Seeing is Not Believing

The Roman soldiers hastened to break the legs of the three men on the crosses to hasten their deaths as the Jewish Sabbath was fast approaching.  However, when they reach the man on the middle cross, he was already dead.  To make sure, the soldier punctured the pericardium and water tinged with blood flowed out, the sign of a heart that was no longer beating.

The man's followers took his body from the cross and laid it in a borrowed tomb.  In their haste, they wrapped him in a linen cloth without the usual preparations for the dead.  The women would come back with their jars of ointment on the first day of the week to finish the preparations of their beloved teacher's body.  

 

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For many years, controversy has swirled around a linen cloth known as the Shroud of Turin.  On the shroud is the image of a crucified man.  It is stained with human blood.  There was blood around the man's head as if a thorn of crowns were place there.  There was blood in stripes down his back as if he had been severely beaten.  There was blood on the hands, feet, and wrists from the crucifiers' nails and a blood stain on his chest just below where his heart would have been.

 

 

Is this the image of Jesus Christ?  For the past few decades, scientists have done everything they could to prove it is a fake - a medieval forgery.  But a new scientific study out of Italy is making the claim that the shroud is far older than earlier research indicated - over 2000 years, and could very well be the real deal.  But even that doesn't prove it was the shroud of the body of Jesus Christ.  Only that it is a real shroud of a crucified man with similar injuries at about that time.

 

In the end, does it really matter?  After all, seeing is not believing; believing is seeing.  Even if scientists had the DNA of God (an impossibility) against which to test it, the shroud and similar relics won't build faith or testimony.  If you want to have faith in Jesus Christ, you need to do it the old fashioned way - in the scriptures and on your knees.

 

And celebrate tomorrow.

 

Just sayin'.

 

Text copyright Gebara Education March 2013

 

Picture of Shroud of Turin from many sources on the web