It is typical of human nature, that when people meet with something unexpected, they tend to suspect the worst.

A man and his wife come home from a trip and find their back door unlocked. They suspect a robbery. But then they find one of their children, who know where the key is hidden, home for an unannounced visit from college.

Your phone rings in the middle of the night. You suspect that someone has met with an accident or died. But then, you find that your caller, from a long distance, had just not remembered the time difference.

Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb of Jesus early on the first day following the Sabbath. She finds the tomb open and empty. She runs back to tell Peter and John that someone has stolen the Lord’s body. She suspects the worst: no wonder—it is human nature.

Peter and John then run to investigate. They find something else unexpected: the shroud of Jesus is lying on the floor of the empty tomb. Would a body thief undress a corpse before taking it away? John sees this anomaly from outside the tomb. Peter goes into the tomb, and finds yet another unexpected thing: the head cloth carefully rolled up in a place separate from the shroud. What body thief, even one who for some strange reason had undressed the body, would bother to do that, and why? What Peter and John see makes less and less sense to them—until it dawns on John (who moves more quickly, physically and mentally, than Peter) that the body of their Lord had not been taken away; it had evidently moved itself away. Jesus had left his tomb as a man might leave his bed and take off his night-clothes. John “saw and believed”; Mary Magdalene’s unexpected discovery had yielded him a much more unexpected explanation.

Jesus had tried to prepare his disciples for his Passion by training them to face painful mysteries expecting the best rather than suspecting the worst. But human nature is recalcitrant. In a world full of unexpected evils, the best defense is to suspect the worst. Despite all his efforts, Jesus had been unable to change that defensive habit of mind in his disciples; he had been unable to convince them in advance that his betrayal, suffering and death were in God’s plan for their eternal good.

That is not surprising; it involves a total change of world-view. What if the real world, under the providence of God, were actually more full of unexpected goods than evils? Only innocent, child-like souls expect the best when they confront the unexpected. Only to them are mysteries more intriguing than fearful. Jesus had tried by every means at his divine command to teach his friends that kind of innocence: “You must become like little children to enter the kingdom of God.” He had not succeeded in the case of Mary Magdalene and Peter; he had succeeded in the case of his beloved John.

Just imagine for a moment some thoughts that might pass through Peter’s mind as he contemplates the burial-shroud of Jesus lying on the floor of the tomb, with its head-cloth neatly rolled up in a separate place. Peter may suspect some dark perversion to account for the Lord’s body being missing without its clothes, some evil plot to confuse or deceive to explain the separation of the head-cloth from the shroud. The Lord’s crucifixion had been bad enough; this seems to add cruel insult to mortal injury.

So Peter brings John back with him to the room where the apostles are hiding behind locked doors. It would take the sight of Jesus walking through a door to convince Peter that John had been correct to “see” what they saw at his tomb, and to “believe.” It would take many appearances of Jesus to convince his friends that he was really risen from the dead. And even so, Mary Magdalene had to be corrected by the Lord, that he was truly risen, not resuscitated: “Do not [try to] hold me, for I ascend to my Father and your Father.”

You see, even with their wondrous discovery that Jesus is not dead, but living, his disciples have to be shown that his Resurrection is meant to open something wholly new and wonderful for them, not just for himself. He is there with them for forty days to offer them this risen life of his; to open up for them a possibility more unexpected, even, than his Resurrection. Their world indeed turns out to be far more full of unexpected good than evil. Jesus is going to his Father, and offering to take them with him, even while they stay on earth: “For you have died,” as Paul writes, “and your life is hid with Christ in God.” Jesus is going to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, for his Father wants to be their Father too.

We all believe in the Resurrection, based upon the eyewitness testimony of these first witnesses; but, just like them, we have to be converted to our resurrection with him. Its full implications are only gradually revealed to our Lord’s first disciples. The New Testament is all about their gradual conversion to the full reality that just begins to dawn on them on that first Easter day. We too have to be gradually converted—from defensively suspecting the worst whenever we confront the unexpected, from a view of reality that sees more of a potential for evil than for good, and from adult cynicism that comes from fear to childlike hope that comes from wonder.

And that is not naïveté. John’s quickness at the empty tomb to believe in our Lord’s resurrection is matched with his readiness to stand beside the Cross. John knows the worst, and his mind is open to the best. That is what we all must be converted to. The fact of our Lord’s Resurrection, among the best-attested facts of human history, opens up a possibility for us that is as wondrous as it is unexpected, a perspective on the world that is as luminous as it is mysterious, and a reality that challenges us daily. If new, eternal life is really being given to us by our risen Lord, we can and must begin to live it now.