So, at the beginning of this book on miracles, uh C.S. Lewis mentions that in all of his life, he’d only met one person who claimed to have seen a ghost. And what was interesting, he said, was that this person didn’t believe in any immortal soul before she saw the ghost, and she continued to disbelieve afterward. So, she retreated back from her experience by saying it must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. So, Lewis comments that the question of miracles can never be answered simply by experience. He writes, “Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen and heard, touched, smelled, or tasted, and our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we’ve been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, that is what we will we shall always say.” So, he’s just saying that for us to accept the supernatural, we first need to have a philosophy or a worldview that allows for the supernatural to occur. And many of us, maybe all of us here this morning, we do operate with that worldview. Along with millions and millions of other Christians across the planet, we we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead as decidedly supernatural, not only supernatural, but factual and foundational to our lives. In fact, we would say that if that single Jenga piece was to be pulled out of our life structure, well, the whole thing would collapse. You know, Paul puts a pretty sharp point on it in 1 Corinthians 15 saying, “If there is no resurrection, then we who hope in Christ only in this life, and if there’s nothing to it that extends beyond this life, then we’re the most pitiful people on the planet.” Why? Well, for one reason, we keep going to church every Sunday, you know, And give up a quarter of our precious weekends every every week. That’s a lot of days that we could have been golfing. So we really are the most pitiful people if that hasn’t happened. So although millions and millions of people share our resurrection hope this morning, we know that millions of others, we know a number of them by name, either don’t believe the resurrection ever happened, or they believe it so weakly and so passively and so lukewarmly that it doesn’t function as as a story that they feel is where centering their lives around. To them the resurrection of Jesus really is little more than a ghost story. So this morning the gospel writer John takes us into that world where people on the first Easter morning have their senses assaulted by something they can see and hear and touch. But their resurrection faith has to emerge from the soil of doubt. So the people we see processing faith this morning, Peter, John, Mary, 10 disciples and finally Thomas, they represent all of us who have processed or are currently processing the resurrection story and we came out the other end believing and having our lives forever changed because of it. Notice first what happens with with John, the gospel writer, who most Bible scholars and Bible students believe self-identifies in his gospel when he says refers to the disciple whom Jesus loved. Now John seems a little modest in presenting himself as a main character in the story, but he’s very comfortable in his association with Jesus who loved him and let that define who he is. It gave him a plot device, a way for him to insert himself into the gospel account without drawing the attention to himself, but rather putting it squarely on Jesus and his love. So the basic story, John chapter 20, Marvin read it, has a woman named Mary Magdalene going to the tomb very early in the morning. It’s still dark. She’s called Mary Magdalene because there a number of other Marys in the Gospel of John including the mother of Jesus. But to keep us from getting confused, Mary Magdalene is identified by her hometown of Magdala on the west coast, Sea of Galilee. And in the dark, she worked her way to the tomb. She saw that the stone had been rolled away. She must have taken a peek inside, and even in that dim light, she could tell there was no body to be found. So, she ran back into the city of Jerusalem to where Peter and John were, told them someone had taken the body. The assumption was grave robbers or the enemies of Jesus or someone else had abducted the body and taken it out of the tomb. So, John and Peter then had that foot race to the tomb, and John was faster, and he bent down, he looked inside. And as Peter was running up, Peter strolled right in, and they confirmed together that the tomb was vacant. John writes that he and Peter saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head, and the cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. And knowing how that moment had affected him, John the gospel writer, referring to himself, says he saw and believed. Adding though, they still did not understand from scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead. So, in other words, this little bit of physical forensic evidence had an effect on John, even though scripturally, theologically, he couldn’t see how the pieces fit yet. The linens and the cloth indicated to him this is not the work of grave robbers. This is something untouched by human hands. Likely one reason for that was that no grave robber or anyone moving a body would ever take the time to unwrap it first, because carrying off a dead decaying body is grizzly enough activity, but unwrapping it, so you’d be carrying a naked body, that would be awfully gross. That was something about the way the linens were arranged and the burial cloth was folded that sparked belief in John. Of course, John had seen many miracles and supernatural events by Jesus over the previous years, so he was no anti-supernaturalist. He’d been conditioned toward belief. So this little piece of forensic evidence, even though he wasn’t able to run it through the scriptures for further analysis, this evidence was enough for the Holy Spirit to spark faith in the disciple that Jesus loved. Some of you know how that works because you didn’t you didn’t require a lot of evidence to be convinced of the resurrection. Nor did it require a great deal of detailed Bible study for you. The Holy Spirit had been working in you, been conditioning your heart and massaging your intuitions toward faith, maybe through your family or some of your friends or maybe even through heartache or a great trial in life. It didn’t take an awful lot to slide the stick shift into gear and get you rolling in resurrection faith. That’s what happened with John. Now story with Mary Magdalene’s quite different. She received far more revelation than John did that morning after running to Jerusalem and alert Peter and Paul the body was missing, she went back to the tomb. That’s where she had her experience. First person on earth to meet the resurrected Christ. Mary Magdalene, she makes her appearance in the Gospel of John late in the game in John chapter 19 as she stands with other women near the cross where Jesus was suffering in agony and shame. But we get a glimpse of Mary’s backstory in Luke chapter 8 where Luke offhandedly mentions that she once was afflicted by seven demons. But Jesus had healed her. He had cured her. He had delivered her from her demonization. Now maybe that fact alone explains why Mary would be among the last ones at the cross with Jesus and the first at the tomb. As soon as the Jewish Sabbath had ended even before dawn on Sunday morning, she was there. You know, we read from everything we read in the Gospels, demonization was no small thing. Demons were hell-bent on destroying people, reducing them to something more animal than human. And if you had one in you, one that had access to your inner life, it was out to destroy you. Read about the man in Mark chapter 5 who lived in the tombs and he couldn’t be restrained even when he was chained hand and foot. No one was strong enough to subdue him and it says that he would just cry out and cut himself with stones. Or the demonized boy in Mark 9 who would roll around on the ground convulsing and foaming at the mouth and the evil spirit in him would try to throw him in the water to drown him or into a fire to burn him to death. So we can only imagine what crazy Mary inhabited by numerous demons would have been like in the little town of Magdala. How reduced and out of control her life would have been. In our strangely disenchanted modern world, many people don’t believe in things like angels or demons anymore. So she’d likely be diagnosed with severe mental illness and she’d be institutionalized or she’d be somewhere out on the street. But Jesus had cured her and she was so grateful, Luke tells us that she became a part of a group of women who traveled, who were with the 12 disciples and who supported them out of their out of their means and their resources. So Mary’s experience that Easter morning, it was spectacular. She returned to the tomb, she stood crying helplessly, she bent down to look inside, saw two angels in white, said, “Wom- woman, why are you crying?” “They’ve taken my Lord away,” she said, “I don’t know where they put him.” Through her tears, she sees another figure standing beside her, doesn’t recognize it’s Jesus. She took him to be the gardener or the groundskeeper, asked him to tell her where the body had been taken away so she could get it back and that’s when she heard that voice, the one she knew and loved so well, call her name. Mary. Mary had been desperately searching for a dead Jesus and even after seeing the burial clothes and the angels, she was still preoccupied with finding the body. She wasn’t expecting the supernatural. But when Jesus called her name and she saw that it was him, she instantly had resurrection faith and she clung to him with all her might. You know, John saw a little bit of physical evidence and believed, but Mary had that intimate experience of just hearing Jesus call her name. And for all of us, certain certainly there’s evidence and rational thinking can open us up to the possibility of faith. But for all of us, Jesus still has to come at some point and call our name for us to cling to him in faith. That’s what happened with Mary and once she had him, she was never going to let him go. Jesus had to break off the embrace saying, “Mary, don’t hold on to me or stop clinging to me for I’ve not yet returned to the Father.” And we don’t know exactly what Jesus meant by that, but it could be as simple as something like, “Mary, I’ve got a very busy day ahead of me. I’ve got to spend the afternoon with a couple of guys on the road to Emmaus and I’m planning on seeing my disciples this evening. I’m going to be around for the next 40 days. I will see you again, but I’ve got to go now. Oh, and Mary, when I ascend to my Father, then you’ll have me all the time. My spirit will come and my spirit will live in you and we can have the same kind of intimacy and I won’t ever tell you to stop clinging to me.” And then amazingly, Jesus chooses this former mental patient to go be his first ambassador. He says, “Go to my brothers, tell them I’m returning to my Father and your father, to my God and your God.” So, straightway Mary runs to the disciples, tells them she’d seen the Lord and what what he’d said to her. There was a man named Celsus, a 2nd century Greek philosopher, and he was one of the earliest intellectual critics of Christianity. He didn’t hate Christianity emotionally. His critique was more intellectual and philosophical. He mocked Christians as people who have blind faith instead of reason. People who do not examine things, they just believe. Central to his argument against Christianity was Mary Magdalene. He saw her resurrection testimony as unreliable cuz she was a hysterical woman. Her gender made her emotional and unstable and prone to imagining things and like any woman she could never be considered a dependable witness. Now Celsus was not a weak thinker but he didn’t really think it right down to the bottom. Because his argument against the reliability of Mary Magdalene is really one of the strongest arguments there is for the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Because if Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead and the disciples colluded to keep his memory alive by spinning this resurrection myth, this fable, this legend, this fiction, they’d never have chosen a woman to be the first witness. Yet in every one of the gospels, the original eyewitnesses to the resurrection are women. So writing a myth about a resurrected Jesus with women as witnesses would be counterintuitive cuz there were lots of people like Celsus around who would have considered Mary to be an unreliable source. You’d never get your new religion off the ground that way. But Christianity exploded like a rocket cuz it was true. The Easter events, the resurrection actually happened and over the next 40 days uh 1 Corinthians 15 tells us hundreds of people in the small nation of Israel saw Jesus and they would naturally spread the word to their family and their their siblings and their their relatives who knew that those witnesses weren’t lying to them. It was that eyewitness testimony of people like Mary telling others that brought thousands of Jewish people and they were not inclined at all to believe in the single resurrection of an individual in the middle of history. That didn’t make sense to them. Yet their world view changed overnight. There was no other explanation for Mary’s inclusion in the Easter story than that she was there and her testimony’s accurate. Mary went back into Jerusalem and he told the disciples that uh she’d seen Jesus that evening. John tells us all the disciples except Thomas were gathered together and Jesus appeared in the middle of a locked room, and the room was locked because they were living in fear that the Jews who had killed Jesus might come and round them up. When Jesus appeared, we read in Gospel of Luke the disciples were startled and they were frightened, and they were thinking that they were seeing a ghost. They’d previously thought Jesus to be a ghost when he came walking to them on the Sea of Galilee. And again, locked in the room with this apparition suddenly appearing, they’re convinced that what they were seeing was a ghost, which is why Jesus had to tell them, “Why are you troubled? Why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It’s I myself. Touch me and see. A ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” And again, we see faith starting to sprout up in the soil of doubt. Resurrected body of Jesus was certainly different, different than the bodies of those that Jesus had resuscitated from death, like Lazarus and like the ones who came out of their tombs the moment Jesus died. But Jesus was not a resuscitated human destined to die again. Resurrected body of Jesus could appear and disappear, could walk through walls, could also be touched, could eat a fish. Resurrected Jesus went unrecognized by the two men on the road to Emmaus on Easter afternoon till he suddenly revealed to them who he was. Even Mary at the tomb seemed to have difficulty recognizing him at first. So the resurrected body of Jesus was something like and very much unlike our own bodies. And as the disciples realized that this was indeed Jesus among them, he began bestowing on them resurrection gifts. These are the same gifts that you and I receive when resurrection faith becomes our own. The gifts include peace. Jesus looked at the men and said, “Peace be with you.” And there was a gift of a purpose, a king giving a royal commission to his subjects. Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, I’m sending you.” Then there’s this astonishing provision and empowerment that Jesus had for them. We read he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Now, we know that the Holy Spirit came on a great many believers with a mighty rush of wind and tongues of flame and uh tongues of unlearned languages, and that happens about 6 weeks later in Acts chapter 2. So, John Calvin suggested that the disciples might have received a sprinkling of the Spirit here in John 20 and a saturation 6 weeks later. But, however that worked, there’s no doubting that the greatest resurrection gift Jesus has to bestow on us is the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit. And finally, the last gift was a gift of authorization or delegated authority. Jesus’ gift of purpose was, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And then he adds the word of authority, “If you forgive anyone his sins, they’re forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they’re not forgiven.” Now, what does that mean? Only God can forgive sins, but as the disciples would go out preaching the gospel message and broadcasting that Jesus died for our sins and that by receiving in faith what he’s done, we’re saved. Well, it’s a message that brings salvation, but it also delivers judgment. As Christians who bear Christ’s spirit, we go out on Christ’s mission. Whoever we share the gospel message with, we place before people life and death, salvation and judgment. Place before them divine forgiveness or divine unforgiveness. We present a message that must be responded to, either eagerly accepted or rejected and ignored, and there are consequences depending on how that message is received. Jesus’ resurrection gift of authority to us, it’s one of proclaiming forgiveness and unforgiveness of sin as well. We don’t own or distribute forgiveness, and we’re not the ones who withhold forgiveness, but we’re the agents of Jesus authorized to act on his behalf, making his message and the consequences known. So, on Easter morning, Jesus gave gifts to his disciples, gifts of peace and purpose, empowerment, authority. Normally, we associate the Christmas season with the giving of gifts, but on Easter, far better and more substantial gifts were being handed out. So, as you’ve seen, resurrection faith came through some basic evidence to John. He was already predisposed to the supernatural. Resurrection faith came through intimacy to Mary Magdalene. She heard Jesus call her name. And resurrection faith came to the 10 disciples in that locked room accompanied by gifts that thoroughly confirmed that the resurrection was true and authentic. One more individual to whom resurrection faith had to come, and that was Thomas. His faith in the resurrection came 1 week later. Disciples were still apparently meeting uh behind locked doors. Uh and once again, Jesus appeared. And Thomas hadn’t been with the others that previous night, so he missed out on the gift giving. Not only that, but he didn’t accept the testimony of his 10, maybe closest friends in the world. These were 10 guys that he had spent the last 3 years traveling with and camping with and and being experiencing Jesus together, being exposed to the supernatural over and over again. Yet, remarkably, Thomas didn’t believe his friends, and he didn’t receive their testimony. He resisted all that second-hand resurrection testimony. He compiled a slew of conditions before he’d believe. The other disciples told him, “We’ve seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I won’t believe it.” Now, I don’t I don’t think we want to try uh psychoanalyzing Thomas. We’re not really given the reason for his skepticism. But he couldn’t have been a rigorous anti-supernaturalist with a materialistic view of the universe because how many hundreds or thousands of miracles had Thomas witnessed in the previous 3 years? He’d even along with the other disciples conducted healings and deliverances himself. Thomas had been there when Jesus called his friend Lazarus to come hopping out of his tomb so it can’t be that Thomas was an anti-supernaturalist. Now maybe if we had access to his Myers-Briggs temperament profile we’d discover that he was like an NT personality type and on the thinking versus feeling scale he was off the charts as a thinker. Or maybe Thomas just didn’t want his hopes raised anymore. You know, Charlene and I were good friends with a young couple in our church and and we wound up both moving away and shortly afterward the young mom developed cancer, a serious cancer. And over the next while she fought and had treatment and her husband prayed like crazy and she prayed like crazy for her to be healed and her husband continued praying as she declined and eventually succumbed to the disease. And their son who I think was a very young teenager at the time after his mom died said to his dad, “Does this mean we don’t have to hope anymore?” It’d been exhausting for him to carry on hoping seeing his dad pray day after day for healing when all seemed lost. And I wonder if Thomas, you know, even after his Lord had been arrested and tortured and crucified, he just couldn’t bear to have his hopes raised again even when his closest friend seemed so certain. Jesus appeared to Thomas and the other 10 disciples. He knew all about the conditions Thomas had put on believing in the resurrection. He invited Thomas to come and put those conditions to the test. “Put your finger in my in my palm and your hand in my pierced side. Stop doubting and believe.” You know, some people just have a worldview aversion to the resurrection cuz miracles just can’t happen. They’re allergic to the idea of the supernatural. Those worldviews can change. Other people may not believe in Jesus as a way of guarding themselves against disappointment because life has taught them that they shouldn’t dare get their hopes up for anything better cuz they’ve seen their hopes come crashing down on them before, but even dead hope can have its own resurrection. We see that Thomas, he didn’t take Jesus up on the invitation to physically touch his scarred body. In fact, it took Jesus it took Thomas about a half a second to drop all of his conditions for belief. Instead, and this is pretty astounding, the greatest doubter then made the strongest confession of faith that any disciple had ever made up to that point. He looked at Jesus and made those bold words, the boldest he could possibly declare. He said, “My Lord and my God.” No one, especially a Jewish man like Thomas, would ever have said those words to a fellow human or a fellow Jew, but Thomas recognized Jesus as God, and Jesus received his worship as entirely appropriate. Jesus didn’t say, “Oh, that’s a bit too much, Thomas. Let’s not overdo it. You know, I I know you’re glad to see me, but let’s not slip into blasphemy here.” No, instead Jesus received the rightful worship as God that had always been his. The faith of Thomas went from zero to 100 in about 2 seconds, and the greatest doubter became the greatest believer, and he received from Jesus his resurrection gift of faith. But then Jesus said, “Thomas, because you’ve seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Blessed are those in Knox Church in Edmonton 2,000 years from now who will gather together and worship me as their God, though none of them will have seen me. Oh, they’ll have my gifts bestowed on them. I’ll give them resurrection faith, and they’ll they’ll be given peace, and I’ll breathe on them, and they’ll receive the empowering presence of the spirit, and I’ll give them the mission of being sent out on assignment to represent me, and the message they speak to others will determine an destinies, whether forgiveness will come or unforgiveness will remain. Blessed are those at Knox Church who have not seen me, yet believe. You know, we began with C.S. Lewis saying that he met one lady who’d seen a ghost, but she’d brushed off her experience concluding that it was just an illusion or a trick of the nerves. We see in John chapter 20, people being are being ushered from doubt to faith to resurrection faith. Little bit of evidence, hearing Jesus call their name, receiving his gifts, then mightily declaring Jesus to be God. And Jesus continues to usher people from doubt to faith every day. Columnist Russell Moore was talking about Christian faith on a university campus, and one of his young listeners came up and said, “The 21st century is not the time for a zombie story, and that’s what Easter is.” Is Easter a ghost story or a zombie story? Russell Moore comments that a zombie is really a ghost in reverse, because a ghost is a soul that’s disconnected from its body, and a zombie is a body disconnected from its soul. And ghosts, they come back to try to resolve unresolved business, you know, some grievance or some love that was unrequited, and the presence of a disembodied ghost would of course be very frightening. But zombie stories are about corpses that are essentially just meat. They’re just motivated by appetite. Their bodies, they have no capacity to reason or to imagine or to love. All they have is craving. Russell Moore says, “We move like ghosts in our digital world because we’re connected, but we’re disembodied. And we we move like zombies when we’re just motivated by our appetites. You know, everyone’s holding their phone up to their face. We’re motivated by lust or pornography or sports gambling, or we’re driven simply by what our appetites desire.” Moore states, “Easter is not a a story. The 21st century is the real zombie story, and that’s the story that Easter comes to undo. Jesus is no ghost, and he is no zombie. He’s a living man standing in the presence of God. His life flows backward to us. We feel the first twitches of life just to make us just enough to make us want to join him where he is. He joined us in our human nature and reconnected it to God. He joined us in our curse and he undid it. And he joined us in the sentence of death and reversed it. Easter is no zombie story. It’s the end of one. So, take their resurrection gifts that Jesus has given you. Take your faith and your peace, your purpose, the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit. We have authority delegated to us so that others can be forgiven. If they reject the message, their sin clings to them. But, let’s take our resurrection gifts out into our world. It’s a world filled with ghosts and zombies. Let’s work with Jesus and his spirit to get out and undo it. Here’s some things we could pray. And let’s just take a few moments of personal private prayer with Jesus. Just rejoice that he is risen and thank him for the gifts that he has brought you. Thank him for the gift of faith and peace and purpose, for his empowering presence, for the delegated authority that he’s given you. Pray that God will lead you into a zombie world with a message of life. So, let’s just take a few moments to pray.