Memories of Easters past.
1972—Schoolgirls at Matopo Secondary dressed in white,
singing “Namhla Uvukile” [Today He has risen!] before the African Autumn dawn. dressed all in white, they sounded like angels!
1991—My parents shaking Lois and me awake with the news that
Dad Heise has just died; the cancer had finished its work. We meant to spend the day with my parents. Instead, it was the last time I saw my mother.
Easter is our invitation to remember all that has happened
in our lives. It is also our own invitation to reinterpret all that happens to
us.
This congregation has also experienced the losses that make
Easter a bittersweet time. As we sing and rejoice, we hear echoes of trumpets
playing and voices singing from those who have gone before. We know well what I
describe when I think of Lois’ Dad singing in Heaven’s choir on Easter morning.
The scene on the road to the village of Emmaus gives us a
way to remember, showing us the path to joy that lies buried in all our griefs.
Jesus invites us to see our lives, to see our world, in light of the cross, and
to discover that “the way of the cross [is] none other than the way of life and
peace.” I will speak primarily from Luke’s account, with the words from Acts 2
and 1 Peter 1 echoing in the background.
Listen to the Text
Again
Two disciples walked the seven miles home from Jerusalem to
Emmaus. Presumably they had been in Jerusalem for the trial and execution of
Jesus. In any case, that is what they were talking about. On Friday they saw
the Messiah killed, and then the sun set. Today we refer to the day between
Good Friday and Easter Sunday as Holy Saturday, a time of waiting for the
celebration to begin. The first “Holy Saturday” was the Sabbath Day, a time of
waiting in God’s presence for renewal through hearing God’s Law, the Torah.
That Sabbath was a strange day of resting. Because it was
the Sabbath, they were unable to go to the tomb, unable to return to their home
in Emmaus, unable to do anything in response to the terrible events they had witnessed.
Finally on the first day of the week, they could go home. They headed off about
the middle of the afternoon, and as they walked they also talked over all that
had happened in Jerusalem. A leisurely Sunday afternoon walk home.
Jesus joined them on the way. They didn’t recognize him,
even when he asked what they were talking about. I have wondered why they were “kept
from recognizing him”. Perhaps they needed to remain in a time of questioning
and searching longer, so that they could deal fully with their grief. Perhaps
they wanted to move on to resolution too quickly; we often do so. As a matter
of practice in the church’s year, this is a good reason for the length of Lent,
and for length of the Easter Season—to allow us to dwell in grief and joy as
long as we need to. I doubt that this thought was in Luke’s mind, but it is true
nonetheless.
Without realizing it, they were talking to the man who was
in the middle of those events. Ironically they said, “You’re not from around
here, are you!” Then they told him what had happened to him—the humour of God
at work. The interaction that follows is vitally important for us to grasp this
morning.
They said:
“He was a prophet. We thought he
was the Messiah! But the religious leaders had him killed. We don’t know what
to do! (We had hoped … !)
“He did say something about the
third day, and today is the third day.
“We heard something this morning.
Some women [you can almost hear the doubt in their voices: women will say
anything …] said that they found his tomb empty. Some of our close friends
[this is more promising] say that they have seen him.
(A point in all of these accounts is the place of the
women—unreliable witnesses in Jewish tradition, but last at the cross, and
first at the empty tomb.)
After they finished, hear Jesus’ response:
He said to them, “How foolish you
are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the
Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning
with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the
Scriptures concerning himself.
Obviously he did not pull out a Torah scroll and show the
passages of Scripture. Rather, he took them to passages that they knew well,
passages read often in the synagogue, passages still read today at Shaarey
Zedek and other synagogues here in Winnipeg.
They reached their home and invited Jesus in. he sat down at
the table with them, and picked up the bread. Then he broke it [just as he had done
at the Last Supper], and they recognized him. They hurried back to Jerusalem,
never mind the onset of night. They hurried through the dark to find the Eleven
and tell them that the light of their lives was alive!
I have wondered what Scriptures he quoted to them in this
process of reinterpretation.
In the passage we read from Acts 2,
last Sunday and this Sunday, Peter preaches to the assembled Jews at Pentecost.
He applies Psalm 16 and Psalm 110 directly to Jesus. I wonder if that
identification goes back to this walk to Emmaus.
At the beginning of the sermon
Peter refers to the coming of the Holy Spirit, who continued the work of Jesus,
as fulfilling Joel 2.
The Gospel writers apply Psalm 22
(verses 1 and 18) to Jesus.
In Acts 4, the disciples apply
Psalm 2 to Jesus.
Probably the most important passage
was Isaiah 53. In John 12:37-38, John applies this passage to the ministry of
Jesus. In Acts 8:32-35, Philip applies the prophecy to Jesus. In 1 Peter
2:22-23, Peter identifies the suffering servant with Jesus. All of these uses
may go back to this walk to Emmaus, as well as to Jesus’ own ministry—see Luke
22:37, in which Jesus applies the prophecy to himself.
One could go through all of the OT passages quoted in the NT
(I think of Jeremiah 31:31-34, for example, or Mark 4’s use of the prophet Isaiah),
and I suspect that many of them go back to this conversation between the two
disciples and Jesus. Jesus took what they thought they knew—the terrible events
of the weekend and their Scriptures—and re-interpreted their Scriptures and
re-structured their lives, changing them from a source of death and despair to
a place of life and hope.
The Basic Point of the passage is this truth: That Jesus
re-interpreted their Scriptures so that they could know the truth about God and
about God’s Messiah, and he re-structured their lives so that what they had
experienced as loss and death became the source of life and eternal hope. So
also for us, God teaches us to read our Scriptures through the person of Jesus
Christ, who reinterprets and restructures our very lives. Our lives begin to
make sense as God speaks into our experience.
Excursus: I locate the basic point of the passage in the preached
word. My OT colleague at Providence locates it in the way that two disciples
recognized Jesus in the breaking of bread, so that the church reads this
passage as a call to the Lord’s Table, where we again meet Jesus. Perhaps we
are both right—the preached word, and the bread and cup. She is Anglican, and I
am Mennonite; we may reflect our own traditions as we read the passage.
A Story of
Reinterpretation
I told you last week that I have been reading the memoirs of
Leoda Buckwalter. She was born in India to missionary parents and served for
over 40 years with her husband, Allen, in India. A story from the last year of
their time in India shows how God uses the events of our lives to do what God
wants to do. God works, even through those parts of our lives that don’t make
sense.
In the final year of their service they were asked to
provide leadership to a small congregation in New Delhi for one year. They
moved from their home, about 15 miles away, to that neighbourhood, where they
rented the back rooms of a Hindu homeowner. For a year they served the
congregation, while continuing their daily work in the offices of the Far
Eastern Broadcasting Association (FEBA). Leoda describes the new setting in which they
found themselves for their last year in India. They were surrounded (not for
the first time) by Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, who saw them as foreigners and
outsiders, in spite of their 40+ years in India. They welcomed their new
congregation and friends with a gathering at their new home on the first
evening there. Here is Leoda’s account:
About nine o’clock
we heard a car outside. Allen stood up, took several steps, then sat down
again. I glanced at him. Did he sense evil as I did? He said nothing and the
moment passed. Half-an-hour later he went to take Shirin home, and the car was
missing! He came back in and said quietly, “Someone has stolen our car. Mr.
Sharma and I will have to inform the police.”
Our neighbors
gathered quickly to investigate another car, same make and color, that sat
across the road. Our landlord and Allen sped off on the motorcycle to the
police station. Shirin turned to me and said, “Auntie, this wasn’t an accident.
That car is out of gas. The thieves unlocked yours, then pushed it. That’s the
evil that I felt.”
“You did? I felt
it too …”
“Uncle must have
also. I wondered why he turned back and sat down. That wasn’t like him.”
“The Lord
prevented him from going.” Quick tears stung my eyes, even as she murmured,
“Yes.”
For three weeks
Allen and I rode the motorcycle forty-five minutes each way to the office.
Biting January winds whipped our faces, and we pulled our coats closer. We
heard nothing until the day when our names appeared in the Prayer Challenge. “Ask
the Lord to supply their need,” he read, then prayed, “Today we need the car!”
That afternoon the
police caught the professional car thieves, involved in six other car thefts.
To the amazement of our Hindu neighbors we received our car back intact. It had
been abandoned in the next state!
“It never happens!”
our new friends exclaimed. “Thieves always strip stolen cars.
What are you
teaching us, dear Lord? I cried again and again throughout that first month in
the Greater Kailash. One morning I heard the Lord say in my inner spirit, “My
child, I know what I am doing. When Allen and you became victims, you took up a
role that every Indian understands. Otherwise, your being foreigners would have
dominated. Now your neighborhood is reaching out to help you.”
Hear me carefully. God does not always explain events to us.
Rather God restructures our lives and gives them meaning—not that we understand
each event, but that the whole fits within God’s will. Paul puts it this in
Colossians 1:
15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on
earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or
authorities; all things have been created through him
and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
We use two words at the end of this description: In Christ
all things hold together. The Greek uses one word: sunesteken. Some
translations give this as “all things co-inhere” or “fit together” or “cohere”.
One idea within this word is that when all things’ “hold together” or “cohere”,
they begin to make sense. When nothing fits together, nothing makes sense. When
life fits together in Christ, we can see that it is right, even if we can’t
explain a particular piece.
We must be careful as we talk about God restructuring our
lives so that they make sense. Some things about our world defy explanation
this side of the grave. I was present at Shaarey Zedek some years ago for
Yizkor—a remembrance service that occurs several times a year within the
synagogue. We remember parents, siblings, and children who had died. Then the
Rabbi said, “Now we remember the six million.” Some things will never make
sense to us, and we should not pretend that they can. But all that is given to
Christ does fit together within God’s reality, within the Cross and
Resurrection: As someone has said, Reality is cross-shaped. What Jesus did for
the two men on the road to Emmaus was help them restructure their lives through
the cross and the resurrection. Jesus wants to do the same for us today.
Conclusion
Like the two disciples walking to Emmaus, we are trying to
make sense of our lives. We have experienced loss—the death of a spouse or a
parent, the loss of relationships, a miscarriage so that an anticipated child
never arrives, dreams that have died, hopes that have failed. As we walk
through life we wonder what has happened to us, and where God is to be found. Then
we notice Jesus walking with us. He begins to re-interpret and re-structure our
lives and our losses. We meet Jesus again as (in C.S. Lewis’ words) “the One
who was so full of life that, when he wished to die, he had to ‘borrow death
from others.’” Jesus borrowed our death, our sins, our losses, our pains, our
very selves; and he gives us back our selves alive with the resurrection.
Having learned the way of the cross, we then can pray the
Resurrection Sunday prayer of victory:
Almighty God, who through your
only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of
everlasting life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord’s
resurrection, may be raised from the death of sin by your life-giving Spirit;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Grace Bible Church
30 April 2017
Texts
Acts 2:14a, 36-41
1 Peter 1:17-23
Luke 24:13-35
Luke 24:13-35
On the Road to
Emmaus
13 Now that same day two of
them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. 14 They were talking with
each other about everything that had happened. 15 As they talked and
discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along
with them; 16 but they were kept from
recognizing him.
17 He asked them, “What are you discussing
together as you walk along?” They stood still, their faces downcast. 18 One of them, named
Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know
the things that have happened there in these days?”
19 “What things?” he asked. “About Jesus of
Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed
before God and all the people. 20 The chief priests and our
rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death,
and they crucified him; 21 but we had hoped that he
was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is
the third day since all this took place. 22 In addition, some of our
women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning 23 but didn’t find his body.
They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was
alive. 24 Then some of our
companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they
did not see Jesus.”
25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and
how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have
to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what
was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.
28 As they approached the
village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going
farther. 29 But they urged him
strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So
he went in to stay with them. 30 When he was at the
table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to
them. 31 Then their eyes were
opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. 32 They asked each other,
“Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us
on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”
33 They got up and returned
at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those with them,
assembled together 34 and saying, “It is true!
The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.” 35 Then the two told what
had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the
bread.
