Fearful Unbelief

When the disciples were stuck in hopeless despair and negative thoughts, refusing to believe reports of good news especially if delivered by emotional women, they missed the opportunity to meet Jesus and discover His plan for them in Galilee. They did not go there as instructed but hunkered down in the familiar, both in place and in thinking. Jesus had a difficult time awakening faith in them even after He found and exploited a weak area in the massive resistance through the couple from Emmaus.

But when they began rehearsing true stories of His appearances which began to produce the tiniest flicker of hope in their deeply hurting hearts, it created an environment where He could show up and fan the flame. Even then the flame wavered in unbelief as they all went immediately to fear and doubt instead of belief and joy. Jesus was desperate to fellowship with and minister to their hurting hearts but He would not force Himself on them. They had to allow belief to take root in their whole mind and release their clinging grasp on tradition and human-based explanations of reality. They had to choose to believe and embrace true reality before they could move on to deeper intimacy and joy.

Luke 24:38 Why are you troubled and why do doubts arise in your heart? This is a very interesting example of left/right brain incongruity. The hearts really wanted to hope, wanted to accept Jesus, wanted to be fulfilled and satisfied and wanted to be released from the overwhelming pain, the detachment pain of losing Jesus. But their left brain was full of surging doubts fueled by the all-pervasive unbelief and lies in society and tradition about what is true and real. After the crucifixion all the insinuations of the Pharisees and leaders now carried much more weight to make them question their previous beliefs about Jesus. All tangible evidence pointed toward and reinforced the gnawing suspicion that maybe they had been duped big-time, that they were victims of some incredible and massive fraud designed to torture their hearts and diabolically make them mere play-toys to be abused and discarded. All kinds of fantastic negative scenarios and explanations raced through their minds and filled them with depression and foreboding as they repeatedly reassembled bits and pieces of evidence trying desperately to figure out on there own what was real and what was illusion. Without Jesus to explain things they were intellectually lost in a dense fog with no clue of which way to turn.

This was actually their greatest opportunity to listen to their heart and discover real reality if they had only been willing to suspend their left-brain explanations and laid down their social prejudices and paradigms. Their life-long training to accept without question the authority and teachings of religious leaders, their deep-rooted social disdain of women's credibility, their natural human bent toward leaning on their own understanding inherited from the Tree of Knowledge – all these worked together to keep them in the hopeless maze of unbelief and confusion.

No one knows how the story would have unfolded very differently if they had believed the message from Jesus through the women and had in faith left Jerusalem and gone to Galilee to meet Him there. Thousands more might have been involved in the story and the Gospel might have exploded much faster.