I know, I know. It’s a line that I never saw myself as writing either.

When I was a young child, my parent’s would take me to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in the evenings. There was (and is!) a large triceratops skull there–at the time, it was in the basement of the museum such that as a young child I could crawl on it. It was tangible, it was real, it was cool! It was old. Older than anything I knew about.

History leaves imprints like fossils. At first, we may not know how to handle or explain the evidence in front of us. Dragon bones! Then bones assembled in all kinds of ways, creating all kinds of strange looking animal remains. When we applied common sense, patience, and knowledge of the evidence around us, the skeletons started to look different. We started to have a more detailed understanding of what these creatures were, how they lived, and now with the additional information of the fossil record, we know what some of their skins looked like, and that some may have had feathers, and that their ancestors fly around us to this day as birds.

It is often easier to believe in dinosaurs than it is that a man, a teacher, was crucified around 2000 years ago, was buried in a tomb, then three days later returned to the living because he was both God and man.

It’s ludicrous!

For starters, people don’t come back from the dead. It is a simpler concept that his body was taken from the tomb by his followers or by others to create the image that he was raised from the dead. It was more profitable somehow to do this.

There are, however, some fossils in the record that may help us.

People, including Jesus’ close followers, were consistently persecuted, killed for what they believed. This past Sunday, we said Mass on an altar stone that contained the relics of three saints and martyrs (even though we can’t be 100% sure who they are because there are a few saints and martyrs with the same names as the ones listed in the documentation that comes with this stone) that were killed between the mid 200’s and 1000 AD. That’s an 800 year stretch that people were killed for believing that a man was crucified, died, and was buried before returning from the dead three days later. Yes, people today die for their convictions and beliefs. These people also died for believing fundamental principles and values about the dignity of human life, the necessity of acts of charity and love. They believed the teachings of this particular man, a man who was God incarnate.

If they’d been killed for “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”, that would’ve been one thing. But it wasn’t just that. They believed this man was the son of God.

They believed that the sacrifice of the Mass was a direct connection to that death, the resurrection, a direct and tangible thing that recalled us to knowing this man personally. Do this in memory of me. Touch, taste, eat, drink, know. Do this in a certain way, gathered together as a family.