Deleted Scenes: They still did not understand (John 20:1-10)

Isn’t it true that oftentimes in life, we don’t know the significance of something until much later? For example, when I met Carolyn for the first time, I was a very young youth pastor in my first year of ministry at a church in Richmond. My church and her church youth groups were part of a multi-church youth retreat on Mount Seymour, at a very rustic lodge called Camp Luther. I remember her sister introducing me to her in the kitchen. I also met a bunch of other people at that youth retreat. I had no idea at that moment that this particular woman I had just met would become my wife years later, the mother of my two children, and my faithful companion in life. In the end, it’s by far the most significant meeting in my entire life, and I had no clue!

In the passage from John 20 we looked at on Sunday, John and Peter look in on an empty tomb with the linens that once wrapped Jesus now neatly folded and laid aside. Unlike my meeting Carolyn at Camp Luther, I have no doubt that Peter and John knew at that moment that this was highly significant. It wasn’t innocuous, like meeting a random person. It was charged with meaning. As I said on Sunday, they received the first glimmer that maybe death didn’t have the final word. But what John adds in verse 9 is significant: “they still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” And then the next verse has them simply returning to where they were staying. It seems like they haven’t really understood the implications of the empty tomb, right?

This has a number of implications, I think. For example, it reminds us to be patient with people who, in our eyes, just don’t get it. This is especially the case when we’re talking about people who are new to faith or simply young and immature. When I reflect on my early years of ministry, I made a lot of mistakes. I had a lot of growing to do. If people had written me off on the spot, I wouldn’t be here today. But thankfully enough people recognized that discipleship is a journey (involving growth) that I was given room for that growth. It also means that we should guard against any mindset that says we’ve arrived and don’t need to grow anymore. I have discovered that for as long as I’ve been following Jesus and studying the Bible, there is always more for me to learn. There are always implications I hadn’t considered before. This should keep us from growing complacent about our own discipleship.

But most of all, I think understanding what I’ve written above should result in greater humility and dependence on the Lord. We should always be asking Jesus to teach us, to speak to us, to help us understand better. We should be asking him, Lord, is there something about this situation that I don’t understand? What are my blind spots? What am I missing? We are foolish, finite humans- there’s a lot that we’re often missing.