Eleven Witnesses

I wonder if anyone has had their whole life come down to one minute? A minute in which all that they'd been taught, all they'd been hoping for, all that mattered in the world to them was fulfilled. A minute that knit together every day of their past and radically shaped every day of their future?

That's what happened to eleven men in Jerusalem. For three years, they had been following around this man named Jesus. They had seen him do many unexplainable things and heard him speak of mysteries beyond their understanding. He was strange, but he was also their friend. They trusted him. They trusted him enough to give up everything and follow him all around the countryside, doing whatever he said.

They were good Jewish boys. Their mamas and daddys had taught them well. They knew the Scripture; they followed the Law. They knew that Yahweh had promised them a Messiah, a rescuer who would save God's people and rule forever. Just about the time they began to think that Jesus might be the One they were waiting for, just about the time they were thinking he would stick it to the Roman leaders and set up Jewish rule once and for all, something crazy happened. He died. His body was put in a tomb. And that was that.

"What in the world was that about?" they must have wondered.

Could they eat? Sleep? I don't think so. All they could do was wonder, and weep, and stumble through what must have been the greatest disappointment of all time.

But then their moment came. THE moment. And it happened so simply.

One minute they were alone, and the next he was there with them. He appeared out of nowhere, very much alive. They were so startled they thought he was a ghost. He knew how jarring his appearance would be, so he let them examine his nail-scarred hands and feet. He ate with them. And then he did something that must have seemed to them even more amazing than raising from the dead. He put every second of every day of their entire lives in context.

He said something like this: Everything you've hoped for your entire lives, every lesson you ever learned, every law you ever followed, every scripture you ever memorized was all about me. This life? All about me. This world? All about me (and, by the way, I created it). The future? All about me.

"Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, 'This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things'" (Luke 24:45-47).

Grief and confusion and disappointment were immediately sucked out of the room. "Ah-ha" moments broke out. Connections were made. Lives, on the spot, were changed, never to be the same. The world was changed, never to be the same. And it all began with those eleven.

Sometimes I marvel over what it's like to be alive right now, in this moment in time. On my watch, the world changed at the hands of technology. The world I was born into looks nothing like the one I inhabit now. I think that's pretty amazing. I wonder how I got to be a witness to such things.

But it doesn't hold a candle to what those eleven in Jerusalem witnessed, when all of history and all of eternity converged in that one holy moment.

He is risen. And this crazy world make sense.