April 20, 2003
The Real Action of Easter
The Rev. Dr. Riley E. Jensen

According to Luke’s account things happened fast that Easter Day.  It began with the women returning to the tomb to add final burial preparations only to find the tomb empty.  They had an encounter with angelic figures, were terrified by it all, and took the report back to the apostles who refused to believe the silliness of their women.

Then flash forward a few hours to observe two travelers trudging away from the city on a dusty road heading south.  They were deep in conversation discussing the events that had transpired over the past week.  It hardly seemed possible that they could have experienced such emotional extremes during that time.  Just a week ago the future looked so bright and hopeful.  The teacher from Galilee (whose followers had been increasing geometrically over the past weeks and months) had come to Jerusalem to be showered with a hero’s welcome.  Hundreds were waiting for him to give the word and an uprising would begin all over the country against the Roman occupiers.

For Zealots like these two it was a heady experience and more than just wishful thinking for they had been assured by a member of the inner circle, Judas himself, that all was in readiness.  But it didn’t happen.  Something went terribly wrong.  Those idiot religionists, Caiaphas and his crowd (who cared more about their positions of privilege than national destiny), had conspired with the Romans to cut off the rebellion before it began.

It had been a terrible week.  The multitudes had dispersed out of fear of being identified with the conspirators leaving only a handful of the faithful at the foot of the hill of torture, praying for one last miracle from the one who had performed so many.  But there was no miracle -- only a horrible death that ended all of their hopes and dreams with a tragic finality.  And now they were heading back home with the hope of rebuilding their lives from the rubble of despair.

If you are a Bible student or if you listened carefully to our Scripture lesson, you recognized this as part of the story of the encounter on the road to Emmaus.  It is found only in the Gospel of Luke, and it is part of a group of post resurrection appearances by the risen Christ.  I have taken a few liberties which you will recognize upon close comparison with the story.  However, I believe that the liberties are consistent with the bigger picture and can help us enter into the spirit of what is happening here.

Most of the time when this story is told, it is told by morning people – you know the dawn patrol.  They say that the world is divided between morning people and night people.  To the degree that is true there seems to be little doubt that the morning people had more influence when it came to telling the Easter story.  The women are up at the crack-of-dawn heading for the tomb.  They go there out of despair and not expectation and when they find an empty tomb, it is not cause for rejoicing but confusion.

They knew as we know that there could have been many causes for that empty tomb.  They didn’t leap to the conclusion of a resurrection any more than we would have.  First of all they had been there.  They had seen Jesus take his final breath, drop his head, and slump into extinction.  Secondly, their Jewish faith was a realistic faith.  In this life you observed halahkah, the way of righteousness, which meant that you lived the best life you could in obedience to the commandments but when life was over, it was over.  There probably was some kind of “other side”, but it was all very gray and undefined, certainly not the golden streets and the heavenly mansions that later Christians would talk about.

When we come to the Easter story, we tend to make a great deal out of the empty tomb, but the fact is that doesn’t prove much more than it was empty.  It was first assumed there had been foul play.  The body had been stolen.  That was a logical conclusion.  Why allow the grave of the rebel, Jesus, to become a monument for the revolutionary cause!

So that Easter morning presents us with a confusing and contradictory time.  People are running back and forth.  Rumors are rampant.  But the truth is that not much has changed.  Yes, we have an empty tomb, but there was more reason to believe that an evil conspiracy was afoot than resurrection from the dead.  That’s why as we move through Easter Day I want to point us to the Road to Emmaus as the place where the real action of Easter is taking place.

We left our friends trudging down that dusty road, reviewing the events of the week, and trying to understand how what seemed so right could go so terribly wrong.  Then they were joined by a stranger.  More likely they looked around and saw someone walking nearby.  Of course, the Gospel writer helps us to enter the story with a dramatic flourish.  We know the stranger is Jesus but “something kept them from seeing who it was”.

I don’t think of this as being so much some cosmic veil of blindness as the kind of thing that happens to all of us when we encounter someone out of context.  It certainly happens to me all the time.  I’m pushing a cart down a grocery aisle at D&W.  It’s usually my day off.  I’m wearing my favorite leather jacket with the collar up, my San Francisco Giants baseball cap, and 24 hours worth of stumble on my face.  I run into one of you coming in the opposite direction, but you greet me with unrecognizing glassy eyes -- maybe nodding a greeting out of politeness as mid-westerners are prone to do.

So let’s not make too much out of the lack of recognition.  From their point-of-view Jesus was dead and besides the last time they saw him he wasn’t looking his best.  But the conversation goes on as they are happy to include this stranger in their discussion.  You see, it is part of the nature of grief to roll the experience around in our mind and to think about it from every angle as we try to understand what happened and our part in it.

The blindness came from their grief.  They were so mired down in that slough of despair and despondency that they couldn’t fully appreciate what was happening around them.  One of the most interesting things about this story is the authenticity of the encounter in the absence of bells and whistles.  This is not Superman disguised as Clark Kent suddenly flashing the big “S”.  It’s not even the risen Christ walking through a wall as he does on another occasion. 

The “aha” only comes after there has been an authentic encounter – the patient stranger helping two people work through the pain of their loss.  And that’s the interesting thing about this encounter.  It’s no hit-and-run event, “See who I am!  Tell your friends!”  And then he’s off to get the next notch on the belt of resurrection proof.

I see this as a lesson for the quick fix -- proof text society of immediacy in which we all live.  We want our television programs to have a happy ending in a half hour.  We want our wars to shock-and-awe the enemy into a quick surrender.

We prefer formulas for change that come from praying magical prayers more than from engaging in the hard work that gets us where we need to be.  It may be that the real action of Easter has less to do with the spectacular nature of the empty tomb (as important as that is) than it does with developing a relationship with two people over several hours and a meal.

Every Easter Sunday when I walk into the pulpit (and this is my 31st Easter Sunday sermon), I do so with no less enthusiasm and excitement.  Of course, the crowds are bigger and you don’t get into this work if you are not turned on by larger groups of people gathered for the common purpose of praising God.  The smell of the lilies, the colors of spring, the pageantry of the occasion make this a time that I look forward to as much as I hope you do.

However, I am also conscious that apart from the numbers this is not my normal Sunday morning crowd.  You have gathered in families.  Some have come from far and wide to do so.  So there is a tribal feel about our gathering, and this is a good thing for families to be together and certainly to worship together on such a high holy day.  But there is something else.  It is  an air of expectation.  It is a sense of hopefulness on the part of some and almost a gauntlet of challenge thrown down by others.

I know that for some Easter is a cultural event and for others it is a grand festival.  But for others who come with both skepticism and hopefulness it is yet one more chance for someone to make sense out of this seemingly incomprehensible cornerstone of the Christian faith, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  I can tell you that is a burden that I accept gladly and humbly because I share it with the Holy Spirit of God whose job it is to help us to understand and accept the truth of God’s love for us.

Returning to our story it is clear that the resurrected Christ was not immediately recognized.  There was some preparation involved.  Part of that preparation was a good old-fashioned Bible study.  It is interesting that the risen Christ did not rely on special effects to convince and persuade, but simply said, “Remember!”

You see few of us come to faith through some amazing revelatory experience.  We don’t know exactly which scriptures Jesus studied with them.  We only need to be reminded of what the scriptures are – the record of how God has worked among God’s people over time.  A friend of mine was at his father’s hospital bedside.  His father was dying and they both knew it.  In a gesture of reassurance the father reached out and took his son’s hand, and said, “Remember, God has helped me through many obstacles in my life, and I know he will be with me through this one.”  You see, it is the work of memory that leads us to insight and acceptance.

There are those words of dramatic revelation that we repeat often when we come to the communion table, “And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him in the breaking of the bread.”  But I would suggest to you that before their eyes were opened, they were prepared for that moment of recognition by doing the work of memory.  “Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us!”

You and I respond with awe, admiration, and critique, “Who wouldn’t be convinced by the teaching of the master teacher himself?”  It says “Their eyes were opened!”  Who of us doesn’t long for that moment of clarity and insight when it all seems to come together and we can say, “Yes, I get it, I believe!”

But let’s back up a moment and be reminded that what was happening here was not the work of conversion – making believers out of non-believers.  These two fellow travelers on the road to Emmanus were already believers.  Maybe they had misunderstood, maybe they had misinterpreted, but they were among those who believed in God and were trying to follow God the best way they knew how.

They were already part of a community of faith that believed in the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel.  They were already among those who believed in a God of love and justice who would deliver them from oppression.  But their eyes had been clouded as ours are.  They lived in a world as we do where might makes right and love suffers.  They couldn’t recognize the Jesus in their midst until they understood the plan of God in history.

The story doesn’t record which passages from the Hebrew scriptures the risen Christ taught them from, but I have to believe that one of them was Isaiah 53 which describes the coming Messiah as “despised and rejected and acquainted with sorrow.”  They had been blinded because they had refused to believe that God was great enough to work through suffering and death.

But now as the bread was broken (after hours of conversation and probably debate) “their eyes were opened and they knew him and he vanished out of their sight,” says the King James Version.  A few weeks ago in a sermon I quoted from Freud’s famous disciple, C.J.Jung, who when asked if he believed in God said, “No, there are some things too important to believe in, I know God.”

When we talk about belief, we speak as children of the Enlightenment.  For an argument to have force the logic needs to come together and then we will be convinced.  But for many of us in this room, faith happens.  And it happens not as the result of a logical syllogism, but rather out of participation over time in a community of faith that sees the mighty acts of God revealed in its midst time-and-time again.

I will not say to you that every one of us knows beyond a shadow of a doubt because doubt is part of the human condition.  And as much as we want to believe, we are always praying for God to help our unbelief.  But our faith takes us back again-and-again to that community of memory where we remember all that God has done for us in the past so that we can participate in that community of the present where we know.

The climax of that first Easter Day for these disciples is that “they knew him.”  They recognized the risen Lord who was dead but now contrary to all hope and expectation was alive and in their midst.  They did not have to hear about the resurrection and they were not asked to believe in the resurrection.  They saw the resurrected one in their midst.  It was one of those moments of supreme clarity and wonderful knowledge.

But then, “he vanished”!  Poof!  Gone!  Out of their sight!  And that was not just a dramatic ending for a storyteller who didn’t know how to bring it to a close.  For the risen Christ is not a trophy to be placed on a shelf to be trotted out as our prize possession in proof of the legitimacy of our faith.

But rather he went before them from among them -- elusive, sporadic, transcending, and surprising.  You never know where he is going to turn up next only that there are those moments of grace that come to us from time-to-time, often in the community of faith, when the bread is broken, our eyes are opened, our hearts burn within us, and we know!

Christ is Risen!!

He is Risen Indeed!!!

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