Only a Stranger in Jerusalem

U pon 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.