'Let others know what you have seen'

"Jesus said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' " - John 20:17 (NIV)

It had been a time of sorrow for the followers of Jesus.


Their leader, the man they believed to be the Messiah, was dead, crucified at the hands of the Romans and the Jewish religious leaders of the day. Howver, when two women came to dress Jesus' body for final burial, they discovered the tomb was empty.


Obviously, the women who first made this discovery and later Peter and the other disciple who came to investigate had reason to be concerned. They knew that people would say that Jesus' followers had come and taken the body so they could say He had been resurrected (indeed, the Jewish religious leaders worried about this happening that they convinced Pontius Pilate to post a guard outside of the tomb).

But Jesus slowly made Himself known to His followers, particularly to Mary Magdalene, who had been one of His earliest students. She had remained at the empty tomb crying, and was desperately hoping that whoever had taken Jesus' body would return it so the persecutions from the religious leaders and the Roman authorities would ease up.

He tested her by asking why she was crying, to make sure that indeed it was Him that she was looking for, that she hadn't turned away like others had when He was arrested and later crucified. When He revealed Himself to her by merely saying her name, she knew right away that her hopes that He had been right all along about His pending resurrection was true, that her and others' following of Jesus, who they believed the long-awaited Messiah, had not been in vain.

However, Jesus also told her to not just sit there, but to go and tell the others what she now knew to be true. He said to not just hold on to Him, but to let the others what she knew to be true.

That is the call to the church today as well. Too often, religion is to be a private matter so not to offend others.

If we know something to be true, something that is so unbelievable, that our merely having faith and putting our trust in it has eternal implications, then we are obligated to say something about it. We are to tell others that not only isn't Jesus not dead and buried, but also alive and eventually, coming back.