Today’s Passage: Luke 24:1-12

Certainty over the death of Jesus has never been the issue. Nor has certainty over the tomb being empty been the issue. Rather, it is certainty over his resurrection.

The tomb is a curious situation. Most of the time it is described as the empty tomb. Most people who struggle with Jesus’ resurrection do not challenge that the tomb was empty. They have theories that contradict a resurrection, but not an empty tomb.

A closer look reveals a detail, the linen clothes. The funeral garments. They are in the tomb, minus the dead body they once held.

In Luke’s account, no one runs into Jesus in the garden. All they have is the tomb minus Jesus’ body.

They are certain he is no longer there. They are perplexed, however, as to what it means.

The point? They need Jesus. They need to see him, to hear him, to experience him—and so do we.

As people, we are all different. We reach conclusions differently. There are often two ends of a spectrum that people straddle: logic and experience. At one extreme some people can logically argue themselves to a point of view. At the other end, some people must experience something before it is true for them.

Operating at either extreme is rarely helpful. I hear criticisms today that we are making decisions too much on “how we feel”. Yet, cold decisions cut off from emotion yield relationally void answers—and the story we have been reading is one of God seeking a relationship with his creation.

How do you process this mostly empty tomb? Along the logic—emotions spectrum, where do you generally sit? How does the Bible fit into all of it for you?

I ask all these questions because in a moment we will be back into the narrative, face-to-face you might say, with Jesus.

Yet his physical absence provides an opportunity to ask, “What does it take for me to have faith in him?”