Easter Sunday offers chance to celebrate most improibably event in history: Faith Matters clergy column by Pastor Geoff Henderson

Christians all over the world will be celebrating Easter Sunday.

Easter is like our Super Bowl, except we already know the winner, and don't have to worry about "plugs" for Budweiser in postgame interviews.

On Easter we celebrate Jesus' resurrection, the most improbable event in history.

Yes, even more improbable than last week's Texas A&M's 12-point comeback in the final minute of the NCAA tournament. My 7-year-old brought me the news, but it was only after I first confirmed with ESPN, that I could share in his true assessment of the improbable.

Not all beliefs can be proven or disproven with evidence. We often think if, "I could just see it with my own eyes, then I would believe."

The reality is: Evidence is not the ultimate culprit of disbelief.

Strangely enough, there are several documented cases where "dead" people have literally woken up in the morgue. Feel free to Google them.

Were they dead, and then somehow resurrected? Or as proposed by Miracle Max in "The Princess Bride," perhaps they were mostly dead, and thus partly alive?

Obviously not.

We believe "the dead don't rise" is a safe presupposition, and so we interpret the evidence through this lens. We come to the conclusion someone just got a little hasty in pronouncing death.

We would operate the same way if we ran into Jesus at the ballfield or the beach.

Literally seeing Jesus' resurrected body would not make us believe today. And it didn't make people believe then.

When one of Jesus' female disciples saw him that first Easter Sunday, she thought he was a gardener. Later that day, Jesus took a walk with two of his disciples, and yet he literally "kept their eyes from recognizing him."

Seeing isn't always tantamount to believing.

Jesus eventually revealed himself to his followers. He had to do it.

The main character on the show, "The Blacklist," is so elusive no one can truly track him down. One FBI agent brags about his detective skills, but another truthfully reminds him, "You only found Him, because he wanted you to find him."

So it is with Jesus.

It is only when Jesus opens our eyes that we can see Him for who He really is. That is not to say God didn't leave a plethora of "clues," as Tim Keller puts it. But we need Someone to make us see.

How does Jesus open the eyes of His disciples? In Luke's account of the resurrection, we don't see anything fancy: as His people eat together and go through the Bible, Jesus opens their eyes. Luke reports the same results in the second chapter of his sequel Acts. We see the same thing today.

Eat/drink together, and read the Bible together.

This is the way people find Jesus, or rather more appropriately, the means by which Jesus chooses to be found.

Pastor Geoff Henderson, at geoff@harborcommunitychurch.org or follow him on Twitter at@theapostleGH. Faith Matters is a regular feature of Saturday's Herald written by local clergy members.

This story was originally published March 26, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Easter Sunday offers chance to celebrate most improibably event in history: Faith Matters clergy column by Pastor Geoff Henderson ."