The Monday After Easter

Long but good.

The Monday After Easter

"If God were real, he'd make himself known. He'd come here and tell us. He'd come here and show us. He'd show us that he cared!"

by David W. Henderson


This past Monday morning, the day after Easter, I went to lunch in the company lunchroom with my boss, Tom Anderson. After we got through the line with our trays and sat down, I asked him how his weekend went.

"It was all right. The usual Easter weekend: going to church, brunch with the family, you know. How was yours?"

"Mine was great! I finally persuaded my family to let me stay home from church on Easter. So while they went to church I grabbed my clubs and headed out for eighteen holes at the club!"
Tom grinned and then was silent for a moment. He turned to me with a different, more serious look on his face. "What do you think about all this Easter business?" he asked.
"Doesn't make much sense to me," I said. "You get all dressed up and go sit on a hard bench for an hour and then go home. I sure don't see any point to it."

"No, I'm not talking about going to church on Easter. I mean Christ and the Resurrection and all that. What do you think about that?"

"It's a bunch of garbage as far as I'm concerned. But, why do you ask?"
"Aw, I don't know. I've just been thinking about it the past few days. There was an article in the paper on Saturday about the Resurrection. Maybe you saw it. Two guys were debating whether it really could have happened. Well, that got me thinking about it. And then some of the things the preacher said yesterday got me going too. I guess I'm just trying to figure out what really happened. I mean, I'm with you; there's no way anybody can rise from the dead. But something must have happened to get the apostles so excited. Did you ever hear of a book called Passover Plot?" he asked.

"Yeah. I read it when I was in college."

"I read it too, but it's been awhile," he went on. "Interesting book. What was the theory that guy had? Wasn't it something about Christ collaborating with some secret disciples in Jerusalem and prearranging everything so it would look like he was fulfilling all those prophecies?"
I chuckled. "Yeah, and he had Himself drugged on the cross and taken down while he was still alive so he could appear to his disciples later and make it look like he rose from the dead."
"Seems a little farfetched, but it's an interesting theory," he said.

Just then a man came up, holding his lunch tray. "Mind if I join you?" he asked. I looked at him for a second and then told him it was all right. This guy was about as out of place as he could be, standing there covered with dirt and grease. This was the section where management sat. He must have been new, one of the guys who worked out in the shop. God only knows why he didn't go sit in the corner with the rest of his buddies from the floor.

He was a short, skinny kind of guy, with long, stringy hair and a scraggly beard, and he was dressed in a dirty old shirt and jeans. I noticed as he leaned over to put his tray on the table that his fingers were all nicked and cut.

Tom and I glanced at each other, and then Tom said, "Well, we can finish that conversation some other time. Say, what's the status on the Dataplus system? Have you finished a mock-up of that brochure yet?"

Before I had a chance to answer, the man who'd come and sat down with us said, "I'm sorry to have interrupted your conversation. Please continue. What were you talking about before I sat down?"

"Nothing, really," said Tom. "It can wait."

But the man gently persisted. "No, please, go on. When I was standing in the lunch line I saw the two of you talking about something with a great deal of energy. I would very much like to know what you were talking about."

I sighed, looked over at Tom, and then reluctantly answered. "Well, to be honest, we were talking about the, uh, Resurrection. But we were just about finished. Big worthless hoax anyway, as far as I'm concerned."

"You don't believe it happened? How interesting . . . " he said.

The last thing I wanted to do was get into a conversation with this guy. But almost against my will I found myself saying, "What do you mean? You don't mean to say that you believe it happened, do you?"

"Certainly it happened. There's no question about it. I find it fascinating that, in spite of the incredible weight of evidence in support of it, somebody can completely write it off."

This guy was really starting to bug me. I couldn't believe how naive he was. "What are you talking about? What makes you so sure it happened? There's no way you can prove it."
"Not if you've already made up your mind that it can't be true. But for the person who is willing to let the evidence determine whether Jesus really rose from the dead, the evidence is overwhelming."

"You don't know what you're talking about. It's all a bunch of medieval legend."
He looked at me for a long moment and then reached into his tattered shirt pocket and pulled out a small Bible. Gently, he said, "Did you know that the Old Testament, from beginning to end, predicted the coming of Jesus—His birth, His ministry, His death, and even His resurrection?" And then, starting with Genesis, he went through the Bible and showed me passages that talked about Christ. Exodus, Deuteronomy, the Psalms—we looked at them all.

He finished by turning to a chapter in Isaiah, which he said predicted the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus seven hundred years before it happened: "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering . . .. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed . . .. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence . . .. After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied."

And then, he looked at me with those gentle eyes of his.

Tom got up, grabbed his tray, and said, "I think it's time we got back to work. Don't you, Cleo? I'll be waiting upstairs to talk with you about the Dataplus project." And he left.

But I wasn't ready to leave. I wasn't about to let some religious fanatic come in and ruin my lunch like this. "Those verses don't mean a thing to me," I said. "A little planning ahead, a little coincidence, a little glossing of the text, and it comes out looking like a miracle. Well, I sure don't call that ‘overwhelming evidence'!"

The dirty shophand across from me silently flipped ahead in his Bible to the New Testament. "Now wait a minute," I said. "You aren't going to try to use the New Testament for evidence, are you? Everybody knows that the New Testament wasn't written until a couple hundred years after Jesus died. And by then, there wasn't anybody who could deny all the lies. There isn't a scrap of accurate information in there."

Still looking at the pages, the man quietly said, "Cleo, we have better evidence for the life of Jesus than we do for the life of Napoleon. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as well as most of the rest of the books in the New Testament, were all written within about forty years of Jesus' death. That's just one generation. That means that when the gospels were written there were hundreds of eyewitnesses to the events who were still living. They could easily deny—or confirm—the facts that were recorded there. We can trust what we have in the New Testament to be true. These things are true, Cleo. These things are true."

"Listen," I said, "people will believe anything they want to. Those disciples had just seen all their hopes and dreams nailed to a cross. They were in no condition to deal with reality in an objective way. They would have done or said anything to keep on hoping, even if that meant believing a lie."

The man looked me straight in the eye and said, "Cleo, do you know what happened to the twelve disciples after this?"

"Yeah, they went right on believing the lie, and then they started foisting their beliefs on unsuspecting people like me."

"Cleo, six of the disciples were crucified, another was stoned to death, two were killed by the sword, two more were stabbed to death by arrows or spears, and another was exiled for the rest of his life—all because they believed that Jesus Christ was a man who was also God, and that he had risen from the dead. Would you be willing to be tortured and killed for something you weren't absolutely sure about? Jesus Christ rose from the dead."

I still wasn't buying it. "Look," I said, "the minute your blood stops flowing, your body starts to decompose. In just five minutes without oxygen your brain cells start to degenerate. And within eight hours your body's as stiff as a board. You've got about as much hope of bringing a chair to life as you do a body that's been sitting in a tomb for three days. I tell you, it's impossible. The laws of nature just don't allow it."

"Cleo, you talk about laws of nature like they're fixed and irreversible physical laws. Did it ever occur to you that the laws of nature are simply a way of talking about God's consistent way of involving himself in creation? God can do whatever He wants to. Nothing is impossible for God, Cleo. Nothing."

"You think you've got it all figured out, don't you? All right, if you think you've got all the answers, let me ask you this: What difference does it make? Tell me that. What difference does it make if Jesus rose from the dead or not? What difference does it make if Jesus ever lived? Who cares about an ignorant carpenter who lived two thousand years ago? It sure as heck doesn't make any difference to me."

As gently and as quietly as ever he began to speak. But this time tears filled his eyes. "Cleo, have you ever wondered what God was like? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see him, to touch him, to know him? Have you ever wondered if he knew you? If he loved you? If he ever cared?"

I had had enough. I bolted to my feet, shoved my finger in his face, and said, "I don't know who you are, and I don't care. I hope I never see you again. But let me tell you something, you religious nutcake. One day when I was a little boy I prayed to your God. I gave Him a chance. I asked Him to make Himself known, to show Himself, to show me that He was real, to say something to me—anything. ‘Just let me know you're there!' And do you know what happened? Do you know what your God did? Nothing. Nothing! Don't you go talking to me about a God who cares. He doesn't! He couldn't care less. If God were real, He'd make Himself known. He'd come here and tell us. He'd come here and show us. He'd show us that He cared!"

I grabbed my tray and glared at him. His head was bowed in his hands. Then he pulled his hands away from his face and looked at me in pain, huge tears in his eyes. And for the last time, I heard that gentle, quiet voice: "He has, Cleo. He has . . .. "