Episodes
Sunday Apr 14, 2013
Christ Incognito
Sunday Apr 14, 2013
Sunday Apr 14, 2013
Rev. Dean Snyder Luke 24:13-19
Luke tells an Easter story in his gospel that no other gospel writer tells. It is a story about telling stories and about a meal that is itself a story. It is a story about the relationship between resurrection and telling our stories, and the relationship between telling our story and understanding our story as part of a larger, eternal story.
We are talking and thinking about Luke’s unique Easter story all of this Easter season until May 19 Confirmation Sunday. I would encourage you to mediate on this story in your personal life for these next weeks – it is Luke 24:13-35. I’d encourage you to find a few minutes to reread Luke 24:13-35 every day and to take a few minutes to think about it and to absorb it.
It was the first Easter and two of Jesus’ disciples were traveling –walking—on the road from Jerusalem where crucifixion and Easter had happened to Emmaus a little town seven miles away. One of the disciples’ name was Cleopas. Luke does not tell us the name of the other disciple.
The disciples were upset and puzzled by the events of the past week. On Palm Sunday Jesus had entered Jerusalem like a king, like a messiah. Monday he had overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple … the act of a revolutionary.
But Friday he had been crucified, dashing the hopes of his disciples and followers who thought he would bring a kingdom of justice and inclusion to Israel.
Then to make things worse Sunday morning some of the women who were part of the community of the followers of Jesus started telling strange stories about Jesus having risen from the dead.
It had gotten all too weird for Cleopas and his friend, and they had taken off for the town of Emmaus seven miles away just to get some space, some room in their lives, time and space to ask “what next?” after three years of following someone who was going to change the world but who had disappointed them.
There is a sentence in Luke’s unique Easter story I’d like to invite you to focus on today. It is found in Luke 24:15-16. The sentence says: “While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”
So the question is why after following for him for three years, after hearing him speak and teach endless times, after eating meals with him and sleeping in the same house, after traveling the dusty roads of Israel with him, after all this then why did these two disciples not recognize the resurrected Jesus? Why were their eyes kept form recognizing him? What kept their eyes from recognizing him?
And what might this tell us about our own relationship with the resurrected Jesus? What can we learn for our own spiritual journeys from these disciples’ experience?
First, why were their eyes kept from recognizing him?
There are a number of possibilities, I suppose.
Jesus could have looked different. He could have died on Friday looking one way and could have risen Sunday looking like somebody else. I’ve always sort of hoped that I myself would be resurrected looking like Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington.
Their eyes could have been kept from recognizing him because he was unrecognizable.
It is true that in the Easter accounts the people who encountered the risen Jesus did tend to recognize him by his voice and by his actions rather than his psychical being.
But the Bible insists that it was really Jesus who was resurrected –it was not some ghost of Jesus, not some specter, not some hologram.
You remember Thomas, the doubting apostle. Thomas, the doubter, was absent the first time Jesus appeared to his disciples in the upper room, and he refused to believe Jesus was risen unless he could see him with his own eyes and he could feel the wounds in his body with his own hands.
The next time Jesus appeared to the disciples Thomas was there and he told Thomas to put his fingers in his wounds and feel them, and one of the points of this story is that it was really the crucified Jesus who rose on Easter. It was not a ghost, it was not a specter, it was not a hologram. It was the real Jesus, the whole person of Jesus.
No, the problem wasn’t that Jesus didn’t look like Jesus.
A much more likely possibility is that their eyes were kept from recognizing him because their minds could not grasp the possibility of resurrection.
We tend to think that it is hard to believe what we cannot see. But it is also true that it is hard to see what we cannot believe.
It is hard to see what we cannot believe.
We say seeing is believing, but we could also say that believing is seeing.
If we believe that something is dead and gone and over, it will be difficult to see it.
So it is much more likely that the disciples did not recognize the resurrected Jesus because they assumed Jesus was in a tomb somewhere dead and gone and over.
Their eyes were kept from recognizing Jesus because of the limits of their imagination, the limitations of their faith, their unbelief of what is possible. It is true for many of us that our imagination, our limitations of faith, our unbelief of what is possible keeps us from recognizing the resurrected Jesus in our world today.
Frederick Buechner suggests one more reason why the disciples on the road to Emmaus may not have recognized Jesus.
Fred Buechner says that they may have not been able to recognize the risen Jesus “because even when he was alive they had never really recognized him.”
Because even when he was alive they “had seen him not as he actually was but only as they had wanted him to be: a hero who could give them a lot of easy answers to all of life’s hardest questions, questions about love and pain and goodness and death. “
And it is true that when you read the gospels, the disciples misunderstood Jesus all of the time. Jesus spoke of eternity and they took what he said to be about next week. Jesus talked about transformation of the world and they took what he said to be about the next election cycle. Jesus spoke about radically changing the way that humanity thinks about women and children and men and nations and money and justice and they took him to be talking about heaven, not the world in which we live.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus demonstrate their limitations of understanding who Jesus is when they try to tell this stranger about Jesus and the events of the past week. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they said about the crucified Jesus. We had hoped that he was the one who would bring freedom and justice to our nation, to our place, to our little corner of the world. But clearly he has disappointed us. He did nothing but die.
Buechner thinks that part of the irony of the story is that the disciples on the road to Emmaus did not recognize the risen Jesus because they never really knew Jesus in the first place. Their understanding of Jesus was too small, their Jesus was too puny, they were too self-interested in getting what they wanted here and now and did not recognize the One who was not just messiah of Israel here and now but messiah of the universe for all eternity . .. the one who would not just redeem their little piece of the world but the one who would redeem the universe – planets and stars and galaxies.
***
Which raises the question for us – we who are Jesus’ disciples today, on our own roads to Emmaus – confused about our lives about the world we live in today – not understanding very well what is really happening – fearful about our futures.
Have we really recognized Jesus in the first place? Are we missing Jesus in our world today because we never really understood him in the first place?
And the answer biblically is, without a doubt, yes. We do not really get Jesus even today.
God in Christ is about something larger than any of us who are his followers have been able to fully grasp at any point in time or place.
We –no one of us, none of us—get Jesus really or fully. We have not fully grasped him yet.
Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, charismatic, Buddhist/Christian, seminary professor, missionary, clergy, lay, bishop, pope – none of us have fully understood him yet.
His agenda and intention is larger than our imaginations.
Have you ever noticed that the people most surprised by what God in Christ is doing in the world lately tend to be the Christians?
What the next generation most heralds as evidence of Christ’s continued presence in the world is what the majority of Christians of the last generation condemned as anti-Christ.
I listen to a lot of sermon podcasts. I listen to sermons from all kinds of churches including fundamentalist churches and Pentecostal churches. I am amazed how often fundamentalist churches these days are claiming Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement as evidence of Christ’s active presence in our world.
Has everyone forgotten that the majority of Christian churches – white and black—condemned the civil rights movement at the time? I doubt that you could have found one fundamentalist church at the time that did not condemn integration as anti-Christ.
Listen to the sermons today and you might think that Dr. King was a fundamentalist who went to Bob Jones University rather than Boston University School of Theology.
What the next generation most heralds as evidence of Christ’s continued presence in the world is what the majority of Christians of the last generation condemned as anti-Christ.
We have not really understood God’s story yet. The story is bigger still than we have even begun to imagine.
So we need to keep listening. Like the disciples on the road to Emmaus we need to keep listening to Jesus tell his story.
God’s story did not end when they sewed the back cover on the Bible.
One of the ways we listen to the resurrected Christ is by listening to each other.
History was changed when some few white people and African-American people started listening to each other 50 years ago and because they started listening, they started telling each other the truth about their experience and aspirations.
A few years ago I read a fascinating book that has disturbed me ever since I read it,. It was written by Jason Sokol and it is entitled There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975.
They were so convinced that they understood African-Americans. The entire political, economic and social system was engineered to make sure African-American would seem to tell them what they wanted to hear. They heard what they wanted to hear but very, very few really listened.
And the moral is not that Southern whites were bad but that it is amazing hard for any of us to really listen to one another.
This is true of all of us – conservative liberal, traditionalist, progressive.
I was at a meeting not long ago where a straight, white, male almost my age was trying to talk about what it felt like to be white and male and straight in the society in which we live today. His sharing was not well received.
I walked form the meeting with a female friend of mine who tore into him after the meeting for presuming that he, as a privileged, straight, white male, presumed he had any personal experience to contribute.
I, of course, just kept my mouth shut because I am a coward.
None of us can afford to write off any of us off. None of us can assume we understand the other without having to listen. None of us can recognize the resurrected Christ in our world unless we are listening to whoever is the other for us.
Cleopas and another disciple were on the road to Emmaus, and a stranger came near and went with them. The stranger was Jesus, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.
May our eyes and ears and minds and hearts be opened.
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