A Catholic reversion story, in 16 parts. <br/><br/><a href="https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">whydidpetersink.substack.com</a>
Why Did Peter Sink?
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A Catholic reversion story, in 16 parts. <br/><br/><a href="https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">whydidpetersink.substack.com</a>
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November 12, 2021
16. The Most Difficult, Most Necessary Step
<p>In my slow conversion, the deadbolt that barred me from faith was always true belief in the resurrection, since the entirety of Christianity depends on it, as St. Paul himself <a target="_blank" href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/1corinthians/15?12&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary">wrote</a>. Without it, the whole story falls apart, and none of the other miracles matter. The resurrection of a sinless human opens the door to the forgiveness of sins and new life for us all. If there is no resurrection, then Jesus is simply an insane charlatan that deserves no respect or worship. This situation of the resurrection puts everyone into a decision point about whether to believe or not, and this is exactly why Christianity is so challenging. The leap of faith all comes down to the resurrection.</p><p>To me the proper response if you do not believe in the resurrection is rejection of all of the Christian faith. Literally, none of it is worth the paper it is written on if he is lying, even the teachings and parables, because to claim divinity without it being true really would be a mental disorder. There is no other response but rejection if the resurrection did not happen, as the teachings of Jesus become moot if the miracle is false. There are lots of teachers in history we can use that didn’t claim something so outlandish. Especially today with all the meditation and self-help books, we can find maxims and aphorisms to live by that do not require belief in miracles.</p><p>On the other hand, if the resurrection happened, then you have no choice but to fully embrace Jesus as the savior. This is why belief is hard, because if the resurrection is true, everything is true. All of it, and yes, that includes the hard parts. The resurrection truly is an either/or selection that we have to make, and if the default is choosing doubt and ignoring the claim, the much more difficult choice is to examine and review whether or not to believe in the resurrection.</p><p>This dilemma presents a fork in the road on how to live your life, one that must be chosen. This is not like being asked to believe if Athena really sprung from Zeus’s head or to believe in the tree worship of ancient tribes in The Golden Bough, this decision puts the miraculous directly in front of us. And we must choose, as even choosing not to make a choice is itself a choice. Making no choice at all is choosing to deny the miracle. That is the default position, but still it is a choice. I love mythology and trees. Really, who doesn’t? Yes, I love Lord of the Rings and giant oak trees and Ovid’s Metamorphosis and cottonwoods. In fact, I like science too and stand in awe of the everyday miracles of surgery and treatments that save lives. But this dilemma about Jesus and the resurrection cannot be avoided because the reality is that our heart knows there is something more than this world, beyond the confines of science and what is known and knowable, that God is so far beyond our ability and understanding that something supernatural, that is beyond nature, can exist and touch our world. The author of the universe cannot be understood, but you can see the wonder in the world everywhere in art and nature. We are characters in the author’s book who cannot know what is outside of our story here, but we can feel the presence of something higher than just tall tales or the periodic table of elements.</p><p>He declared multiple times that he is the way to eternal life. That is a hard pill to swallow for modern rationalists who seek data and a cause for all things. “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live,” and “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” I guess this is why Jesus says we have to enter through the narrow gate, because it is hard to find and perhaps harder to decide to walk through that gate. I think it is mainly hard to squeeze my mind and ego through it.</p><p>I’ve gone on in a prior <a target="_blank" href="https://whydidpetersink.substack.com/p/the-empty-tomb?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary">post</a> about how the scenario at the tomb on Easter Sunday sowed doubt in me. The story sounded too fantastic to be true, and lacking answers I let my doubt win rather than pursue the subject, since I didn’t get the impression that asking questions was encouraged. I’ve come to realize that Catholicism can handle any question thrown at it, especially ones surrounding the divinity of Jesus. Today I only wish I had sought a deeper understanding of faith sooner in life. I have come to realize that there is no stone left unturned in the writings of the church and the Catechism, as they have spent 2,000 years turning over stones.</p><p>Specifically, for the resurrection, there are many points that tipped the scales from doubt to faith, but not without probably cause and good reason. As Frank Morison noted in his book Who Moved the Stone? about his own conversion to the truth of the resurrection:</p><p>I have wrestled with that problem and found it tougher than ever I could have conceived possible. It is easy to say that you will believe nothing that will not fit into the mold of a rationalist conception of the universe. But suppose the facts won't fit into that mold? The utmost that an honest man can do is to undertake to examine the facts patiently and impartially, and to see where they lead him.</p><p>The main reasons are below, but each could be a lengthy post of its own.</p><p>-The fearful and defeated Apostles turns into fearless and unbreakable believers. <strong>No one dies for a lie. Not this way. </strong>People may be willing to die for a lie that gives them social standing or power or fame or honor, but the followers of Jesus got none of that. They received the opposite, becoming outcasts and rejects of society.</p><p>-If the Romans or people of Jerusalem could have produced the body of Jesus, they would have done so. <strong>No one ever did.</strong></p><p>-No one disputes that the tomb was empty. This is a massive fact, even for those that accuse the Apostles of stealing the body. Clearly <strong>the tomb was empty</strong>. This is a problem for the Romans, Jews, and Apostles. Even Mary Magdalene first announces that the body has been taken. Had his body been moved to a different tomb or location, rumor and hearsay in the city would have created cause for a search, and even today pilgrimages to the “correct” tomb in Jerusalem would be occurring. This didn’t happen. The powers at the time try to convince people that the Apostles moved the body, but these men were all cowering in fear, scattered across the city or returned home. Someone in the city of Jerusalem would have known where this second burial location was at, but no one appears to even be searching for a kidnapped body.</p><p>-If the Apostles had moved the body or knew of someone moving the body, <strong>one of them would have cracked</strong> under the numerous beatings and torture and martyrdom that came to them over the next thirty years. They never waver in their story, not once. None of them. Human beings cannot keep a secret, so if they had a secret of such magnitude, it would have come out.</p><p><strong>-If it was all made up, the writers of the Gospels and Acts and James would not have mentioned a 7 week gap between the death of Jesus and the beginning of the preaching the Good News</strong>. This gap only causes doubt or gives detractors an entry point to suggest that the Apostles spent these 7 weeks crafting a story. This is one of the elements of the timeline that actually creates doubt. If the early believers wanted to sell a contrived fable, they would have claimed their preaching began the moment Jesus had risen. <strong>But they don’t write that</strong> - they all agree that they were confused and fearful until 7 weeks after the death and Resurrection.</p><p>-Once they do begin to tell the story of the Resurrection, after Pentecost, the Apostles manage to <strong>win over people in the same city where the trial, death, and burial happened.</strong> They convince people who were there in the city when it happened. The Apostles didn’t sneak off elsewhere, far away, and start telling people who might be duped, they stood in the city where it happened, where everyone knew it had happened and had even witnessed Jesus’ ministry. The original band of evangelists were uneducated people with no social standing who suddenly begin to convince people that the Resurrection occurred.</p><p>-Over <strong>500 people saw the risen Jesus.</strong> It’s not just a handful of people. The “hallucination” theory might work for one or two, but not 11, and certainly not 500.</p><p>-<strong>Women are recorded as the first witnesses</strong> at the tomb and this is important, as culturally they were not even allowed to be witnesses in court. This would not help make the case, so it’s clear that the women were the first to witness, or the Gospel writers would have left it out. They would not have wanted to mention this since it worked against their case, but they did mention it, so why would they make it up?</p><p>-Over and over in the Gospels and Acts details are included that allow for doubt, or questions about the miracles. <strong>The authors are clearly not crafting a tale because elements of the stories do not make sense unless they were true.</strong> If they were trying to build up the apostles, why tell about Peter’s denial of Jesus? Why admit Jesus wanted to escape his fate in the Garden by “passing this cup”? Why have Jesus utter the words, “My God, My God, why you have forsaken me,” on the cross? Why not make the stone at the tomb crumble like magic? Why admit that the Apostles fell asleep in the Garden? Why characterize the Apostles as bumbling rubes so frequently? These books read like no other literature ever written and the writers were not literary types or trained storytellers. These aren’t troubadours, they are fishermen and tax collectors. The reason for all of these curiosities in the Gospels is that <strong>the truth needs no rehearsal.</strong></p><p>-Crucifixion was a brutal spectacle meant to shame. The fact that the savior of the world would be shamefully executed in this way – <strong>no one would make up a story like this.</strong> It was demoralizing and devastating to the Apostles, until the Resurrection and Pentecost turned them into lions. To have your savior of the world, your messiah, rushed through an urgent kangaroo court trial and brutally executed with two murderers does not fit with any other story ever told. And no, the <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jesus-is-not-copied-from-pagan-mythology-zeitgeist/id1354647807?i=1000530751739&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary">myth of Horus is not the same, not even close</a>. Great effort among doubters is made to disable the message, but most amazing is that however many angles the attack takes to steer people away from the Gospels, it never works. The truth of these four books cannot be squashed, despite the Herculean efforts of writers and governments. The story taps into what is written in our hearts and for those who come to believe, the idea that we are both sinners and saved is shocking. That we are corrupt and don’t deserve saving, coupled with Jesus’ coming to serve us and die for us as if we were the heroes of the story, could not be invented by these writers and agreed upon so readily unless they were writing the truth. There is no myth of god of any other religion where the hero dies for the unworthy and then immediately turns around and forgives his killers. If anything, all other myths have the god turn around and wreak vengeance upon his tormentors. For anyone that reads these books without a cynical eye, with a historical context and critical study guides like those of the <a target="_blank" href="https://scepterpublishers.org/products/the-navarre-bible-gospels-and-acts?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary">Navarre Bible</a> or <a target="_blank" href="https://www.wordonfire.org/bible/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary">Word on Fire Bible</a>, the reader will begin to feel the power of these words, as there is no myth or history or genre that can compare to this story.</p><p>-The Gospels agree that Jesus had said <strong>multiple times that he would rise on the third day.</strong> This clearly stood out in the Apostles memory as it is recorded in multiple places. This “third day” repetition is hammered into them by Jesus as a reminder.</p><p>-<strong>The “swoon theory” of Jesus not dying on the cross is beyond ridiculous</strong>, as the witnesses of the risen Christ do not see a staggering, bloody, nearly dead man in the Upper Room. They see a fully restored man, but with the wounds to prove it is Him. A “swooned” man who had been tortured and whipped and crucified and lanced wouldn’t be restored in a mere 2 days after the event. He wouldn’t be able to walk or move. Those type of injuries would have had a man on a gurney, not eating fish and walking to Emmaus. Moreover, the “swoon theory” didn’t come about until modern times when some creative academics got together and invented it.</p><p>-There is <strong>more written about Jesus than any other historical figure</strong> of his time. Clearly he existed, and clearly the Romans crucified him. Matt Nelson of Word on Fire recently wrote an <a target="_blank" href="https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/the-claim-of-christianity-did-jesus-really-exist/32456/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary">article</a> on this. </p><p>-Ancient people, I have come to realize, were probably less gullible than people are today (see the internet and Facebook for ample evidence). <strong>The idea that the “ancients” were morons is just modern prejudice</strong>, also known as chronological snobbery. The idea of someone rising bodily and passing through walls and ascending to heaven would have been every bit as incredulous to an ancient audience as us today with all of our gains in modern science.</p><p>-<strong>The message could not be stopped</strong>. In a short time, this idea spread like wildfire. Starting with Rome and ever since, empires have attempted to stop the message of the Resurrection and failed. There is something greater at work, something beyond this world, something stunning and world-changing. There have been plenty of false messiahs whose messages go nowhere. But this one cannot be stopped, and all of the witnesses agree and will die for it and did die for it.</p><p>This quote from <a target="_blank" href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/who-moved-the-stone-frank-morison/1111630242?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary">Frank Morison</a> sums up the challenge that is put before us:</p><p>If the sole evidence for this really extraordinary phenomenon lay in a single passage in the early chapters of Acts it would be possible to regard it as the rather exuberant record of a contemporary historian whose close connection with the movement had biased and colored his views. But this is precisely what no one can claim. There is a far earlier and more authoritative testimony in the letters of Paul, of Peter, and of James the Just, and in the admittedly historic network of Christian churches stretching from Jerusalem through Asia Minor to the catacombs at Rome. Only from an intensely heated center of burning zeal could this vast field of lava have been thrown out from a tiny country like Palestine to the limits of the Roman world…The phenomenon that here confronts us is one of the biggest dislodgments of events in the world's history, and it can be accounted for only by an initial impact of colossal drive and power.</p><p>Yet the original material from which we have to derive this dynamic force consists of a habitual doubter like Thomas, a rather weak fisherman like Peter, a gentle dreamer like John, a practical tax gatherer like Matthew, a few seafaring men like Andrew and Nathanael, the inevitable women, and at most two or three others.</p><p>I do not want to minimize the character of the historic nucleus from which Christianity sprang, but, seriously, does this rather heterogeneous body of simple folk, reeling under the shock of the Crucifixion, the utter degradation and death of their Leader, look like the driving force we require? Frankly it does not, and the more we think of it disintegrating under the crisis, the less can we imagine it rewelding into that molten focus that achieved those results. Yet the clear evidence of history is that it did. Something came into the lives of these very simple and ordinary people that transformed them…</p><p>…The sequence of coincidences is too strong. When we remember the swinging around of the disciples from panic fear to absolute certitude, the singular matter of the seven weeks' gap, the extraordinarily rapid adhesion of converts in Jerusalem, the strange absence of administrative vigor on the part of the authorities, the steady growing of the church, both in authority and power, until the whole situation blew up into the frenzied attempts at suppression under Saul, we realize The Historic Crux of the Problem that we are in the presence of something far more tangible than the psychological repercussion of a fisherman's dream.</p><p>If the flip happens in your brain, from disbelief to belief, where resurrection becomes a capitalized “R” - Resurrection - you are in trouble, because there is no turning back. You will be stuck with the result of being happy and having a purpose in your life like you have never experienced before. You will no longer be sinking, you will have a hand reach out for you when you look away and start to fall. The fear of being adrift will disappear when you say, “God, help me,” and Jesus will reach out and grab your hand before it goes under. He will save you first, and then with a gentle rebuke he will say to you, “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?”</p><p>Notes:</p><p>Listen to Trent Horn on comparisons <a target="_blank" href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jesus-is-not-copied-from-pagan-mythology-zeitgeist/id1354647807?i=1000530751739&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary">to other myths</a>.</p><p>Read Matt Nelson’s article on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/the-claim-of-christianity-did-jesus-really-exist/32456/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary">the existence</a> of Jesus and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/four-reasons-to-believe-jesus-was-really-crucified/18593/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary">4 reasons</a> to believe in the crucifixion.</p><p>Book: <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Who-Moved-Stone-Frank-Morison/dp/0310295610?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=25-the-most-difficult-most-necessary">Who Moved the Stone?</a></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">whydidpetersink.substack.com</a>
July 18, 2021
15. Love My Neighbor...?
<p>In my tunnel vision of life, for some strange reason, I choose to learn by my own mistakes. Rather than learn from what others have taught and told to me, I prefer to get tossed around and beaten up before coming to see the light. But in that path I have much company, as today there is the idea of finding your own “truth,” which is kind of funny, as if there are seven or eight billion versions of truth in the world. In essence, finding your own truth implies that there is no truth, and what that really means is that there is no God, there is no First Cause of the universe, and that we are just unhappy results of chemistry and physics. I do not accept that since at the bottom of that is nihilism and meaninglessness. I do, however, think it is extremely important to let people find that out, as I needed to do. Despite ample opportunity to follow the path back to the heart, I became stuck and lost in so many oxygen-starved capillaries of the world.</p><p>As for getting lost in the worldly things, I should be grateful for it, to be honest. My life suffered no major hardships to correct me back to awareness of my powerlessness. I was under the impression that I had control, which allowed me to pursue paths of learning and ideas that elevated the self. I know others who came to faith much earlier, some who came to see after a tragic event. Others apparently just have the gift to believe and stick to it from a young age, which is the key, as Jesus <a target="_blank" href="https://www.biblehub.com/matthew/18-3.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">says</a> “…unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” What’s funny is that people that take the long route (like me) end up coming back like a child, or more aptly…a prodigal.</p><p>Of course, as a returned prodigal, that means I have committed many, many sins for which I need forgiveness. In my two decade absence from church, I made a laundry list of mortal sins - or grave matters. I needed absolution of those to get myself righted, and fully oriented toward God. To me, my weaknesses and frailties of the past give me insight into the Golden Rule, the most important commandment. Because of my flaws, I understand others’ flaws. But it depends on the flaw. You see, I seem to have accepted my flaws as valid, while judging certain other flaws as greater or worse. Yes, I have a snobbery about specific flaws, it seems, which Jesus didn’t mention anything about. So as to that Golden Rule, the greatest commandment, I like to imagine that I’m capable of living true to it, but I’m not. This one <a target="_blank" href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/22?35&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">paragraph</a> rules over the rest of the Bible:</p><p>“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. <strong>The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.</strong>”</p><p>That last sentence puts a bow on the Bible. It’s like a gift card with a tagline message. “Dear reader, in case you don’t have time or energy to read a few thousand pages of ancient texts, here’s a quick summary for you: Love God. Love and forgive others. Your life is not about you.”</p><p>It seems so simple. How easy it really seems to love everyone. If I direct my positive thoughts, my heart, and my soul toward God, I will see the good in all and love everyone I encounter today and every day. I think, yes, I am capable of that love toward all. I can be like that weird guy at the retreat who plays spiritual rock music and raises his hands, eyes closed, and calls for witnesses. But I can do it my way, through caring and understanding and respect. I could love them like a normal person might love others without a creepy weirdness!</p><p>Sure, yeah. I can. I surely could. Then I step outside of the house and the world attacks and I attack it back. Heck, even inside the house I have attitude some mornings.</p><p>Why is it so hard? I do know that when I stay focused on God, when I spend time in the morning with the New Testament or with Christian texts, I am more oriented toward this notion of “love thy neighbor” than if I get out of bed and charge out the door. Without question, this focus helps me to love others more effectively. But I lose focus, like Peter on the water, and slip - only it takes me a while to call out “Lord, save me!” since I like to sneer and judge for a spell before I recover. Why did Peter sink? Oh right, he forgets about God.</p><p>To love one another sounds so easy, but in reality is perhaps the hardest task assigned to a Christian particularly because of this: it is actually easy to love someone when it is reciprocated, such as in a family, or in a Church full of like minded people (although there can be plenty of discord in those places too). What makes the Golden Rule really difficult is when the love is not returned, not reciprocated, but instead you are either hated or you have to shove aside your own feelings of dislike, disdain, or hate to remain humble. In fact, today in what is called the “post-Christian” era, it’s less likely that others will hate you for being Christian so much as they will just roll their eyes at you - because they have all heard plenty about Christianity. Rather than being persecuted, Christians seem the persecutor due to having such an incredible run of winning for two millennia. So what does this mean?</p><p>I believe that Christians, American in particular, are feeling a backlash for being too aligned with worldly power. The “love” that Christians have been pushing since faith made its unholy merger with politics around 1980 has effectively flattened and removed the effervescent bubbles from the message. Love thy neighbor became love thy Christian neighbor, and to hell with the rest. Besides, everyone loves an underdog and for some time Christians were not the underdog that they are supposed to be.</p><p>Without question the media and politicians have painted this picture, and have done so successfully, making Christians the enemy as of late. As the religious are removed from the public square and an atheist society takes shape, what comes afterward will be ugly. Those opposed to faith will focus on sins that the faithful have committed and ignore the massive amounts of charity and community work that followers of Jesus do in this world. This is not to say the abuses are excused. No way. There are horrific offenses that deserve full attention and justice. But there is far more good done in this world by those with faith in God than by the few faithful who have eroded trust in religion. Having worked at homeless shelters in two states, I can tell you that 99% of groups that volunteer are religious groups. Everyone ranting online from their computers about saving the poor - you don’t see them show up in person. They care enough to tweet, but not enough to enter the fray to mop the floor and do the dishes.</p><p>Most Christians that I know are like me: human. (Some are very strange and I’m not yet sure about their origins, but most appear to be human.) But the reality is that Christians suffer the same problems with loving others as non-Christians, but the point of the whole doggone faith is to try to do better. The reason people go to church, is to return to the right path. When non-believers point out that people going to church have a lot of flaws, I have to laugh because that is the purpose. “Those religious people are awful.” No kidding? That’s literally why they are praying and asking for forgiveness. They are a bunch of sinners, the only difference is that those going inside are admitting their limits and faults. There’s a response from G.K. Chesterton about why did he become a Catholic, at which we said, “To get rid of my sins.” Those flinging and slinging mud at people of faith for having stains on their life are so close, so infinitely close to understanding the “why” but sadly missing the point. They point out that Christians are not perfect, they are sinners. To which every Christian who knows about original sin just nods in agreement and goes to church.</p><p>Since I am not Jesus, that is why I have to try, try harder, and try again. Knowing that I will fail still means I need to make an effort, every single day, to love my neighbor. And that love needs to have no conditions attached to it. No strings attached. No waiting for reciprocity or validation - I have to love without being loved back. I must forgive all affronts and insults and perceived flaws, because I commit errors and sins when I lose vigilance. The minute I forget about God and stop praying constantly, I am pulled back into the morass of human nature. I am owed nothing, I owe all to God. I start to sink. I start to drown.</p><p>When I think of the modern Church with the struggles of keeping the faithful, where people are leaving due to modern Siren songs, and chasing shiny things on the internet, like New Age religions and alternate lifestyles, the Church must remember the greatest of all commandments which the whole depends on. Love your neighbor. This is the focus. Never can the eye be taken off the ball of the greatest commandments, or the game is over. And the order matters. First: Love God. Second: Love your neighbor. Without the first, the second one doesn’t stand a chance.</p><p>Want to know a recipe for disaster? First, take a fundamentalist version of Christianity and stir it real thick with politics, and let those folks be the primary voice of Christianity for several decades. Constantly preach anti-intellectualism in a rapidly changing culture where knowledge is expanding at an exponential rate. Fold in a distrust of science, making it an enemy of religion rather than a complementary pursuit of truth. Seize on a single grave sin, abortion, as the only focus of morality, ignoring the enormous list of unrelated mortal sins that mankind can commit. Divide the family by letting fathers off the hook, forcing no one into the discomfort of responsibility. Tenderize excessive drinking and drug use until fully meshed into daily life. Glaze the eyes of men and boys with endless pornography from an early age. Let marriage cool until the sanctity gels and turns into the equivalent of a high school relationship. Finally, for the topping, drape over a sex abuse scandal, sprinkled over a century, so abhorrent, so far beyond the pale that it makes Jerry Sandusky’s escapades at Penn State look like a parking violation. For a finishing touch, quibble over liturgical format while the building burns around you.</p><p>Is it any wonder the Church says people are leaving vs. joining at a rate of 6 to 1?</p><p>For myself to return, it took a series of events to even want to listen or learn from a Church that had seemed conjoined to politics. The abuse scandal shattered trust in the priesthood, which is a shame since so many millions get spiritual direction from them.</p><p>The sense of “us vs. them” was apparent to me as a child, as Catholics were obviously mocked in films and society, and I could see how the faithful circled the wagons in America, going into defensive mode against the secular world. All the while, flaws were festering on the inside just as much as outside. And do you know what? Aside from Jesus, the flaws were on the inside and the outside long ago in the same way. Way back in 30 A.D. the Church was as full of flawed people as it is now. We can read about what a bunch of knuckleheads the apostles were before the resurrection awakened them and the Holy Spirit invigorated and steeled them. You can read St. Augustine and see how flawed he was on practically every page of his Confessions. It is actually the flaws that make us real. You can’t hide from them. They are not going away and never will. It’s not “us vs. them” it’s “us vs. us” because we are them! And them need help as much as us.</p><p>Grammar is not my strong suit.</p><p>In the first century, to go against the grain and preach “love thy neighbor” would get you crucified or boiled or clubbed. Nowadays it just earns the rolling of eyes and a yawn, because the focus on the greatest commandment became something of a joke. The problem is not that anyone disagrees with “Love thy neighbor.” No, the problem is that everyone agrees with that. But everyone has forgotten the first commandment of Jesus, which is to “Love God.” Today’s Catholic and Protestant only has to suffer ennui and disdain instead of a beating, mostly because of our own faults at forgetting to remind the world what the first commandment is. Loving neighbor cannot be done without love of God. I need a daily reset, getting back to the root solution to realize that: “I am not a smart man, but I know what love is.” Again, I must come back to God like a child, or in this bad joke of an example, like Forrest Gump to Jenny.</p><p>As I digress away from the subject of this article, which is about the test of loving thy neighbor, I must write a bit more on the causes of why the Christian message, which at first spread like wildfire and took hold of the world for so long, has “petered” out in recent decades. We all know the story of Jesus and the resurrection. Everyone does. Everyone on earth has heard it in some form, but many give it about the same level of credence that they give to the Marvel cinematic universe. In fact, some people are more excited about the Marvel comics because it’s not brought to them via annoying religious proselytizing.</p><p>Many years ago, I recall sitting on a beach on spring break when someone came and asked me if I’d chosen Jesus as my personal savior. I said, “No,” and asked them to move on. Now, at this point in my life I was agnostic so this experience annoyed me and I simply wanted these people to leave me alone. I always felt anger at them and thought of the Grateful Dead lyric in the song “Truckin’” where Jerry Garcia sings: “They just can’t let you be.” I had spent many years turning away Mormons and family members and quite literally anyone who was selling religion or telling me about God.</p><p>Why?</p><p>Why did anyone coming at me in the usual format of “Jesus as personal savior” repel me so much?</p><p>Because I didn’t want to be sold.</p><p>In America, everyone is selling, all the time, to the point that you know even the doctor is selling you in the clinic. The saying, “If you go to see a surgeon, he will recommend surgery” is true. There is nowhere you can go in this country without being pitched. I would watch televangelists and my stomach would turn at the spectacle of salesmanship occurring which was clearly in the name of money and fame rather than God. The beach, TV, and door-to-door evangelists with their pamphlets had nothing new to share, and I wondered how their pitch worked on anyone. The questions I had were not in need of a true or false answer, but the pitchmen were trying to close the deal as if I were buying a car: “So do you want this baby in red or blue?”</p><p>This sales style of evangelization reminded me of salespeople at work, some who would throw their mothers into traffic if it meant hitting their quota. Salespeople in the software world must tailor their message to whatever product or feature produced the biggest bonus or commission. In corporate America, there is so much smoke and mirrors that it’s difficult not to see snake oil in all products on the market eventually, and unfortunately it was most apparent in the religious proselytizing. The trick to all sales is to appear like you are not selling something, but that you have something the buyer wants and needs. Funny that what the beach and TV evangelists were selling was in fact what I wanted and needed, but their pitch was not working.</p><p>So for saving my soul, this elevator-pitch approach actually confirmed my suspicions of that old Marxist “opiate of the masses” idea, as if believing in religion meant being a simpleton and sucker who only believed because heaven sounded like a better option than hell.</p><p>Who can argue with that? Heaven does sound better than hell. But I was lost on four things that the beach and TV evangelists were skipping over. I didn’t figure out what this approach was missing until I listened to Bishop Robert Barron, who <a target="_blank" href="https://www.wordonfireshow.com/episode14/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">spelled it out</a> in a podcast. I couldn’t articulate the problem, but he could. These four points were the problem of why I couldn’t get on board with the simple pitch:</p><p>* <strong>Existence of God</strong>: Do I even believe in God? This is the first block and if you can’t get past this one then you’ll never get to the Cross. But I would never have got past this block without falling on my face and having to find the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.whydidpetersink.com/p/4-release?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">Street Light God</a>. (Thank God for that Street Light God.) I realized in the end that finding the existence of God is not really an intellectual exercise, but an act of faith. And once you believe, only then do you understand. I do believe in God, because of the First Cause and Contingency arguments. Basically, something cannot come from nothing. I’ve moved on past this, but this is where most atheists and agnostics get stuck, and rightly so. Good luck with the Resurrection if you don’t believe in God! But if intellectual arguments are needed, then I choose to take up sides with Thomas Aquinas in his <a target="_blank" href="https://aquinasonline.com/the-five-ways/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">5 Ways</a>.</p><p>* <strong>The Bible</strong>: Fundamentalism and literalism had blocked me from considering it as anything but myth. I truly didn’t understand how Catholics read it until recently. I had to start over with a non-fundamentalist reading to even get started. Until I understood how to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/video/how-to-read-the-bible/186/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">read</a> the Bible properly as a Catholic, the wall was impassable. How Catholics read the Bible has made all the difference in the world to me.</p><p>* <strong>Anti-intellectualism</strong>: Catholicism appeared to be against deep thinking, against reason. But this is the picture painted by those who dislike the Church, that want us to believe that Catholicism is merely an act of ancient ritual and superstition. I was like Han Solo, <a target="_blank" href="https://quotegeek.com/quotes-from-movies/star-wars/1001/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">doubting</a> “hokey religion” as “simple tricks and nonsense.” In reality, the Church has a deep, intellectual history, but this had been somehow hidden from me and needed to be “re-discovered” by me. Starting with Augustine, I began to see how unexposed I was to the tradition of intellectual ideas. From those early church writings, through Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics, all the way to Popes Benedict and Bishop Barron, I began to realize the vastness of Catholic thought and teaching. All of the deep questions of philosophy, art, and literature have been considered and argued over the last two thousand years by people wiser than me. I had shut myself out of two millennia of wisdom and thought because of the prior two problems regarding God and the Bible. Reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.wordonfire.org/bible/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">Word on Fire Bible</a> blew my socks off as I found my assumptions to be wrong time and again. Plus, there is no shortage of intellectuals among the Dominicans, Jesuits, and Franciscans. The nerds at <a target="_blank" href="https://www.catholic.com/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">Catholic Answers</a> seem to be able to take on all comers on any topic, be it chemistry, physics, history, or theology. This is what shocked me: there is no stone unturned in the cosmology of the Church, and no question too hard for it to answer. I may not like all the answers, but there is an answer. When I think of a question, when I’m feeling clever and believe I’ve found a plot hole, I quickly learn that my question has already been mulled over long ago and answered in excruciating detail.</p><p>* <strong>Science</strong>: Finally, religion and science are not enemies but different avenues to truth. Catholicism is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/does-the-church-oppose-science?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">surprisingly</a> pro-science, far more than I suspected. The perception of a conflict between science and religion is invented, again by those who dislike religion. The idea that the Church is anti-science is not only wrong, but the complete opposite. The Catechism states that science glorifies God in helping us understand his creation. The Church’s only ask is that science should be done for good rather than evil. So figuring out atomic bombs and tweaking viruses for biological warfare are obviously bad, while curing disease and understanding the universe is good. In other words, the Church requests that science avoid advancing the opportunity for sin in the world. Not exactly controversial. Science reveals the world, but science cannot destroy or outshine God. The Catechism is quite clear on this in <a target="_blank" href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s1c3a1.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor#159">Faith and science</a><a target="_blank" href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s1c3a1.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor#159">:</a> "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are."</p><p>As far as bringing myself back to the faith, I can say that Bishop Barron made more sense to me than a thousand other voices and I am grateful for his podcast and books, as that was the entry point that I needed to come back to the Church. Quitting drinking brought me to God, and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.wordonfire.org/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">Word on Fire</a> brought me back to the Church.</p><p>Alongside Robert Barron, there is another man, Timothy Keller, a Presbyterian, who made equally significant points to me about why that beach evangelism failed to work. He said, paraphrasing from a <a target="_blank" href="https://podcast.gospelinlife.com/e/the-gospel-and-the-outsider/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">podcast</a>, that there’s a gulf of difference between “religious proselytizing” and “gracious good newsing.” Jesus calls us to do gracious good newsing. No one wants the other form. Want to evangelize people? Then do the good newsing. Humility and grace will win converts, because knowing and showing that you are a sinner and not better than anyone else will catch a lot more fish. Oh, and treat everyone the same. Keller says your soul craves something, and Jesus gives it the living water that it needs.</p><p>That’s the stuff - the simple stuff, without any lights or music or hand waving or virtual retreats. No psychedelics or TED talks needed. Gracious good newsing. Show me by example. I can believe that, and, heck, I can do that, because I am finally past those 4 bullet points above, which were the hurdles I couldn’t leap over for most of my adult life.</p><p>Once past those blocks, I could worship God and pray to God. And then I could work toward loving others and expect nothing in return because Jesus has already died for my sins, and my salvation is through him. Because I am full of sin and mistakes, I need to love others. That is my duty as a Christian for what Jesus has done for us. In fact, if I cannot love someone, if I am struggling, I try to think of why. To love thy neighbor is not easy, and that’s why we have to double our efforts when we struggle to do so. The moment we forget the greatest commandment, we have lost the purpose, and we will keep losing because disdain or hate has stolen our gaze. God is love, and each person is a child of God, a person that deserves Christian love. Not lukewarm Christian love, but real love, just as Jesus gathered the tax collectors and lepers and all manner of sinners to him. This doesn’t mean all sins should be allowed and celebrated, because that is literally what the modern world thinks we need. We need to love the drunkard, not the fact that he’s drunk and wants to be drunk. Somehow people managed to love me through my drinking years, but it was clear that my priorities were out of order. The modern Pharisees are the ones who get lost in the dogma and lose the love. To me, Catholic teachings have the comprehensive cosmology that works and makes sense, both intellectually and spiritually.</p><p>I suspect that any person who enters a church on any Sunday has about the same amount of sins on their conscience as any other person. Many of us have private sins that perhaps we only expose in silence or confession, or we fail to see altogether. Every soul in attendance at any given mass carries his or her own millstone into the pew. Everyone has a cross to bear, everyone has a vice, a tendency that weighs them down. Accepting sinners is part of the gig, especially when their flaws are not like our own flaws. This goes back to my flawed thoughts about flaws: my flaws are fine, but yours…are not ok. That doesn’t work. Now, clearly not every sin is as bad as murder, but there is a long list of grave matters that the Church defines and I wish you luck discerning God’s intention on which one is worse than the others. Last I checked they were all “grave” matters and each of us need to be constantly reconfigured and oriented toward Jesus. In reality, all of us sinners have at least one major issue to tackle and resolve through penance and faith in Jesus Christ.</p><p>“…penance…must take into account the penitent's <strong>personal situation</strong> and must seek his spiritual good. It must correspond as far as possible with the gravity and nature of the sins committed. It can consist of prayer, an offering, works of mercy, service of neighbor, voluntary self-denial, sacrifices, and above all the patient acceptance of the cross we must bear. Such penances help configure us to Christ, who alone expiated our sins once for all.”</p><p>This doesn’t mean sins of the modern age should just be glossed over and we pass laws enshrining and celebrating sin. There exists a Natural Law. Going out and getting drunk on purpose is against the rules. Looking at smut online is against the rules. Sex and booze both pave the road to nowhere. Drinking to drunkenness, in my experience, is the gateway to many other sins. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the multitude of social and family ills that beer and liquor unleash. Drug use and drunkenness open a floodgate to the whole garden of earthly delights. I believe that drinking gets too much of a pass in some Catholic circles. This concerns me quite a bit, as there is nearly a celebration of a drinking culture in the Church that many Protestant circles reject, and I think drinking is the plank in the eye of Catholics while they admonish others for their sins. I suspect much of the sin in the sex abuse scandal was due to drunkenness.</p><p>St. Paul kind of sums up the modern world in one sentence of what we should not be doing.</p><p>…let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. <a target="_blank" href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/romans/13?13&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">(Rom 13.13)</a></p><p>Drinking, drugs, and pointless sex are a no-go, according to St. Paul. And the “rivalry and jealousy” phrase reeks of social media.</p><p>What gets thrown into the same pot by Paul? Sex and booze. Both are journeys away from God, both are false idols of this world. Both of these pursuits are searches into empty alleyways, which look like a carnival from the outside but turn into prisons. The key to “love” is not abandoning anyone who goes down those alleys to check out the carnival, but rather to wait for them to wake up and walk out, free from the bondage. Oh, and the other key is to not follow them down the alleyway and join in on the carnival of orgies and drunkenness.</p><p>Take a look at the list on <a target="_blank" href="http://www.aggiecatholicblog.org/2012/04/what-constitutes-grave-matter-what-makes-mortal-sin-mortal/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">this page</a> of mortal sins and contact me if you are free from all of them, since you might just be the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and I think I’d like to meet you. As for me, I can tell you that on any Sunday, I have, or have in the past, had one or more of these mortal sins marking me for need of forgiveness and penitential acts. I can see plenty that I know I’ve committed and on some occasions definitely should not have joined the Communion line.</p><p>In fact, I just realized that gluttony happened to me this morning, when after breakfast I sort of had a second breakfast. Thus I’ve already befouled my day with a mortal sin, during Lent no less, yet no one will shame me for my error because I downed that extra Pop Tart in private.</p><p>I am not the model of piety, and I know quite a few believers who are also like me. They are all like me, with human frailties and problems. In reality, even those who have remained faithful throughout the struggles of the Church commit sins every week, every day. I know that modern Christians like to draw the battle line in the sand between moral relativism and moral absolutism, where we hunker down behind a redoubt, bricked in by the absolute truths of Natural Law. But I will say the test for Christians is the same as it ever was: if I cannot love my neighbor, all of them, then I better check myself and try again, because the Golden Rule is kind of important. I mean, it’s just that little detail that Jesus said “the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”</p><p>I fail, and that’s the whole point of why I need to keep going back to Mass and asking for forgiveness during the <a target="_blank" href="http://preces-latinae.org/thesaurus/Basics/Confiteor.html?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">Confiteor</a>. If I fail to love someone that is different from me, or I spurn them because they don’t like me, then I didn’t really love them in the first place and I am at fault. First, I need to keep my own side of the street clean before I worry about someone else’s side of the street.</p><p>I believe the true question for love is not a question at all, but a statement of fact from <a target="_blank" href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/1john/2?9&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=15-love-my-neighbor">1 John 2:9</a>. This is the whole test, right here:</p><p>Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">whydidpetersink.substack.com</a>
July 17, 2021
14. The Empty Tomb
<p>The most difficult part of faith to me, is the part where you have to actually have faith. Consider this definition, and think of the implications of it against the backdrop of our world today:</p><p>By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. (<a target="_blank" href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s1c3a1.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">CCC 143</a>)</p><p>Think about what is being requested here. If I completely give my intellect and will to anything, wouldn’t that just make me an automaton or a robot? How gullible do you think I am? You know, blind faith is how cults get started! The definition above always seemed too extreme. I could not subscribe to without a very compelling reason to do so, with ample evidence and reason behind why I would ever submit wholly to anything.</p><p>First, to even bring me to the table to consider this deal, the product or service needs to offer an amazing deal, a prize that cannot be gotten anywhere else through any other vendor.</p><p>I have already written about the efforts I’ve given toward things of this world, such as alcohol, knowledge, work, and exercise, but in those pursuits I didn’t give complete power over myself. You might say I divided up my intellect and will between a few pursuits at a time, but never fully to any single thing. While drinking I never reached anywhere near the point of alcoholic nihilism like that of Leaving Las Vegas. I certainly never won my age group in any marathons or foot races, proving that I could have trained harder. At work, I may throw myself into tasks but eventually I slack off or burnout. I don’t know that I’ve ever given myself completely to anything.</p><p>While I pursued those things, I imagined that I could still be good, or more specifically, virtuous. Obviously I was more virtuous with exercise as my highest priority rather than alcohol, but what I want and desire to be is to be vigilant in staying virtuous. From the self-help books of today, to Stoicism and Epicureanism, to Confucianism, to Buddhism, a code of ethics can be found in a thousand flavors. Each can be applied for living virtuously and righteously, to a high degree of success.</p><p>For a time I was enamored with Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. In fact, I still am. He recorded an amazing list of thoughts on living righteously, as he simultaneously tried to halt the rise of a rival Christian ethics that was catching fire among citizens of the empire. Today, a modern Stoic movement’s rise is gathering steam among the secular world, as its core teachings fit into a inward looking self-reliance, meditation, and “mindfulness” (which seems to be the secular term for prayer that we use today). To this day, I refer back to certain passages in my dog-eared copy of Marcus Aurelius’s thoughts. For instance, this passage is powerful to me:</p><p>Whatever anyone does or says, I must be a good man. It is as if an emerald, or gold or purple, were always saying: ‘Whatever anyone does or says, I must be an emerald and keep my colour.’ (<a target="_blank" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30659.Meditations?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">VII.15</a>)</p><p>The book contains an amazing set of ideas for living, many of which you can find strong parallels in the Gospels in the words of Jesus. Verses on forgiveness, kindness, strength, and the fleeting nature of life jump off the page. Marcus Aurelius’s writing contains a remarkable worldview that works well, but, in my opinion, there is one crack in the Stoic concrete that the ice of life wedges apart: the Stoic looks for help from within, while the Christian looks for help outside, from God. The inward vs. outward gaze makes all the difference.</p><p>I have already learned the hard way that my willpower alone does not work, or does not work for long whenever I have tried. Willpower and discipline come from the self, but without connecting the mind and body to the external God, we cannot overcome our own built-in flaws. I have character flaws that cannot be unwound from inside because they are written on my bones and brain. The power to overcome these flaws cannot start from within me, because the power doesn’t live in me. The power is outside of me, and I need to let it in to be there. If I don’t let it in, I can’t find it. Once I let the Holy Spirit in, then I can create a “little chapel in the heart” where I can go for strength and trust, to remove anxiety and fear. In addition, the Stoic method works best for the strong, not the weak, ill, or elderly. It approaches life’s problems from a position of strength. Emotionless love and shades of forgiveness exist in Marcus Aurelius, but nothing like the forgiveness that Jesus commands. The best example is when Peter asks Jesus how many times we should forgive someone, and he throws out a number, seven. Is seven times enough?</p><p>I can hear the wheels turning in Peter’s head: “Hey, Jesus, about the whole forgiveness thing, what’s the actual maximum before we can hate or discard the person again without feeling bad?” I can almost hear him thinking about someone that he’s irritated with as he’s asking, probably his brother Andrew or one of the other apostles.</p><p>Jesus delivers one of his greatest one-liners on forgiveness, shooting down Peter’s question. “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.”<a target="_blank" href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/18?22&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">*</a> Probably not what Peter was looking for in the answer but the one he needed. Again, I can imagine him nodding and thinking, “Wow, I was almost to seven times forgiving Andrew. I mean, I was thinking that in basketball after seven fouls you get the bonus and free throws, but I’m not even close. He gets to commit seventy more fouls and I have to keep forgiving him.” I don’t think anyone is as relatable as Peter, since his weaknesses and eye for shortcuts do not seem that far off from my own.</p><p>If anything makes the Christian message stand out from all others, it’s the approach. Rather than coming from a position of strength, the message of Jesus comes from a position of vulnerability and humbleness. Jesus comes to serve the weak, not the strong. This unexpected twist on power flips the script on all deities. We do not gain God’s favor by our ability, but by our need for God. And God gives the grace if we only ask for it. We used to joke, “What is the best kind of beer?” The answer was “Free beer.” This grace from God is free and it really is much better than free beer, because there is no headache. I just have to ask for help and God fortifies me against anything. I need to be weak, and need help, to be strong. Admitting this is hard, asking for help goes against much of our worldly instincts. This message reverberates through the entire Christian era, even in a recent homily from Pope Francis.</p><p>“Be reconciled: the journey is not based on our own strength. No one can be reconciled to God on his or her own…What enables us to return to him is not our own ability or merit, but his offer of grace…The beginning of the return to God is the recognition of our need for him and his mercy, our need for his grace. This is the right path, the path of humility. Do I feel in need, or do I feel self-sufficient?”<a target="_blank" href="http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2021/documents/papa-francesco_20210217_omelia-ceneri.html?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">*</a></p><p>If a code of ethics is all we want or need, then Christianity would never have got off the ground. Even the ancient world had plenty of self-help philosophies. What sets Jesus apart from others is the claim that he is God, but he serves everyone, forgives everyone, and suffers. All of this from a position of weakness rather than strength. This is a wild claim to make and either puts him into one of two categories: he is either telling the truth, or he’s insane. If he is insane, then he’s lying about being the son of God. If he is lying, the resurrection is bogus. If the resurrection does not occur, then all of the New Testament can be thrown out. St. Paul said this very clearly, that all is in vain without the resurrection. Even the ethics and morals are moot because the ancient world already had plenty of moral teachers, ones that were not insane. If virtue is the sole goal, then options already existed.</p><p>Thus, it all comes down to the resurrection. All of it: every miracle and parable, every clever comeback and turning of the cheek. If the resurrection does not occur, then the whole New Testament is a tale like any other mythology. As I mentioned earlier, one of the turning points in my loss of faith came from asking questions about the empty tomb and that it seemed easy to remove a body and claim resurrection. Not only that, but the different Gospel accounts of the empty tomb still conjure up those old doubts in me. Were there guards posted at the tomb or not? Who did the women see there? Was it one man, or two men? Or an angel? Exactly how many women came to the tomb and can we get the names please? Was the stone still in place or already rolled back? How heavy was the stone? How were the women going to roll back the stone for anointing if it was sealed? Were they at the wrong tomb? Did Mark add the resurrection paragraph after his first writing, and if so, did he think the empty tomb spoke for itself or did he add it to “fix” his story later on? Where is this tomb?</p><p>This can go on and on. It has gone on among scholars, for a long time. I am not going to go any further into my former doubts on the tomb, because I stumbled across a used book in a Goodwill thrift store called <a target="_blank" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/299961.Who_Moved_the_Stone_?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">Who Moved the Stone?</a> which addresses all of these questions. I’m glad someone else already did the heavy lifting. I just needed to read this short book in a single sitting to soak up the answers I was longing for regarding the tomb.</p><p>I’m also not going to go further on the tomb because of one other major reason that I cannot explain away: I cannot fathom the immense drive and spirit of the apostles, who tended to waffle, quibble, and argue. The flaws and frailties of these men make them clearly human, not fiction. And they went from cardboard to steel alloy in conviction, strength, and boldness. Their message never wavered in the aftermath. The only explanation to me is that they did indeed experience and confirm the resurrection of Jesus. All of the apostles were fearful and had fled to hiding places during and after the crucifixion, but then become recklessly fearless and willing to suffer any amount of pain to tell the world what happened.</p><p>These first Christians didn’t give their lives for a philosophical system…they died to uphold what they knew because they had seen it with their own eyes. Had it been a lie, then why die for it? … One after another these eyewitnesses gave up their lives defending the truth they had seen: Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead. (<a target="_blank" href="https://reallifecatholic.com/shop/the-search-book/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">The Search</a>, p.119)</p><p>Suddenly, somehow, Peter goes from being weak and furtive to a fortress of faith. He is crucified upside down thirty years later, having preached the message his entire life, with no education beyond that of a fisherman. The other apostles fare the same. That is, badly, as they are stoned, burned, stabbed, beaten, boiled, clubbed, and crucified. All the while they are relentless in spreading this message, alone, in different areas of the known world, telling the same story. If they were up to clever tricks about the tomb or Jesus’ body, someone would have cracked and tattled. Moreover, if the authorities, Jewish or Roman, had stolen or hidden the body, they would have just produced it and ended this tall tale.</p><p>Something happened, something profound, mysterious, impossible and life-changing for these people. Robert Barron says it best:</p><p>“That this dejected band would spontaneously generate the faith that would send them careening around the world with the message of Resurrection strains credulity. What is undeniably clear is that something had happened to Jesus - something so strange that those who witnessed it had no category to describe it.” <a target="_blank" href="https://www.wordonfire.org/bible/?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">WOF Bible</a>, p.280).</p><p>With daily readings I have come to believe. My faith has come by effort and truly needs continual conversion to stay strong. I did not fall off a horse, like Paul did. The Church talks about continual conversion and the need to restore the belief, and this is true. In coaching there is a saying that you need to refill your “E-tank,” your “Emotional Tank,” from time to time. That is true of coaching, and it’s true of faith. Belief can feel like a gas tank that needs a fill-up, which is why daily prayer is so beneficial to it. Faith is also like fitness, where as soon as you stop exercising the backsliding into sloth and muscle atrophy begins. Whenever we lose focus, we start to slide, and the world has many distractions to pull that focus away. In fact, modern technology is entirely based on pulling our focus away, which is why programmers and marketers have “focus” groups and A-B advertising tests to figure out how to pull your focus away from life so that instead we will focus on their products and services. All of this drains the E-Tank of faith.</p><p>As an example of losing that focus, and how quickly and easily it can happen: this morning I had spent time reading and praying and felt ready for the day, both in spirit and body. I got into my car and started driving. At the first stoplight a driver didn’t realize the light had turned green and I almost knee-jerkingly wanted to honk and call the man an idiot. I find this remarkable, as I had just spent time reading about humility, and the lack of it among the Pharisees. “For they preach but they do not practice.”<a target="_blank" href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/23?3&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">*</a> I’m such a Pharisee. How easy it is to be moral and righteous when alone, and how difficult in real interactions with people. So many of us today, particularly in our cars, leap to anger almost instantly, over minuscule events and perceived insults. I’ll apply that same sentiment to social media, which is the greatest poison to our peace of mind of all modern invention. At least in my car, only I can hear whatever cruel whim flits between my ears. Not so on Facebook and YouTube comments, where we are all free to spew angsty discord to the entire world.</p><p>The human heart and mind so quickly drift from intentions and hopes, and so I cannot imagine the remaining eleven apostles, who were ordinary men, sticking to their wits and resolve with such commitment unless they were utterly convinced of the rising of Jesus. This accomplishment was not completed behind closed doors, by reading and writing, but by interaction in the world in the face of monstrous opposition. They did not bring the message by the sword, but rather the sword was put to them. These ordinary people did not flinch or crumble, as if their sign of the cross made their spirit, if not their bodies, impervious to the slings and arrows of this world.</p><p>Now, if they had solely come up with a great idea or story that satisfied our hearts, they might have convinced only gullible people to believe. If that were the case, then the powers of the world wouldn’t have worried about them. But the apostles took this idea of the risen Jesus into the heart of the intellectual world of Jerusalem, and shockingly, won the argument. The eleven didn’t flee to the hinterlands to start proclaiming, they returned to the very location of the trial and death of Jesus, where witnesses lived and where the events occurred.</p><p>[There is]…the indisputable fact that Christianity was gaining adherents at a prodigious pace. The movement was spreading beyond all reasonable expectation...The terrific persecution of Saul, involving an inquisition to places as far distant as Damascus, shows that four years later it had grown to really alarming proportions.<a target="_blank" href="https://www.gospeltruth.net/whomovedthestone.htm?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">*</a></p><p>Put this fact together with who first witnessed and started to tell of the risen Jesus. The women at the tomb were first, and Mary Magdalene explicitly is mentioned. The very first voice that recognizes and announces the missing body and resurrection is a woman who had “seven devils” driven out of her and was a “sinful” woman. If spinning a yarn, the Gospel writers would have posted someone of political or worldly significance. Perhaps someone like Caiaphas, the high priest, might have come to the tomb and said, “I was wrong. I can’t believe it, but it’s true,” and thrown himself into prayer. But no, the witness to the most important event in history is a “fallen” woman, who would not have clout, nor even enfranchisement among women. Yet she is the chosen witness, fitting with the “last will be first” of Jesus’ teachings. The empty tomb, as seen by the women, is undisputed. There seems to be no one arguing that the body is gone and the burial clothes were left behind. The only argument seems to be about what happened to the body, but not about the empty state of the tomb and the women being the first to discover it.</p><p>The second voice is Peter’s, the fisherman, and his first proclamation starts with something funny, assuring that he and his cohort are not drunk. “These people are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.”<a target="_blank" href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/acts/2?15&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">*</a> That he needed to say this suggests that he knew this message sounded radical and insane. Without any education or platform to deliver knowledge, he begins by telling people, “Really, people, I’m not on drugs.” But the message is not aimed at simpletons, rather he delivers it to “devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem.”<a target="_blank" href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/acts/2?5&utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">*</a> This implies both uneducated people and intellectuals. If this were all a charade and tale, the leader would need to be someone steeped in rhetoric and debate, to handle the rebuttals and logical criticisms that surely came immediately. But it’s a man who catches fish for a living, who somehow convinces thousands upon thousands that what he has seen is true, in the city where the event occurred. Peter is not a genius or shrewd salesman, but after Jesus’ death his character is altered dramatically. I often think of the saying, “The truth requires no rehearsal.” This is why salespeople and lawyers need to rehearse arguments, demonstrations, and pitches: because there is a roundabout angle to getting to the “truth.” Peter is able to speak plainly, from the heart, and people believe him, unrehearsed, because he’s telling the truth and wouldn’t be able to convince anyone if he were telling a contrived fiction. He doesn’t have the training and toolkit to do that. His transformation is unexplainable without the Holy Spirit filling him with grace. The same can be said for the others who became warriors of faith after having so recently been trembling and afraid at the crucifixion, hiding out, even returning to their old jobs after being devastated at the death of Jesus, thinking that he had not “redeemed Israel” after all.</p><p>“It took an objective encounter with the risen Jesus to crystallize the disciples' faith in Him and cause them to proclaim His resurrection. Visions and subjective experiences would not have done it. Something had been seen. Something real.”<a target="_blank" href="https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/2004/03/who-moved-the-stone.html?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">*</a></p><p>“Gethsemane's cowards became Pentecost's heroes. This is inexplicable without the Resurrection. Had prestige, wealth, and increased social status accrued to new believers when they professed Christ and His resurrection, their profession would be logically understandable. In fact, however, their "rewards" were of a different type, eventually involving lions, crucifixion, and every other conceivable method of stopping them from talking.”<a target="_blank" href="https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/2004/03/who-moved-the-stone.html?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">*</a></p><p>I spent many years refuting and mocking the idea of the resurrection of Jesus. I have made many rude thoughts about it, siding with the doubters and logicians, writing off miracles as artifacts of an age where the world was haunted by demons. In reality, I guess my abandonment of Christianity was one response, because if you do not accept the resurrection, then the only answer is total abandonment of the faith. St. Paul has said the same, as have many others. Without the resurrection, what’s the point of it all?</p><p>I cannot explain how resurrection can occur, nor do I need to, because I believe now that events can happen beyond our comprehension, that science does not and will never explain everything. Even if life is discovered on other planets, or our physicists take us to the depths of the quantum world, and biology cures the last disease, and psychologists can explain away and prescribe solutions for all mental ailments, nothing can replace the need for God in my heart, as I have followed it all the way down to the end of the line, and I know that the answer to all questions is through faith, by surrendering my will and intellect to belief in the resurrection of Jesus. The flaw of humanity is real, and I find nothing more convincing than the resurrection of Jesus as the cure, for the forgiveness of me and my enemies, as the only way to live in the world and hold on to one another for the promise of the next. There is only one path to removing hate, and that is forgiveness and love, and that is why the power of the Christian message never dies. Right now the world may be called “post-Christian” but it’s not, as nothing the secular world can offer will ultimately replace the message of love and forgiveness through God. The United States and Chinese empires of today will fall away like every other empire before it, like the USSR, the Third Reich, the Austro-Hungarians, the Ottomans, the Hapsburgs, the Holy Roman empire, the Romans, the Greeks, and a thousand other willed sand castles of mankind, yet the truth of faith will endure. People have in the past and will again in the future use, abuse, and twist the faith to make it a tool of worldly power, but the center will hold because love and forgiveness shine through any lies in the end. Straying from that cannot go forever because the believers are like yo-yos, who must come back to the starting point. Nothing could shake the power of the message that empowered the very first believers of Jesus, and time and again those who hold steadfast to the Golden Rule correct the errant ways of a drifting faith. To this day the power of the Word remains fully charged, and this is because of the resurrection. From a position of weakness, forgiveness, and love, we are saved from death, and the faith will carry that forward and never end. While we quibble over traffic, split our families over politics, moralize over sexuality and death, obsess with celebrities and materialism, entertain ourselves with movies and music, and distract ourselves with phones and computers, the righteousness of Jesus’ message and resurrection remains unbothered. Even if Christians go back into hiding for a thousand years, and the followers are once again hunted down, as they are today in parts of the world, the faith will never die - because there is nothing better on offer, nothing like resurrection and the forgiveness of sins, nothing above it, nothing with more truth, and nothing more satisfying to the heart. We are the inheritors of the greatest mystery of all time. We are the same as those originals, lost and found, over and over again. We may start out like Saul, but end up like Paul, unable to explain how or why it happened, just as we can’t fully explain the resurrection. Once you choose to believe it, you don’t have to explain it. I just know that it is real and that I have changed.</p><p>“The phenomenon that here confronts us is one of the biggest dislodgements of events in the world's history, and it can be accounted for only by an initial impact of colossal drive and power…a habitual doubter like Thomas, a rather weak fisherman like Peter, a gentle dreamer like John, a practical tax gatherer like Matthew, a few seafaring men like Andrew and Nathanael, the inevitable women, and at most two or three others…<strong>seriously, does this rather heterogeneous body of simple folk, reeling under the shock of the Crucifixion, the utter degradation and death of their Leader, look like the driving force we require? Frankly it does not…Something came into the lives of these very simple and ordinary people that transformed them</strong>.”<a target="_blank" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/299961.Who_Moved_the_Stone_?utm_source=flies&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14-the-empty-tomb">*</a></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://whydidpetersink.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">whydidpetersink.substack.com</a>
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