Robert Barron - Evidence of the Resurrection
Peace be with you, and a very happy, very blessed Easter to everybody. So, we come to the climax of the Church's year, we come to the feast of feasts, we come to the very reason for being of Christianity. St.Paul said, "If the Lord has not been raised, our faith is in vain". And so everything in Christian life centers around the Resurrection. And the Church gives us, every year, marvelously, the passage from the Gospel of John, the account of Easter morning. And there's so much here, everybody. I want to bring out just one feature that John especially draws attention to.
So, we hear about Mary Magdalene, who had this great friendship with the Lord Jesus. She comes early in the morning; it's still dark, that's Johannine symbolism for sin, and for death, and for not understanding, all of that. She notices the great stone has been rolled back, and so, right away, she suspects that there's been a grave robbery. Who would go to the effort of rolling the stone back? Why else would you do it? So, right away she runs to Simon Peter and the other disciples and says, "They've taken the Lord from the tomb. We don't know where they put him".
So, it's the dark. She's still operating within a conventional framework, if you want, trying to understand what she's seen in light of what she's already known. Then this scene. The two disciples, having heard this, they're alarmed, I'm sure, they're also intrigued, they're full of wonder. So, Peter and John make a kind of mad dash toward the tomb, and we're told the younger John outpaces the older Peter and arrives at the tomb first and looks in. I just came across this recently, Graham Greene, the great twentieth-century Catholic novelist who was a convert to the faith, he said one reason he converted was this scene, and he read it with a novelist's eye.
Why would they have included that little odd detail of John getting to the tomb first, unless it really happened? Unless this was something vividly remembered. You know how when you're recounting the story of something that really meant a lot to you, and you remember every little quirky detail of it? So, that struck Graham Greene as a sign that we're dealing not with mythology and legend but something that was vividly remembered. Well, John looks into the tomb. Eventually, Peter gets there, he goes into the tomb. What do they notice? And this is something that St. John puts a great stress on. They notice the burial cloths. It's mentioned a couple times. And then they even mention the cloth that was around his head was rolled up neatly and placed in a different spot.
And you say, "Yeah, okay, they're remembering this event. The body of Jesus is gone. Why would they be so focused on the burial cloths"? Well, here's an immediate response; how weird that would've seemed. If the body of Jesus had been stolen, thieves, you imagine, would want to get, kind of, in and out pretty quickly. And why would they have bothered unraveling this corpse? And then why would they have walked out with an unclothed body? It just seems so odd. Wouldn't they have just picked up the wrapped body and spirited it away? And then, press it further, why in the world would thieves have bothered rolling up, neatly, the headband, and putting it in a separate spot?
There was something obviously very peculiar about these cloths that got their attention. Here's something else. I wonder whether they saw something on those cloths. I wonder whether there were markings on those cloths. And I wonder, furthermore, whether we can see them to the present day? So that the very burial cloths that signal to these first disciples the fact of the Resurrection might play the same role for us today. Now, undoubtedly, you know I'm talking about the most famous relic in Christendom, the Shroud of Turin, now kept in a vault in the Turin Cathedral in Italy. I saw the Shroud of Turin back in 2010. I was over in Rome as a visiting scholar, and it was on display, unusually, for a few weeks. Thousands and thousands came.
I remember going up there, and you were allowed into the cathedral, and able to get within maybe twenty feet of the shroud, and you could stay in that little section for five minutes to look at it closely, then you had to move out. But it's one of the most moving moments of my life, to be that close to this fourteen-foot-long cloth, marked, as you know, with the frontal and dorsal images of a crucified man around thirty years of age. You can see, even with the naked eye, you can see the gashes in his wrists and his feet. You can see the wound in the side. You can see blood marks and other indicators of a cap of thorns. This is the relic that is venerated as the cloth that these disciples saw, the cloth that covered the body of Christ in the tomb.
Now, if you've done any research into the shroud, you know the most extraordinary moment happened about 1898, when it was photographed for the first time. So, it'd been around for centuries and people had seen it, seen these kind of vague, rust-colored markings. But 1898, it's photographed for the first time. And the photographer, to his infinite surprise, as he's developing the photographs, notices that the negative of the photograph he took is an exquisitely detailed image of the man of the shroud. Exquisitely detailed image of his face and of his wounded body. He realized that what we see on the shroud is not a positive image, it's a negative image, so that a negative of the negative produces this extraordinary positive.
But once the scholars got that, and once the scientists got to it about the 1970s, they discovered so many details. I mentioned the wounds, and it's interesting how the wound's in the wrist, not the palm of the hand. Any Christian iconographer would've put the wounds in the palm of the hand. But more realistically in the wrist, where the nail would be supported by the bones there. But the wounds in the wrists and the feet and the side. I mentioned the cap of thorns. But with the more detailed analysis, they could see all the wounds from the scourging correspond precisely to the evidence we have of the scourges that Roman soldiers would've used at that time. More to it, they discover pollens and other biological evidence that show the shroud was in the Judean, indeed Jerusalem, area.
They even find, as they look very carefully, a remnant of a coin of Pontius Pilate on the eyes, they would've placed on the eyes of the dead Christ. For these and many, many other reasons, people came to see this is the same cloth that those disciples saw on Easter Sunday morning, that led them, as we hear, to see and to believe. The same cloth we can see and bring us to belief. Now you say, "Okay, let's say it is an image of this man, who was crucified long ago. Why would you think it's evidence of the Resurrection"? It's the marks themselves.
What confounded the scientists, still does, what are these marks? Where'd they come from? It's very clear now, from hours and hours of scientific analysis, the marks that you can see on the shroud, they're not from pigmentation, they're not from any kind of coloration. They exist only on the absolute surface of the fibers of the shroud. Any kind of pigmentation would've gone deeper in. What produced them? Best guess, because no one's been able to reproduce it, by the way, people have tried, using all the scientific means we have today, to produce that remarkably negative image off of a body, and they can't do it.
The best guess from the scientists who've examined the shroud? Something like an intense burst of radioactivity, an intense burst of radioactive energy. Coming, by the way, from all dimensions of the body, because the shroud is inscribed with a kind of three-dimensionality. Coming from the entirety of the body all at once, in a split second, this intense burst of radiation, produced these marks. Christians nod their heads and say, "Uh-huh". The moment of the Resurrection. The moment when the body of Christ is brought back through the power of the Holy Spirit to life. And leaving behind, wonderfully, on the burial garment of Jesus, leaving behind marks that indicate the fact of the Resurrection. They saw and they believed.
Isn't it kind of amazing, everybody? It's kind of a miracle, given the long history of the shroud, as it made its way from Jerusalem and through a number of different parts of Europe that we can identify (Asia too) how it finally made its way to Turin, finally coming to our present age, where we too can look at it with our own eyes? See and believe. I've said this before to you, but when I was coming of age, there was a tendency to reduce the Resurrection to a symbol. It was one more iteration of the myth of the dying and rising God. It was a literary device to express the fact that Jesus' cause goes on. It's a way of speaking of the disciples' ongoing faith and what he taught, etc.
Even when I was taking all that in as a young guy, I thought, "If that's all it is, who cares"? If that's all it is, well then, I can point to any inspiring figure from the ancient world and say, "His thought goes on, and his inspiration continues. So boy, oh boy, he's raised from the dead too". But see, that's not what they're claiming. That is not what they're claiming. Think again of Graham Greene. They're remembering, vividly, that morning. That morning when Peter and John race to the tomb. That's not a vague myth we're talking about, that's not legend and symbol and all that.
That's a vividly remembered moment. And they look into that tomb and they're expecting to see the body of Jesus, but the body is not there. But there are these peculiar… and then you wonder, as they looked more carefully at them, these strange and wonderful burial cloths that open the door, anyway, to their belief in the Resurrection. I wonder, today, you know we live in a skeptical time. I get it. Especially in regard to the claims of Christianity, which are historical claims, so they're hard to verify independently. You have to go back to these texts.
I understand people are skeptical. Maybe look up the Shroud of Turin. Go on the web or find some images of it and read a bit about it, because I think the same burial cloths that opened the door to faith long ago could perhaps do the same thing today, and lead us then into the truth of the risen Christ. We heard last week the centurion, "Truly, this man is a Son of God". What ratified Jesus' claims about himself? His Resurrection, his bodily Resurrection from the dead. When they saw that, they knew he was who he said he was. May those same burial cloths lead us today to that same faith. God bless you all, and happy Easter.