John 20:8-9 NLT

'Then the disciple who had reached the tomb first also went in, and he saw and believed – for until then they still hadn’t understood the Scriptures that said Jesus must rise from the dead.'

We often use the phrase “seeing is believing”. This suggests that to believe something that is unusual, it is necessary to see it with one’s own eyes. Other people’s reports are insufficient proof. Here the two disciples enter the empty tomb and believe in the resurrection on the basis of what they don’t see, a corpse. For these two disciples, they now understood what had been hidden to them; Jesus was risen indeed.

I felt drawn to Jesus. Yet, until I decided to commit myself to the truth I hoped might be true, only then did I discover that Christ is real and can be known to me in my daily life. Not that I don’t lose sight of God, nor refuse to trust when invited to give more control over my life’s direction, but something substantive and real became present, even though this was hidden from many family and friends. Family comforted themselves that I was passing through a “religious phase” as part of my maturing. Friends largely disagreed with me, some even rejecting friendship with me because I’d “got religion”.

All of us have problems grasping the immaterial. It can only become material through both the eyes and practice of faith. What remains bread and wine is also the body and blood of Jesus as promised in the gospel. What had been a very real experience of the Last Supper now finds its realisation in the risen body of Jesus. With his resurrection, God’s redemptive plan locks into place. In a moment these two disciples saw the coming together of all of human history and the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets. As such we, the Church, are invited to live within the material always with a sense of the immaterial, which is home to the very presence of God. The tomb’s forever empty, yet Christ forever present with us.

QUESTION: Do you need to see something for you to believe it?

PRAYER: Thank you, God, that you exerted your mighty power and raised Jesus from the dead, defeating death.