Some Doubted?
There’s a curious passage at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus has risen from the dead and has appeared to several of the women who had been on the way to the tomb on the first day of the week. After He encountered them, He told the women to instruct the apostles to head for Galilee, where they will see Him. The disciples do as they were instructed and head for Galilee. And now, here they are: beholding Jesus, gloriously risen from the dead! With their own eyes they see the wounds in His hands and His feet. With their own ears they hear His voice. He is incontrovertibly alive! And yet the text says, “And when they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some doubted” (Mt 28:17).
Huh? The eleven disciples, who knew Jesus in a way we can only imagine, even after the resurrection, doubted. What an encouraging text. And what an illuminating text.
How did they go from worshiping but doubting disciples to fearless and courageous heralds of the gospel? What changed it all? Rather, Who changed it all?
Last Sunday, we heard Jesus tell these same doubting, unsure disciples that they were going to be “clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). When that happened everything changed. The Spirit descended upon them on the Day of Pentecost and they went from men sitting in the upper room to men catapulted out into the streets of Jerusalem, no longer able to stay silent about the wondrous deeds God had done for the whole world in Jesus, namely, His defeat of the powers of Sin, Death and Hell (cf. Acts 2:2).
As it was with the disciples so it is with us. Absent the action of the Holy Spirit, we don’t understand that all He did happened for me. Absent the Holy Spirit, we are left to our own strength, which isn’t much. Absent the Holy Spirit, Christianity remains a nice little story, but one hardly worth sharing with others. But once we too are clothed with power from on high, we are moved to surrender to this God who has acted on our behalf, and we cannot stay silent about the hope that is ours in Jesus (cf. Acts 4:20).
As we prepare to celebrate Pentecost this coming Sunday, let us ask the Lord to send the Spirit anew in power upon us, both upon us individually and upon the Church as a whole. Let us pray that the Spirit will fall afresh upon us and move us to surrender anew to God. Let us pray that He will make us fearless, courageous, joyful and attractive heralds of the gospel in our day, a day that is desperate for hope, desperate for healing, desperate for peace, desperate for unity, desperate for reconciliation, and so much more. All these things God desires for us, even more than we do. And they can happen, but not as the result of our own planning and action. Only by His power at work within us.
We have been reading all throughout these Easter days from the Acts of the Apostles. Soon we are going to stop reading this great book and return to “ordinary time.” As we do so, however, let us remember that the same Holy Spirit who wrote the early pages of the Church through the lives of Peter, Paul, Lydia, Aquila, Priscilla, and so many others, wants to continue to write the next chapter of the Church through our lives, broken and in need as we are. Come, Holy Spirit! Clothe us with power from on high! Re-create us! Fill us with the love of God! Catapult us out into this world so hungry for God, even though so many don’t know it.
