? Will we remain faithful when others do not receive our testimony? Will we go to the mountain and see Him?

“As faith,” St. John Henry Newman wrote, “is content with but a little light to begin its journey by, and makes it much by acting upon it, so also it reads, as it were, by twilight, the message of truth in its various details.” Christ is risen. The Resurrection is a glorious miracle. The world has changed irrevocably. But the reality of the Risen Christ is recognized only by the virtue of faith.

The Risen Lord is still among us, present in the fullness of His body, blood, soul, and divinity. Yet He appears hidden again—this time under the form of bread and wine. There are, as there were during the forty days leading to His Ascension, many who doubt it is He.

But it is. How do we know? In the same way, they perceived Him in the garden, the upper room, and on the mountaintop. St. Thomas Aquinas answers the question in his marvelous hymn for the Feast of Corpus Christi, “Pange Lingua”: Sola fides sufficit. Faith alone suffices to see the Risen Lord.

(Editor’s note: This article first appeared, in slightly different form, in The Catholic Servant and is reposted here with kind permission.)