Introduction
Memories of Easters past. 1972—schoolgirls at Matopo Secondary
dressed in white, singing “Namhla Uvukile” [Today He has risen!] before the
African Autumn dawn. 1991—my parents shaking Lois and me awake with the news that
Dad Heise has just died; the cancer had finished its work.
Resurrection Sunday! The central day of the church’s year,
and the event that stands at the centre of our lives. We have walked the way of
the cross with Jesus, and now we walk in the resurrection of Jesus.
In our own congregation we have experienced the loss and
grief that is basic to human existence. Loved family members have died. Jobs
have come to an end. Dreams have failed. Relationships that we thought would
last until Heaven have been torn apart. As we heard the story of Jesus’
crucifixion retold on Thursday and Friday, I felt that it was speaking my own
grief.
We have walked paths of loss this past year that we never
thought we would see, and the grief is still fresh. For all of us. Like the two
nameless disciples in our text, we are processing what has happened to us, and
we can feel our own losses as we walk again through the events of Good Friday. We
are seeking direction for our future, just as these disciples were trying to
figure out what they would do now that the Messiah had been executed.
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 can go home. They headed
off about the middle of the afternoon, talking over all that had happened as they
walked.
Jesus joined them on the way. They didn’t recognize him,
even when he asked what they were talking about. Why were they “kept from
recognizing him”? Perhaps they wanted to move on to resolution too quickly; we
often do so. Perhaps they needed to remain in a time of questioning and
searching longer, so that they could deal fully with their grief. It is often
so.
Ironically, talking to the man who was in the middle of
those events, 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!
“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 his close friends [this
was 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.
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 like 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.
- Certainly the Gospel writers apply Psalm 22 (verses 1 and 18) and Psalm 110 to Jesus. So also Luke applies Psalm 2 to Jesus (the disciples’ prayer in Acts 4:25-26).
- Probably the most important passage was Isaiah 53: see John 12:37-38 (John’s comment on the ministry of Jesus); Acts 8:32-35 (Philip applies the prophecy to Jesus); 1 Peter 2:22-23 (Peter identifies the suffering servant with Jesus); Luke 22:37 (Jesus applies the prophecy to himself).
The Basic Point of this whole 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.
A Small Word Game
I first studied this material systematically 37 years ago. I
had to preach eight sermons over a period of two semesters for my homiletics
course at AMBS. Easter 1980 I preached the last of these sermons on this
passage. I was an eager young seminarian, so I translated the passage from the
Greek myself before writing my sermon. In the process, I made found something
about verses 22-24: “In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the
tomb early this morning but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that
they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. Then some of our
companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they
did not see Jesus.” They went to the tomb [expecting to find death] … they went
to the tomb [and found evidence of life].
The discovery was this: The word for tomb in Greek is mnēmeion,
from which we get the English word “mnemonic”. A mnemonic is something that
helps you remember something else—a memory aid. So the word for tomb means “a
remembrance”. We have the same link in English between the grave and a memorial
stone that sits on the grave. The discovery echoes the basic idea in Luke’s
passage: As we remember the events of our lives, they become either a place of
death (a tomb with the stone rolled in front of it) or a place of life (an
empty tomb with the covering stone rolled away).
A Story
Let me tell you a story of a life-giving memory of an event
filled with death. This story should come with the kind of warning you find
before TV shows that are filled with explicit violence.
Several weeks ago we had a special guest at Providence. Sokreaksa
Himm is a survivor of the Killing Fields in Cambodia. His father was a teacher
when the Khmer Rouge overthrew the Cambodian government in 1975. They were
particularly brutal to anyone who was part of the intellectual class, so his
family was relocated to a village where they were forced to work in the fields
as part of being re-educated. The “Forgiveness Project” website tells his story
thus:
In
1977 at the age of 14, Sokreaksa “Reaksa” Himm saw 13 members of his family
murdered by Khmer Rouge soldiers in the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
Miraculously surviving the massacre, Reaksa swore revenge against the men
responsible for the loss of his family. Years later, after surviving the
horrors of refugee camps and roving death squads, Reaksa had a life-changing
conversion to Christianity that gave him a whole new reason to seek the
murderers: to forgive them. … Reaksa authored two books on the tragedy and his
journey to forgiveness: ‘The Tears of My Soul’ and ‘After the Heavy Rain’.
There is also currently a film in production called ‘Reaksa: A True Story of
Forgiveness’ www.reaksafilm.com.
After years of surviving the
“Killing Fields”, I, along with my father and brothers were dragged to the edge
of a mass grave and slashed with machetes and clubbed with hoes. Minutes later,
I awoke in the grave in a pile of my dead and dying relatives. I was able to
climb out and hide in nearby weeds when the killers left to round up my female
relatives and complete their macabre mission.
When they
returned, they murdered my mother and sister. As the soldiers threw dirt on the
people who were my entire life, I swore revenge. I was alone, hungry and scared
and in the coming weeks I made my way across the jungle, avoiding soldiers by
day and sleeping in trees by night to escape roaming tigers. I eventually found
my way to the “safety” of a succession of refugee camps all the while planning
and plotting the deaths of the men who murdered my loved ones.
I fled to Thailand
and spent five horrific years in refugee camps, including Khao-I-Dang, before
immigrating to Canada. There, I would come to an even greater moment of truth
when I eventually came to know Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. Through
years of Bible study and communion with God, I started a new life in the west
but could not release myself from the prison of hatred, anger and vengeance. I
discovered that forgiveness truly is divine and that as the years passed, my
blood oath and all consuming ire were in direct conflict with my new nature. [DC:
In our chapel Reaksa described their vows in this blood oath—to find his family’s
killers and take revenge; if he could not, to become a Buddhist monk; if he
could do neither of these, to leave Cambodia forever.]
The anger against
the killers was as great as the grief for my family and it burned inside me
like a great ball of fire. For years I cultivated elaborate fantasies in which
I tortured and murdered the killers again and again, projecting all my rage and
pain I bottled inside myself in my plans for what I would do to the men when I
found them. I realized that I would never know true peace until I had dealt
with this as well. I had to find a way of forgiving them, before the bitterness
inside destroyed me. …
I began to
meditate on the Bible, and I found in the book of Psalms a wonderful source of
support and comfort. Here was someone like me, David, who had known despair and
who was not afraid to cry out to God in pain and anguish. Across the centuries
I heard the voice of a man who wept and cried to his God, and yet who always
reaffirmed the reality of God’s ability to keep him safe.
Forgiveness
doesn’t come through vengeance, and neither does forgetting: no amount of
violence could erase my memories. So I gave up my urge to inflict pain on those
who had hurt me and killed my family. I knew it wouldn’t help, and nursing
those desires was only damaging me; my emotional, spiritual, physical and
psychological being.
In time I
discovered that forgiveness opens a channel for real spiritual power to work in
my life; a power which brings healing and wholeness.
In the years that
followed, I began a new mission: one that still included finding the men
responsible for the deaths of my loved ones but for a new purpose. I no longer
wanted to seek their deaths, but to tell them of the life and hope that I
found.
I eventually found
two of the men involved in my family’s deaths, in the very village and among
the very people they terrorized over two decades before. Initially on hearing
that I wanted to meet the men to forgive them, many people thought that my plan
was just another attempt to locate the men so that I could take my revenge. To
the surprise of the men and most of the villagers, I shook hands with the two
men and forgave them. [http://theforgivenessproject.com/stories/sokreaksa-himm-cambodia/]
In our chapel Reaksa told how he had come to Providence
after his conversion to do an MA in counselling. He went on to finish a
doctoral degree in Psychology, but it was this act of forgiveness that set him
and his enemies free from the power of hatred and fear. He showed us pictures
of him giving the men three gifts—a scarf, a Bible, and a new shirt—as symbols
of his forgiveness. He told us how they trembled when he embraced them. He
talked of the fear they had felt when ordered to do the executions, or face the
loss of their own families.
Another part of the story, a wonderful piece of the absurd
and overflowing grace of God, is the beginning of “Hockey Night in Cambodia”.
Reaksa began two schools—one for younger children, and a high school. Since the
young people had nothing to do after school, he introduced them to hockey,
which became a passion while he was here. Somehow, I don’t know how, he connected
with some NHL players who have helped to promote hockey in Cambodia. God’s
overflowing grace brings life into places we could never predict! (I found some
YouTube videos about the work done in Reaksa’s village, as well as a Vancouver Sun story from 2011 on this phenomenon.
I also found evidence of a Hockey Night in Cambodia league in the capital, Phnom
Penh, but I don’t know if these are at all connected to each other.)
Conclusion
We come to Easter Sunday through the quiet Sabbath of Holy
Saturday. 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. I don’t mean that we
understand why someone died or why someone broke relationship with is, but God
acts so that our loss becomes a place where the tomb brings forth life. Life
himself walks with us. As Reaksa’s example shows, God brings life out of death—if we ask God to!
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.” We realize that Jesus borrowed our own death, our sins, our losses,
our pains, our very self; and he gives us back our selves alive with the
resurrection. We learn what the Friday prayer in the Anglican Prayer Book
means:
Almighty God, whose dear Son went
not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he
was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may
find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your
Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for
ever and ever. Amen.
Having learned the prayer 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.
Steinbach
Mennonite Church
16 April 2017
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.
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