April 22, 2012
Luke 24:36b-48
This morning I want to continue a theme I picked up in my sermon on Easter Sunday. On Easter we used the gospel reading from Mark, which ends pretty abruptly at the tomb with the angel saying he is not here, he will meet you later in the city. I talked on Easter about what an open ended message that was for all of us. In Mark’s resurrection, we are not shown any images of what the risen Christ might look like. Instead, we are told to go out into the world and expect to have our own experiences of the risen Christ. I said that Mark points us toward a future with Jesus that is still unknown, an unseen future into which we must live.
In this morning’s gospel reading from Luke we have a contrast with Mark’s simple tale and at the same time, some connection with the message that our future with Jesus is yet unwritten. Luke’s story today gives us a lot of information about Jesus that we didn’t get from Mark. We have Jesus appearing in the presence of the gathered disciples who are startled frightened. We have Jesus making himself known in the act of sharing food with the disciples. We hear that Jesus’ life and death is grounded in the scripture and tradition of God’s unfolding revelation to Israel, and finally, we hear the charge that the message of Jesus is to be proclaimed to all the world, beginning in Jerusalem. Luke gives us a lot more information about Jesus, but a bit of the background of Luke’s message brings me back around to the theme of an unknown future with Jesus. It also makes me think of Jor-el.
You remember Jor-el, right. No not some obscure figure in Hebrew scripture, though the name does sound like Hebrew. Jor-el was Superman’s father. He was well known to those of us who lived with stacks of DC comics and who considered ourselves followers the caped crusader. You may remember the story. Superman ended up on Earth because his planet, Krypton, was about to be destroyed. His father, Jor-el, packed him of in a home-made space capsule--not unlike Moses’ mother putting him in the Nile--and sent him off to earth hoping that his son would find a new life. In that capsule, Jor-el packed a few essential things his son would need to make it in the new world.
In a similar way, Luke is preparing Jesus for a journey into a new situation and he is sending him out with the essentials he will need for his new life. Luke’s world, like that of Jor-el, has been rocked in ways that make it difficult for Jesus to remain in Jerusalem. Let me explain.
It is believed that Mark’s gospel was written twenty or thirty years before the others, and that between the time of those writings, the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. When Mark wrote his gospel, the Jesus movement was centered in Jerusalem. Christians were seen as a sect of Judaism and the home of Christianity was certainly in the ancient holy center of God’s people. By the time the time Luke and Matthew and John’s gospels were written Christianity’s future was moving out into the larger world of the Mediterranean. There were those in Jerusalem who thought maybe the new sect had brought on the trouble with Rome. The Jesus movement was not as welcome in Jerusalem as it had once been. Christianity had moved along trade routes and come to life in Asia Minor, Greece and Rome. The later gospel writers were writing for a new audience, and along with the stories of Jesus they packed a few essentials for life in a new and unknown future.
Like Matthew with his great commission and John who has Jesus in a long discourse hand over his mission to the disciples, Luke includes a commissioning in which he says that the message of the gospel is for the whole world. The list of essentials we hear Luke including as he commends the message of Jesus to its future in the world includes basic elements of the faith that you and I still recognize.
First, Jesus becomes known in the community of those who gather in his name. We know that to still be true. There are all kind of ways Jesus can become known to us, but they all start here, in this place where we tell the stories and where we offer our hopes and our lives and eventually ourselves as disciples. Then there is the basic central message that Jesus becomes known to us in the context of a shared meal. For two thousand years the bread broken by Christians on this, the first day of the week, has marked us, transformed us and fed us. The meal we share at the table can seem to us an everyday act of piety and it can be the deepest of mysteries. This table fellowship with the risen Christ will continue long after we are gone. Another of the basics is that Jesus puts previous revelation in context and is himself put in context by those same scriptures. This one is especially important for Luke. Luke, who goes on to tell the story of the new Church in the book of Acts, wants to make sure we know that Jesus is the keystone in salvation history. And finally, Luke wants us to know that the message is to be spread to all the corners of the earth. Christians have a mission in the world. All of these are packed away with care by Luke and handed over to a world and a future Luke could not have imagined. Luke seems to have chosen well, for these Christian essentials still provide the structure and framework of our faith.
Of course, another theme kind of jumps out as we read the story from Luke this morning. In today’s story, unlike the Emmaus story which precedes it or John’s breakfast on the beach, Jesus’ eating of the piece of fish is used to provide an extra level of surety about the truth of the risen Christ. A ghost can’t eat a piece of fish, but the risen Jesus can. Luke wants us to know that this part of the story is true. That would seem to be the hardest part of what Luke and John and Jor-el had to do. Some things you can pack along with what you are commending to the future, but how do you pass along what you have come to cherish in your heart about this person, this experience you are having to let go of. Maybe the answer, at least in the case of Jesus, is you don’t. Jesus will be ok out there. Jesus will make himself known among new people in new ways. We know that to be true. You’ve given us the basics Luke. We can work with those. In fact we are called to keep working with those basics in this new world.
When Luke spoke of Jesus being foretold in scripture he was referring to the promise of an heir of David restoring the kingdom of God. He was thinking of Isaiah whose suffering servant would provide a homecoming for the exiles. He had in mind psalm 22, my God, my God...which mirrors the story of the crucifixion. Maybe it is still up to us in our time to continue the work of looking at history through Jesus. We were told that scripture proves the truth of Jesus. Maybe Jesus is also the embodiment of the prophet’s call for a new kind of sacrifice of self giving and service to the poor. In our time, for many, the mission of making Christ known is centered at least as much in service to others as in words about God and Jesus. Christians have gone back and forth between those two calls since the beginning, and I am certain that the call of our heart whatever it may be in that two sided mission is important for our world in our time. In this new world of ours the hope of meeting Christ in the community gathered continues, and in our best times we challenge ourselves to see Christ in new places and among people who are very different from us. As the world becomes smaller through communication we have to look for ways to experience the risen Christ in a community where some of us are Christians and some are Muslim, Jews, Hindu and on and on. Luke, who so obviously trusted the experience of Jesus showing himself to the disciples, sent us not just a story about one moment in history, but a lens through which we might watch for the risen Christ in our own time.
The truth of the story that luke so desperately want to convey really can’t be given. I am often dismayed as I hear the early evangelists trying to convince us at such a distance of the solid reality of what they are proclaiming. I hear them, but I can’t always feel the certainty they want to impart. That’s the way it is when you have to release your most cherished beliefs into the unknown world of the future. The deepest, most profound truth of the story has to do with experience and that has to be lived. And we know something about that too. We experience the risen Christ in little ways and in profound ways. In the face of another person, in moments of insight, in a voice that reassures us in hard times, in the call to love and serve, in lives changed. We live those moments and then we return to this place with its community, and table, and lore of scripture and tradition. Here we put our experiences of the risen Christ in the context of their experiences. Here we find encouragement to keep watching and expecting to meet him in new ways in lives yet unseen. JB
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