The "No Show" resurrection

Something strange happened at the resurrection. I hadn't seen it before, but once the question came to mind, it made sense of a puzzling feature of the first Easter morning. The question is this:

Why did the Lord Jesus not just appear to those who arrived at the tomb first?

He had promised that he would rise. He had actually risen. But the women were greeted, not by the Risen Lord, but by angels and an empty tomb.

And the next incident in Luke tells how the disciples on the Road to Emmaus were joined later that day by a mysterious stranger - the Risen Lord was hidden from their recognition. Why did he just not appear to them with a great fanfare? Why the strange "secrecy" over an event that is in such a central part of the plan of God and the Gospel proclamation?

The answer lies in what was said to them. At the tomb, the angels say:

He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: “The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.”’ Then they remembered his words. Luke 24 v 7-8

And to the confused Emmaus-bound disciples, the concealed Lord leads them on a Bible overview of the Old Testament:

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. Luke 24 v 27

The point is this. From the very start, God so ordered the breaking news of the resurrection, so that the disciples' belief in it would rest on multiple points of evidence - not just the experience of their own eyes. When the Lord Jesus did reveal himself to them, their reaction was shock and disbelief, supposing they were seeing a ghost. And if that were the only evidence we had for the resurrection - the experiences of the disciples - both they and we would be vulnerable to perennial argument that the resurrection appearances were simply hallucinations. The product of wish fulfilment by anguished bereaved individuals.

But it was not, and could not be that, because there is not one strand of evidence, but four:

And more than that - Christ establishes the pattern of trusting in Him as the Risen Lord that is common to all Christians at all times - not just the first disciples. We look at the evidence as a whole, rather than one item. We trust the pattern and promise of the Bible - predicted in the Old Testament, and explicitly articulated by Jesus himself in his earthly ministry. And then confirmed by our own experience of those promises in our lives.

• The physical reality of the empty tomb
• The repeated teaching and promise of the Lord Jesus himself that he would be killed and raised to life again
• The consistent witness of the whole Old Testament to the identity and work of the Messiah
• The actual experiences of the disciples themselves.

This should be the pattern of our believing. To say "I believe Jesus is alive because I feel him in my heart" may be true, but will, in the end, be inadequate. To have a faith just founded on a rational argument about the empty tomb, or the witness of scripture will, in the end, be fruitless unless we experience the reality of the Risen Lord in our lives.

And this should be the pattern of our evangelism too. Proclaiming the sure foundation of the resurrection from the wide and stable base of the whole evidence, not one part only.