How we miss the presence of Christ in our grief — and how He meets us there anyway
Listen to the unabridged sermon here: Believing is Seeing
Happy Easter.
Yes, I know it’s October. But here we are, in John chapter 20, on Easter morning — which is as good a reminder as any that you don’t need the church calendar to tell you to celebrate the risen Christ. Really, we should probably reorient ourselves to think of every Sunday as Easter Sunday. As Resurrection Sunday.
John 20 is, in many ways, the pinnacle of John’s Gospel. It’s where he declares to us what happened that first Easter morning.
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.
Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).
Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her. (John 20:1–18)
In the dark
Notice the detail John gives us right at the start: while it was still dark.
In John’s Gospel — really, in all of John’s writings — light and darkness matter. Darkness is the time of chaos and heartbreak and sadness and fear. And that is when Mary Magdalene shows up to the tomb.
Jesus had died. Everybody knew he was dead. There was no question about this. This would-be Messiah was in a hole, in a cave, behind a stone, and he was dead.
Can you imagine what that must have felt like for them? This man whom they had declared to be the Lord, the Son of God, the Messiah — they had a very clear picture of who Jesus was, and now he had died.
So Mary shows up in the dark, before the sun rises, expecting a stone. Probably expecting to simply mourn.
But the stone was moved. And she looks in, and there’s no body. And she takes off running.
John and Peter run to the tomb — and can we just pause there? John, “the disciple Jesus loved,” makes sure we know he outran Peter. Not once. Three times. He reached the tomb first. He was faster.
Just tell me that’s not the most guy thing ever. I find it hilarious that John made sure nobody would wonder: he won the race. Guys have been guys from history to this very day.
They look in. They go away bewildered. And Mary is left standing outside the tomb, weeping.
The angels who didn’t get to say their line
We can read past this part so quickly, and miss how deep Mary’s grief really is. And we catch it in a very small detail — a detail that isn’t even there. And that’s what makes it so important.
When an angel shows up in Scripture, what are the first words, just about every time?
Do not be afraid.
What do these angels say?
“Woman, why are you crying?”
They’re on their back foot. You have to think these angels were sitting there ready to deliver their line — Do not be afraid, we know we’re awesome — and Mary isn’t wowed by them at all. She is in such grief, such heartbreak, such a state of unmet expectation, that the presence of not one angel, but two angels, does not awe her.
Mary is crushed. She is gut-wrenched. She is so broken that two of the most awesome beings in the universe, sitting right in front of her, leave her not dumbstruck, not awestruck — just weeping.
And their hearts break for her. They have to meet her in her grief.
“Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
She hears the voice behind her — the gardener, she thinks — asking her the same question. And again she is so overwhelmed that she doesn’t even recognize who is standing in front of her.
“They took him. Don’t you get it? They took our Lord away. Tell me where he is. I’ll go get him. You don’t have to do it. I’ll get him.”
She cannot see what is right in front of her.
Until she hears her name.
“Mary.”
And all of a sudden, it all becomes clear. There is Jesus. There is her teacher. There is her Lord. He is not dead. Not only is he not dead — he’s alive. He’s standing right here, in her presence.
It goes from grief to unmitigated joy in a single word.
But don’t miss this: in her grief, in the midst of her unmet expectations, she could not see him. She could not see him.
Three ways of seeing
There’s something happening under the surface here that we get in the Greek and miss in the English, because John gives us a whole trajectory of sight.
When Mary first sees the stone removed, John uses the word blepei — a surface-level seeing. Just noticing. I see that it’s sunny outside. I see my shoes are dirty. She sees the empty tomb, and she runs to tell the disciples.
John gets to the tomb first and he, too, blepei. He bends over, looks in, notices the strips of linen. It’s real. It’s there. But it’s still surface-level.
Then Peter runs straight in — Peter being Peter — and John uses a different word: theorei. This is a deeper, more thoughtful seeing. Almost scientific. Peter is right down by the stone slab, looking at the clothes, really taking it in, evaluating it. Cognitive. Careful.
And then John himself goes inside, and we get a third word: eiden. He saw and believed. Eiden carries the idea of perception — seeing and knowing. It’s that moment of, Oh. Oh, there’s something happening here. He has risen.
From noticing, to evaluating, to perceiving.
But notice how that section ends: “They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” They were perceiving that something was going on, and they still didn’t really get it. It was a process. Belief gave them sight, one step at a time.
The question for us
Which brings us to the question we have to ask ourselves:
How do we miss the presence of Christ in the midst of our own griefs and unmet expectations?
Because this world is hard. Our lives are not always easy. We think, I’m doing all the right things. I’m following Jesus. I go to church. I read my Bible. I pray. And yet pain happens. People get sick. People die. We walk through difficulty, and all of a sudden we are faced with unmet expectations about what God will or won’t do.
Mixed with grief, it becomes very, very easy to miss the presence of Christ.
We are so much like Mary. In the midst of our grief and our unmet expectations, Jesus can be standing right in front of us — and we will not see him. We can notice (blepei). We can evaluate (theorei). We might even begin to perceive (eiden). And still not fully get it.
So the second question follows the first: Will we hear our name when he speaks it?
When Jesus said “Mary,” she knew. Because as Jesus says earlier in John’s Gospel, “My sheep know my voice. When I speak to them, they will know my voice, and they will follow me.”
In the midst of our grief and our unmet expectations, we need to be listening for his voice. Will we hear it? Will we pay attention? Will we be listening for our names?
Behind locked doors
The story continues that same evening — Easter night. It’s getting dark again, and the disciples are together with the doors locked, for fear of the Jewish leaders. And Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”
He showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Peace be with you. Have shalom. Have fullness of life. Be at peace.
Do you see it? He shows up in the midst of their fear and their unmet expectations, shows them who he is, breathes the Spirit on them, and sends them out — just as the Father sent him.
“I will not believe”
But Thomas wasn’t there.
The other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” And you can just picture them running up to him: Bro, you’re not going to believe it. We were behind locked doors, in the room at night, and he just showed up. He showed us his hands and his side. He breathed on us. We got the Spirit. He sent us. It was awesome.
And Thomas, still in that place of grief and unmet expectation, says, basically: You’re right. I’m not.
“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
A week later, the disciples are in the house again, Thomas with them. Though the doors are locked, Jesus comes and stands among them and says, “Peace be with you.”
And then he turns to Thomas. He does not say, “You faithless fool.”
He says, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
We do what Thomas did, don’t we? In the midst of our pain and grief, we make declarations.
Because that’s really what Thomas was doing. It’s not so much doubt as it is a declaration: God absolutely cannot be real. If God were real, why would this happen? If Jesus were what everybody says he is, why would that be happening? Or maybe our version is softer: Well, the Jesus I believe in would never…
Pick your thing — the thing you slot in there. We make these declarations all the time, and almost all of them come out of the same place: grief, or unmet expectation.
And Jesus meets Thomas — and meets us — not with heavy-handed tactics. Not with “you fool, don’t go to hell.”
He meets us with a gracious, loving, merciful invitation: Come to me. What do you need? You need to touch my hands? Touch my hands. You need to put your hand in my side? Put your hand in my side. Come. Turn your doubting into belief.
And here’s the beautiful thing: Thomas doesn’t actually need to touch anything. The invitation itself is enough. Through that gracious invitation, he makes the greatest confession in the Gospel:
“My Lord and my God.”
We do not come to faith and trust in Christ because somebody shames us into it. We come because he looks at us with love and grace and mercy and says, I will meet you wherever you are. He meets us in the midst of our grief and our unmet expectations, and he reframes our declarations.
The final beatitude
Then Jesus gives us what John has saved for the very end.
John doesn’t give us Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. He doesn’t give us the Beatitudes — all the “blessed are the…” statements — until right here, at the end, as his own addendum:
“Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Blessed are you who believe without seeing.
Look around. We are the ones blessed to believe without seeing. We have never seen the risen Christ with our own eyes. We’ve never seen an empty tomb. We’ve never watched him die on a cross or physically perform a miracle in front of us. We’ve seen none of it the way John describes it.
And yet here we are. We believe. And therefore we are blessed, because we have life in the risen Christ.
John tells us why he wrote it all down: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)
When we believe, we begin to see the work of Christ all over the place.
I know this because when I said “we haven’t seen signs and wonders,” I saw the look on some of your faces. You were thinking, Um, I’ve seen Jesus do things. I’ve seen the Spirit of God do things. I’ve seen signs and wonders in my life.
And that is because you believe.
Things other people call coincidence, we can name as the hand of God. A number of years ago, in our missional community in Ypsilanti, one of the folks there asked us to pray for her niece, who needed a job. She’d applied for a particular position that really fit who she was — her skills, her training, her passions. One of those jobs where everything lines up. So we prayed for her that night, together.
The following week, that same woman was standing around my kitchen after communion, in our time of sharing stories and prayer requests, and she was glowing. “You are not going to believe this,” she said. “My niece got the job!”
And we all celebrated.
“That’s not the part you’re not going to believe,” she said. “As she and I were talking, it turns out she got the email that she got the job at basically the exact time we were praying for her to get the job.”
Some people would say that’s just a coincidence.
We believe, and so we can see the hand of God at work. That was not a coincidence. That was the sovereign and good God doing his thing.
Believing is seeing
And so, as we walk through a world that brings us much grief, that gives us so many opportunities for unmet expectations, the way forward is this:
Seek to embrace belief. Trust that we have a Savior who is standing there, looking at us, saying, Come to me. I will meet you in your grief. I will meet you in your unmet expectations. Come to me, my child. Come to me, my brother. Come to me, my sister. Come to me.
We believe, and then we are able to see.
Resurrection faith gives us sight.
Believing is indeed seeing.
Heavenly Father, we know we live in the midst of a world that brings great grief, a world that causes so many unmet expectations. We desperately want to be a people who hear our Shepherd’s voice in the midst of it all — who believe that you are indeed our Lord and our God, who can see Christ in the places where we are grieving. Make us a people who believe, so that we can see. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.