Third Sunday of Easter, Year B, April 19, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

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

You probably know that the Gospel of John, for all of its beautiful love poetry and prose, is notoriously anti-Jewish or anti-Judean in its rhetoric about the death and resurrection of Jesus, written as if it were Jews and not Romans who were the threat to Jesus. In the Gospel of John is codified one side of a late first century argument about ways to move forward socially, politically and theologically in the precarious time after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. The writer of John 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, less offensive. Written for Gentile audiences, its rhetoric works to prove Jesus as one who can stand up to and prevail against other Gentile deities and that every claim made by Caesar was true of Jesus, but even more so: miraculously born, son of God, Savior, God from God, Redeemer, Liberator, Prince of Peace. If the writer of the Gospel of Luke just stopped with Book 1, we wouldn’t have much record of the details of family-feud-like conflicts of the first generations of the small groups of Jesus-following Jews and large numbers of 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 libelous anti-Jewish language. So we are not off the hook just because Holy Week is over. While it is probably good that during the Great Fifty Days of Easter, our lectionary no longer appropriates passages from the Hebrew Bible to bolster our resurrection narratives, we still have a mountain of work to do to grapple with the cause and effects of anti-Jewish rhetoric in our scriptures, especially on this side of the Shoah. In an article called, “Luke and his fellow Jews,” William Willimon insists that we have a moral imperative “to preach and teach Acts in such a way as to make it clear that this book is the means whereby the contemporary church is inextricably wedded to [God’s chosen people] Israel rather than a pretext for our severance from the people who first taught us gentiles to look for the Messiah.” And at the same time we must be clear that “their story is not merely subsumed by our story [and] the church is not the replacement for Israel.” [1] We are like siblings or cousins whose stories are not the same, but whose stories are inextricably woven together, both for better and for worse. That’s not a hard argument to make from this pulpit of course – but still, I can’t leave it unsaid.

Those early Jesus followers interpreted their scripture – Torah, Prophetic literature, and other Writings through the lens of experiences of the resurrection. I say experiences, because there were many stories about the resurrection of Jesus, some of which were recorded, some of those have survived, and none of which are the same. Not only are they not the same, some are not at all compatible! The only thing that is clear to me is that it seems to have been a struggle for those early writers to describe or define what resurrection meant, but it most often involved sharing food. The power of love stronger than death was most often in clear evidence when fish and bread were being shared with strangers. That is some of what we are doing at our communion table – although broiled fish has sadly been dropped from the Eucharistic menu!

Our Gospel passage from the end of the Emmaus story is so powerfully embodied, isn’t it? Earlier in the passage, Jesus has eaten a meal with the two who had invited him to join them after their conversation on the road to Emmaus. Here’s a still-hungry Jesus asking for and then eating a piece of broiled fish. You can almost smell it can’t you? Here is Jesus in the flesh – immediately recognizable to the disciples (but presumed to be a ghost), 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 and touch Jesus’ hands and feet and a request for food then consumed in their presence. These are the strongest possible images of reality in response to accusations of fantasy. Of course it seems impossible to us, but as I love to say, just because it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. [2] As far as I can tell, the Gospel writers – indeed the writers of all of our scripture – had far less interest in factual and literal than in discovery and meaning. And that seems true from the beginning of Genesis to the end of the Revelation to John. The question is not “how did this happen?” but “how is this true?”

So what might be true about this story? What might be true about this of a gathering of friends of Jesus, sticking together after his most gruesome and shameful death, talking about how their lives had been changed by him? Many of us have experienced the truth of those kinds of gatherings. Indeed, I imagine 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. Mark Davis translates the Greek here this way: “he made open-minded their mind to the like-mindedness of the writings” [3] (meaning the scriptures). They are seeing and hearing things they never noticed before – having had their minds opened. Here is a story of folks coming to the 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 people. So resurrection is an experience that is so powerful it can be experienced in the body; it often involves feeding others; it is mind-opening – mind-expanding; and finally, it involves repenting – turning around – turning toward the Divine and going out to spread the Word.

Back to William Willimon. He suggests that we might understand what has happened to the Church since the Acts of the Apostles, by looking again at Luke’s own story of the prodigal son – you know, a younger son asks for and then squanders his inheritance while his father is still alive, and while his older brother continues to behave responsibly. When the miserable and sorry younger son crawls back home on his hands and knees, his joyful father welcomes him with open arms. The angry older brother refuses his father’s invitation to join in the party.

Willimon writes: “[Since then] the story has taken a sad and unexpected turn, one Luke could not have imagined. The younger brother soon lost his repentant, contrite spirit. The shock of his father’s gracious reception wore off. He came to resent his older brother’s failure to party at his homecoming. He began to scheme against his brother, to take on airs, to forget how fortunate he was to be in the Father’s home. At last he even resorted to locking his brother out of the house. He bolted the door and the party which had been a celebration for the reception of a penitent became the victory bash of the triumphant usurper. The music and dancing continued. The smug younger brother had it all to himself. But outside in the dark still stood the Father where Luke left him, out in the darkness, standing where he had always been, beside the older brother. The younger brother had succeeded in locking out his brother, but alas, he had locked out his loving Father as well.” [4]

I wonder about the resentments that any of us harbors in our minds, where we refuse to celebrate, or where we have closed and locked the door, and in the process, inadvertently barred the love of God from entering in, inadvertently barring our own love from spreading out. Some of us are dutiful, loyal, and responsible; some of us are reckless and irresponsible. Some of us are overly proud. Some of us are overly ashamed. Most of us are somewhere in between. The Risen Lord is calling all of us to a closer relationship with the Divine.

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” [5] but in the midst of life and death, that’s often what matters the most. Mystery, meaning, risk, and relationship matter 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. One of my pottery teachers is fond of saying, “if you’re not scared, you’re not doing it right!” 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.

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