O God of life, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will. Amen.

      You probably know, especially if you hang around Emmanuel Church much, that the Gospel of John, for all of its beautiful poetry and prose, is notoriously anti-Jewish in its rhetoric about the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Written last, it codified one side of an argument about ways to move forward socially, politically and theologically in the generations after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.  The writer places anti-Jewish words anachronistically in the mouths of Jesus and his friends who were, of course, all Jewish.

      The Gospel of Luke, by contrast is often viewed as kinder and gentler.  Written by and for Gentiles, its rhetoric works to prove Jesus as one who can stand up to and prevail against other deities and that every claim made by Caesar was true of Jesus – miraculously born, son of God, Savior, God from God, Redeemer, Liberator, Prince of Peace.  (Did you know that Caesar claimed those titles?)  If the writer of the Gospel of Luke just stopped with Book 1, that is, The Gospel according to Luke, we wouldn’t have much record of the details of conflicts of the first generations of Jesus-following Jews and non-Jesus following Jews.  The writer of Luke saves all of that for the second book in the two-volume set, The Acts of the Apostles (or Acts for short).

      During Eastertide, the Church lectionary schedules readings from Acts which are chock full of anti-Jewish language.  Last week I omitted more than half of the scheduled reading and this week I left it out altogether.  Since there are no Hebrew Bible lessons appointed from the Law or the Prophets, in their place, last week and this, I’ve substituted a reading from Psalms – the Hebrew hymnal.  I tell you all of this because I don’t want you to be lulled completely into a happy state of post-Easter bliss, not suspecting that, as a church, we still have a mountain of work to do to grapple with the cause and effects of anti-Jewish rhetoric in our scriptures.  

      It was Rabbi Berman’s sermon on the psalms last week that made me notice something in today’s Gospel reading that I’ve never noticed before.  The resurrected Jesus says that he is the fulfillment of the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms!  The fulfillment of the Psalms is such an interesting idea to me – it’s like saying the fulfillment of the hymnal.  To my ears, that both elevates the Psalms (the Songs) and broadens the idea of fulfillment – it busts it wide open to consider so many hymns expressing so many ideas, feelings, hopes, complaints, promises, laments, dreams.  It seems particularly fitting to contemplate in a parish like Emmanuel where music and scripture and spirituality are so inextricably woven together into a broadcloth.

      It’s a moment of wideness which is particularly striking because this snapshot of the resurrected Jesus in Luke is so focused – and so narrow.  Anyone who heard me preaching about resurrection on Easter Sunday – about metaphor and mysticism – might wonder about this embodied encounter.  Here’s a hungry post-death Jesus eating a piece of broiled fish.  You can almost smell it can’t you?  Not a ghost; in this story, here is Jesus in the flesh – immediately recognizable to the disciples, absolutely famished after three days in the tomb! 

      And you can almost hear the argument that this account is answering, can’t you?  Jesus wasn’t really resurrected; his followers were just seeing things – ghosts.  Somehow this story answered that argument with an offer to see Jesus’ hands and feet and a request for food then consumed in their presence.  These are the strongest possible images of reality.  And I want to say three things about that.  The first is that this is one of many accounts of resurrection experiences that range from strictly metaphorical to strictly literal with most accounts having considerable ambiguity – lots of elbow room.  The second is that ultimately there is no way to prove (that I know of) that Jesus appeared in this way, nor is there a way to disprove it.  And while many or even all of us may find it implausible, we should not be so arrogant as to declare it impossible.  And the third is to say that just because it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.¹  As far as I can tell, the Gospel writers – indeed the writers of all of our scripture – had less interest in factual and literal than on discovery and meaning.  And that seems true from the beginning of Genesis to the end of the Revelation to John. 

      So what might be true about this story?  What might be true about this of a gathering of friends of Jesus, together after his most gruesome death, talking about how their lives had been changed by him?  We have all experienced the truth of those kinds of gatherings.  Indeed, they were talking about how their lives were continuing to be changed by him even after he had died.  For one thing, they were the ones who had been fed by Jesus and had witnessed Jesus feeding the multitudes, and here it is they who are doing the feeding.  They are realizing that their minds are being opened to new understandings of old stories and old songs.  They are seeing and hearing things they never noticed before.  Here is a story of folks understanding that it was now up to them to witness to the redemptive power of Love, capital L – not just to and for themselves, but to all the nations, all the peoples. 

      You know, if I asked you to tell me the beginning of the story of Jesus, you might tell me a story of his birth.  If you were particularly fond of the Gospel of Mark, you might start with his baptism in the river Jordan.  But I want to suggest to you that the beginning of the story of Jesus is what happened to and in the people who loved him after his death.  That’s the beginning of the story of Jesus.  That’s what made all the rest worth writing down.  The Gospels weren’t written like trip diaries where, at the beginning, one does not know what will happen next or how the journey will end.  Just the opposite, the Gospels were written after the resurrection, as stories of the journey that preceded the experience of resurrection.  Everything written about Jesus in our scripture is retrospective -- written looking back through the lens of resurrection:  his birth, his baptism, his ministry, his passion, and his death.

      It’s arguably irrational to believe that the Risen Lord appeared to the eleven and their companions, and it’s a little bit crazy to believe that the Risen Lord appears in the turbulence of our own lives.  But let’s not get “too preoccupied, suspicious, too busy to actually recognize God in our objective world” of fact and matter.  It’s a little bit crazy to lean in to “mystery and meaning and risk and relationship”² but in the midst of life and death, that’s often what matters the most.   And we can learn to know ways in which this story is true if we pay attention to our own experiences of life after death.  Albert Einstein once said that the most beautiful thing we can experience is mystery.

      That’s not the end of the story of course.  The experience of the Risen Lord is never meant to be a private gift or a purely personal experience.  The command to go and tell is explicit in so many places, that it’s clear that it is implicit here.  In case we’re not entirely sure what to tell, Jesus explains, “that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in the name of the Christ to all nations…You are witnesses of these things.” In other words, go out and preach the Gospel, using words only if necessary (to paraphrase St. Francis).   Jesus tells the people gathered to wait for the power from on high – the gift of the Holy Spirit.  But even the first hearers of this Gospel knew that they had already received the gift of the Spirit, that power from on high.  And so have we.  We already have everything we need to behold the redeeming work that Love is capable of doing.  It is up to us.  It is up to us to be witnesses to the truth of the power of Love again and again – to all nations.