So they found the lost tomb of Jesus!Or at least that’s what some would have us believe.
It seems every year now there is some new discovery or claim that would threaten to undermine the historic tenants of the Christian faith,
whether it be the claims of the Da Vinci Code, the Gospel of Judas or the lost tomb of Jesus.
No doubt most of you have heard the assertions made by, among others, James Cameron, the director of the movie Titanic.
The discovery of the tomb is actually nothing new.
It was first found in 1980 and a number of ossuaries, or bone boxes, were removed from the site at that time.
The bones inside were buried in unmarked sites in Israel, as is the custom when such discoveries are made.
What is new is the claim of Cameron and others that the names found on some of the boxes indicate that this was the final burial site of Jesus, his parents Mary and Joseph,
a woman by the name of Mariamne, who is purported to be Mary Magdalene and someone named Judah, son of Jesus.
The claims are made despite the evidence that these names, including the name Jesus, were among the most common names of the first century in Palestine
and have been found on numerous other bone boxes of the period, and despite the fact that even the translation of the names on the ossuaries
are contested within the archaeological community.
Besides all this and many other misgivings, the obvious question remains, if the whole Christian religion is founded on a hoax,
that Jesus did not ascend into heaven after his resurrection, but seemingly lived a somewhat normal life and married and had at least one child,
why was the tomb so easy to find?
Why would Jesus’ disciples, his followers, not have made sure that there would be no way that the body and remains of Jesus
were ever going to be found?
If you are trying to deceive people into believing that a body doesn’t exist, wouldn’t it make sense that you would do everything possible
to hide the body instead of burying it so conveniently, along with his mother and father and his perhaps his wife and child,
and in of all places, Jerusalem, which wasn’t even Jesus’ home town? There is so much in these latest claims that just doesn’t add up.
It really would take a miracle for all the supposed evidence to prove what is being claimed.
And as good a director as James Cameron might be, the only miracles he performs are done on the big screen.
I would agree with the commentator Michael Coren, who wrote in the National Post last week, that it was James Cameron who announced at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1998, when he won the Oscar for best director, that he was the king of the world.
Sorry Jimmy, writes Coren, but my money’s still on Jesus Christ.
(Michael Coren, “From Jerusalem, tall tales.”National Post.February 28, 2007)
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When it comes to challenging the authenticity of the origins of the Christian faith, this latest episode is nothing new and ultimately it is neither profound nor compelling.
If we were looking for reasons to doubt the faith, we wouldn’t need to wait for anyone to come up with documentaries or novels
or conspiracy theories or long lost gospels.
If we truly wanted to doubt we wouldn’t have to look any further than our own experiences. Can you rely on God? Can we rely on God?
It’s a question that all of us have struggled with at one time or another, to some degree or another, in some fashion or another, in our lives.
We ask the question whenever evil seems to triumph over good, when the good needlessly suffer, when the young die tragically
and the old suffer for an unnecessarily long period time.
We ask the question when calamity blindsides us, when people betray us, when those we trust abuse us.
We ask whether we can rely on God when no one seems to hear our pleas, when no answer seems to be given to our prayers,
when people just don’t change despite our best attempts.
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If anyone had a case for doubt, it would have been old Abraham.
We know his story, more or less.
Abraham, at the time he was known as Abram, lived with his wife Sarah, in Haran, in the land of Ur, in what is modern day Nasariyah in Iraq, between Baghdad and Basra.<span> </span>One day God said to Abraham,
leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.
And I will make you into a great nation… and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
I suppose if there was any incentive to leave the comforts of home, it would be that of becoming a great nation through which all peoples on earth would be blessed.
Abraham left home and journeyed to the land God showed him, the land of Canaan, modern day Israel.
It wasn’t an uneventful transition.
His wife was very beautiful and her beauty almost cost Abraham his life so he lied to protect himself.
His nephew Lot turned out to be more of a burden than an asset. But the hardest part was that after years of waiting, Abraham and his wife Sarah, were childless.
The promise was made. Go and do as I command and I will make you into a great nation. But the question remained, how?
As we come to our text this morning in Genesis, the word of God came to Abraham in a vision. “Do not be afraid, Abram.
I am your shield, your very great reward.” But Abraham questions God’s providence. “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless
and the one who will inherit my estate is one of my servants?” You have given me no children so a servant will be my heir.
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You leave all that you know, because God says he wants you to do that. You go on the promise of God’s word and you turn your life upside down for him.
But years later the promise isn’t any closer to being fulfilled than when you first heard the words.
And so you begin to doubt whether God can truly deliver on his promises, whether you can rely on God. But God isn’t fazed by Abraham’s crisis of faith.
His word comes to Abraham again, “This man shall not be your heir, no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.”
Then God brought Abraham outside and showed him the stars of heaven. “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.”
Then God said to Abraham, “So shall your descendants be.” And Abraham believed the Lord and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
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Abraham believed the Lord.Its probably one of the most quoted phrases of the Old Testament. Abraham believed the Lord.
From Paul to Luther to countless theologians and preachers through the ages, we have heard that Abraham believed the Lord and it was counted to him as righteousness.
This is what faith is and how it comes. Walter Brueggemann, in his commentary on Genesis remarks, there is nothing new in these verses which amount to persuasion.
The new promise offered no new data not already known to Abraham when he refused to believe earlier. But the two responses of Abraham are very different.
The first response, that of wondering what God will give him for he remained childless, is a response of disbelieving protest or lament.
The second response, when Abraham believed the Lord, is an act of faith. So why the difference? What moved Abraham to a new response?
Surely, as Brueggemann states, its not because he feels new generative powers in his loins, God didn’t give him some ancient prescription for Viagra.
And its not because he has any new expectations for Sarah either. In fact it has nothing to do with flesh and blood, rather he has come to rely on the promise speaker.
Abraham has now accepted God to be, not merely a hypothesis about the future, but the voice around which his life is organized.
He has repented.
Abraham still doesn’t know how God will accomplish what he has promised,
but he is certain of one point.
The one who makes the promise is one he can rely on.
(Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation – Genesis, p.144)
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How does this happen?<span> </span>Does this happen to us?
Somehow something in Abraham has changed
and he reaches a decisive milestone in his faith.
From doubting the reliability of God at first
to believing that what God has spoken, God will accomplish,
something has changed in him.
Again, nothing on the side of evidence has changed, only the response.
So what’s the difference?
The difference, as it is with all matters of faith,
is an act of God’s grace.
Brueggemann puts it so well.
The new reality of faith for Abraham must be accounted as a miracle from God.
The faith of Abraham should not be understood in romantic fashion
as an achievement or as a moral decision.
Rather, Abraham is a creature of the word of promise.
The situation of Abraham is parallel to the confession of the disciple Peter
who, when Jesus asks him, “Who do you say that I am?”
abruptly and without explanation of cause,
makes the declaration that, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
How does such a man come to such a confession?
How is faith possible in the life of unfaith?
Jesus’ response to Peter’s declaration indicates the miraculous nature of faith,
“Blessed are you Simon, son of Jonah,
for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood but by my Father in heaven.”
That is how faith is and how it comes
and that is the faith of Abraham as well.
He did not move from protest to confession by knowledge or by persuasion
but by the power of God who reveals and causes his revelation to be accepted.
The new pilgrimage of Abraham is not grounded in the old flesh of Sarah
nor the tired bones of Abraham,
but in the disclosing word of God.
(Brueggeman, p.145)
And so it is with us as well.
We rely on God, we trust God, we have faith in God, if we are honest about it,
not because we have moved from protest to confession by our knowledge
or by persuasion of things rooted in flesh and blood,
but by the word of God and what it discloses in our hearts and souls.
Sometime between wondering how God would provide an heir
and looking at the countless stars of heaven,
Abraham had his moment of epiphany.
Something new came to him by the grace of God.
For those of us here this morning, is it not the same with us?
Does our faith ever stand on whether or not
someone finds a bone box with ancient names inscribed?
Does it ever stand on whether or not
there might have been some alleged cover up to hide the descendants of Jesus?
No.<span> </span>Our faith always stands on that moment,
whether we can identify it clearly or not,
when the word of God was disclosed to our hearts and souls
and we accepted that the one who speaks the promise can be relied on.
Our faith stands firmly on the claims of the gospel,
that, in the words of the Apostle Paul,
if Christ has not been raised,
our proclamation has been in vain and our faith has been in vain,
our faith is futile and we are still in our sins
and we are, of all people, the most to be pitied.
Think about the fact that for nearly 2000 years
people have tried to discredit the historic claims of the Christian faith.
No other religion has even come close to such scrutiny.
The attempts will continue
but I suggest that if 2000 years hasn’t yielded the evidence necessary
to discredit the historicity of the Christian faith,
maybe there’s truly something to those claims.
As I read in the paper this morning,
the shame of such energy being spent in the search for evidence to discredit the faith
is that the original truth is more marvellous than any latter-day fiction.
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At some point in our lives we have made the decision
to accept the word of God as being reliable, as being true for us.
Not because of empirical evidence, but because we trusted.
Faith is a miracle made possible by the grace of God.
It doesn’t rest on the temporal issues of flesh and blood,
bone boxes or hidden gospels or secret societies.
The truth of God is not revealed to us by flesh and blood, bones or boxes,
but by the grace of our Father in heaven.
Soren Kirkegaard once said something to the effect,
if you want faith, don’t look for evidence
because you’ll only postpone commitment.
Faith comes by accepting the grace of God which invites us to rely on God,
to believe God, to trust the promise speaker.
As we come before the Table of our Lord Jesus Christ this morning,
the question is, can we rely on God?
There’s no physical evidence we can point to
for the resurrection and ascension of Christ,
only the claim of the one who speaks the promise.
It takes a miracle to come to this Table in faith and with faith
and it took a miracle for our Lord to be crucified
and then to rise from the grave and ascend into heaven,
from where he will come again one day.
If the miracle depended on us it would never happen,
but the miracle doesn’t depend on us,
it depends on our Lord Jesus Christ,
who is indeed the only King of the World.
And to him be the glory, now and forever, Amen.