“The Fear Factor”

“The Fear Factor”

Text: Psalm 27

© March 4, 2007 by C. Edward Bowen

What you afraid of? Some fears are rather common. For instance, do you get uneasy when you climb up on a ladder or when you stand near the edge of a cliff? If that’s the case, you probably have acrophobia, the fear of heights. Or if you feel uncomfortable and nervous when you’re around large groups of people, maybe you have agoraphobia, the fear of crowds. Or I know that there are quite a few people in the church who would almost rather die than stand up front here and speak in front of the congregation. If that describes you, maybe you have glossophobia, the fear of speaking in public.

But in addition to those rather common kinds of fears, there is a whole multitude of other kinds of fears and phobias that people have. For example, some people apparently have ablutophobia, which is the fear of bathing. So if you have ablutophobia, it would probably be a good idea not to get too close to someone who has autodysomophobia, which is the fear of being around people who smell.

There’s also arachibutyrophobia, the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. Or there’s ergophobia, the fear of working – maybe you’ve had a job where some of the other employees seemed to have that affliction. But since you’re all here in worship this morning, I guess it would be safe to say that you don’t have ecclesiophobia, which is the fear of churches. But do be on the lookout – because if you see someone around you starting to tremble or twitch during the next 15 minutes or so, it might be because they have homilophobia, which is the fear of sermons.

We seem to live in a world where every time you turn around, there’s something that you’re told that you ought to be afraid of. If you turn on the Fox News Channel in the morning, scrolling across the bottom of the screen is a message that tells you how afraid you should be of terrorism that day, informing you whether the terror alert level is yellow or orange or red. Or if you read the newspaper, every day it appears that you’re told about something else that you should be afraid of – possible nuclear bombs in North Korea, a potential crash in the stock market, the possibility of a bird flu epidemic. Or I came across an article that says that in another 875 years, there’s an asteroid that might be on a collision course with earth, which, if it were to hit, would probably bring life on earth to an end.[1]

Almost everywhere we turn these days, we find ourselves bombarded with messages of fear. Almost everywhere we turn these days, we find ourselves bombarded with messages telling us what we ought to be afraid of. What about you? What are you afraid of?

In the Bible, though, we find this psalm, Psalm 27, where it says: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” In other words, if we truly have faith in God, then no matter what happens in life, we don’t have to afraid. If we truly have faith in God, then no matter what happens in life, there’s no need for fear.

In fact, in the Bible the words “do not be afraid” and “fear not” are spoken to people by God and Jesus and angels more than 300 different times. When the angel Gabriel appears at Mary’s doorstep and she doesn’t have any idea what’s going on, the first words out of the angel’s mouth are “Do not be afraid.” When the disciples are out in that boat on the Sea of Galilee and a violent storm comes along and is almost ready to sink them, when they see Jesus walking toward them on the water and they get thrown into a panic, the first words out of Jesus’ mouth are “Fear not.” Or when Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb on Easter Sunday and is thrown into a panic when she discovers that the body is gone, an angel comes and says to her, “Do not be afraid.”

Do not be afraid. Fear not. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that those words represent one of the main messages of the Bible. No, if we put our trust in God, that doesn’t mean that bad or troubling things will never happen to us. But if we put our trust in God, no matter what might happen in life, we don’t have to be afraid, because God is with us, and God will see us through.

And most especially that’s the message that was revealed to us at Easter. Because when God raised Jesus from that tomb, when God raised Jesus from the dead on that resurrection morning, that was God’s way of saying, “If you put your faith in me, there is nothing in all the world that you have to afraid of, not even death. If you put your faith in me, then the day is going to come when I’m going to take everything in this world that seeks to hurt and destroy and that causes people to be afraid, and I’m going to bring all of that to an end. And when that day comes, people are never going to have to be afraid again.”

And because that Easter message is so very important to us, it’s no surprise that such a furor has erupted in the last week or so over the Discovery Channel special where they claim to have found Jesus’ bones and suggest that they have proof that Jesus died and stayed dead. At issue are ten ossuaries that were found south of Jerusalem. An ossuary is a stone box that contains someone’s bones. You see, back around the time of Jesus, if you died, your body was taken to the family grave, which quite often was a cave-like structure in the side of a hill. And they would place your body on a kind of stone table inside the tomb.

And although it might not be pleasant to think about, what would happen is that your flesh would begin to decay and eventually there would be nothing left except bones. And so at some point your family would return to the tomb, would put all your bones into a stone box called an ossuary, and would put the ossuary off to one of the sides of the tomb so that the stone table in the center of the tomb could be available to lay out the body of the next family member who would die.

And so what they found was a tomb that had ten of those ossuaries in it. And among the names they found carved on some of those ossuaries were the names Jesus, Mary, another Mary, and an ossuary identified as Judah, son of Jesus. And so the producers of that TV show have come out and said, “Look at what we found! Obviously the only possible conclusion is that these ossuaries contain the bones of none other than Jesus Christ, Mary (Jesus’ mother), Mary Magdalene (who probably was Jesus’ wife), and Judah (who must have been Jesus’ and Mary Magdalene’s son)!”

And what certainly seems to be implied in all of that is the message, “Hey, you Christians! We have proof. We have proof that you’ve been deluding yourselves and misleading yourselves for centuries. God didn’t raise Jesus from the dead. No, Jesus died, and he stayed dead. And here are his bones to prove it. So, you Christians think that you don’t have to be afraid of death, that you don’t have to be afraid of anything? Well, think again!”

On the surface, all that sounds like a rather startling revelation. But once you take a little closer look at their evidence, it turns out that it’s not quite as startling as you might think. First off, with all the publicity that this TV show has been getting on TV and in the newspapers, you could easily be led to conclude that these ossuaries were just now discovered. But the truth is that those ten ossuaries were found back in 1980, some 27 years ago. And British television did a show about the ossuaries back in 1996, with the result being that most people were not the least bit convinced that those ossuaries contained the bones of Jesus and his family.[2] And if anyone really thought that those boxes contained the bones of Jesus and his mother and Mary Magdalene, don’t you think that sometime in the past 27 years you would have heard a little more about it?

Another problem is that where the ossuaries were found, miles south of Jerusalem, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If Jesus or his family did have a family tomb, you might expect to find it in Bethlehem, which was the ancestral hometown where Jesus was born, or in Nazareth, where Jesus and his family lived for quite a while during his adult years, or in Jerusalem itself, where Jesus was put to death. But instead of any of those places, these ossuaries were found in a middle-class first-century graveyard outside of Jerusalem.

Another problem is the way that the TV show producers rushed to the conclusion that if three ossuaries were found together with the names of Jesus, Mary, and Mary, they had to contain the remains of Jesus Christ, his mother Mary, and Mary Magdalene. The problem with that line of reasoning is that names of both Jesus and Mary were extremely common during that time. For instance, the historian Josephus, who wrote around the time of Jesus, mentioned 21 different men who were all named Jesus. And so if there were 21 different Jesuses who were noteworthy enough to be mentioned in a history book from that time, just imagine how many hundreds or even thousands of other Jesuses there must have been. In the same way, evidence from the first century suggests that about 1 out of every 4 women back then was named Mary.[3]

So to find a tomb with the names Jesus and Mary in it means virtually nothing. And then to make the leap and say, “Aha! This is the grave of Jesus of Nazareth, and here are his bones, and here are his wife’s bones, and here are his child’s bones,” is really quite irresponsible. And the overwhelming majority of archaeologists and scholars around the world agree – that the producers of that TV special aren’t dealing with facts; rather they’re simply making those claims just to generate publicity and money for themselves.

But I have to admit, the producers of that TV special are smart. Because they realize that their advertisements are causing people to be afraid: afraid that Jesus wasn’t really raised from the dead, afraid that the Christian faith might be some big, huge mistake. Even at Youth Club this week, I do the Bible lesson with the kids, and children as young as 2^nd grade were asking me questions about those ossuaries and what those claims meant with regard to the truth of the Christian faith. The producers of that TV special are smart, because they’ve generated fear in many people’s minds. And fear sells. Fear has a way of grabbing hold of people and consuming people’s attention. And attention is exactly what those TV producers wanted for themselves and for their show.

As we live out our lives, we have a basic choice we have to make: Do we live our lives based on fear, or do we live our lives based on faith? Do we live our lives filled with worry and anxiety, constantly waiting for the next shoe to drop, constantly fearful about what’s going to happen next? Or do we live our lives by putting our faith in God, trusting that even if bad things do come our way, the ultimate victory has already been won, that with God on our side, there is absolutely nothing we have to fear? No matter what happens in life, put your faith in God. And do not be afraid, because God is with us, now and forevermore.