Thomas Kleinert
Nancy and I were waiting for our Uber driver Friday night, just outside TPAC, when suddenly Margie and her mom walked out, and after a second, we realized that we had all just been in the same theater and seen the same show, The Color Purple. And saying “seen the same show” doesn’t even get close to describing the experience of having witnessed a powerful musical performance that moved us to tears, made us laugh out loud, and had us jump up from our seats, more than once, for a standing ovation. We already knew the story. Some of us had read Alice Walker’s book, all of us had watched the 1985 Steven Spielberg movie as well as last year’s outstanding musical adaptation directed by Blitz Bazawule. But Friday night was different. Outside on the sidewalk, we joked about getting the word out that anyone who’d been to Polk Theatre on Friday could sleep in on Sunday morning since they’d already been to church—except that we only got to watch the communion picnic at the end, instead of joining the cast on stage.
Now we’re all here together this morning; you didn’t sleep in, and some of you may have had a déjà vu moment during the Gospel reading. Didn’t we hear that very story just last week? About the disciples together in a room and suddenly Jesus standing among them, saying, “Peace be with you?”[1] Are we in some weird Groundhog Day loop? Or are we actually meant to hear the same story again? Maybe because ‘it didn’t take the first time,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean? Or because the story is so good that, like children at bedtime, we want to hear it again and again, for weeks, for the peace of hearing it?
I think it may be a little like The Color Purple—you’ve read the book, you’ve watched the movie, but then a group of people does something with the story that draws you in completely and turns you from an audience member into a participant. It’s no longer the same story, because now, you’re in it. Last week was John’s take on what the first witnesses had passed on, and today’s reading is Luke’s take on the same material. Both of them, of course, along with generations of witnesses and preachers, hope that, when we leave, we’re no longer just a gospel audience, but participants in the story of Jesus, folks who jump up from their seats and step onto the world stage, ready to live this story inside out.
Hearing the story again a week later means we get to linger a little longer in that moment when the whole world is changed for good. It’s like we get to push the pause button and look around and ponder what God has done in raising Jesus from the dead. It takes time for the new reality to sink in and reshape our imagination, how we look at each other now, how we see ourselves, how we think and act, now that Christ is risen from the dead; it takes time.
“Christ is risen, time to move on,” shouts the world. The Easter candy has been on sale, 50% off the first week, then 75%. “Clear the shelves to make room for whatever comes next, no matter what it is, as long as it sells.” The witnesses whisper, “Pause,” and we get to step out of the hamster wheel. We get to take a breath. We get to look around. We get to ponder. We get to inhabit this wondrous moment when the words of the women, dismissed as an idle tale, become the resurrection life of a people. We get to inhabit, really inhabit, and not just fly by, this moment when the first witnesses were “gathered together in bewilderment, astonishment, and incredulity.”[2]
They were talking about what kind of day they’d been having, the messy mix of feelings, reports, and unbelievable statements.
And while they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified; they thought that they were seeing a ghost.
They had no words, no concepts for any of this, only the startling encounter with Jesus who clearly, suddenly was with them, but not like he had been with them before. Luke uses words like startled, terrified, disbelievingand wondering to draw us into the moment where the newness of resurrection life just erupted. We get to be with them in that moment, we get to bring our own wonder and confusion, our doubts and questions and hesitation. Is it a ghost, an apparition? Is it the wishful fantasy of a group of grieving followers?
“Do you have something to eat?” Jesus asks. It’s one of the most basic requests a human being can make. It’s the question thousands of children in Gaza and Sudan ask their parents. This question and a morsel of food are what makes ‘peace’ more than just a word. This question and a piece of broiled fish turn the trauma of violent loss into communion. “Do you have something to eat?” — Yes, we do, here, have some more. At the home in Emmaus, the guest became the host, and the risen Lord was made known to the disciples in the breaking of the bread. In this scene, the Lord of life is a hungry beggar, and we begin to see who he is when we give him something to eat. It begins with a simple response to the most basic human need.
He said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”
The Risen One is present, but he speaks about himself in the past tense. There is continuity here, physical, embodied continuity, but it’s far from an obvious or self-evident continuity. Luke writes, Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. Our minds must be opened to take in the newness, to begin to perceive and comprehend its scope and meaning. Nothing is self-evident here, neither the body nor the scriptures, but the Risen One himself opens eyes and texts and minds.
Opening minds can seem like the biggest challenge imaginable, especially when you find yourself surrounded by people with thoroughly closed minds who won’t budge, even when you carefully present your best case with great patience. Elizabeth Kolbert, writing about Christopher Columbus, noted “his reluctance to acknowledge the magnitude of what he found.
In four trips across the ocean, he never… came upon anything remotely like what he had expected: not only were the people novel and strange; so were the geography, the topography, the flora, and the fauna. Still, to the end of his days Columbus insisted that Cuba was part of China, and that he had arrived at the gateway to Asia. He didn’t want to have discovered someplace new; he wanted to have reached someplace old, and, as a result, was blind to the real nature of the world he had stumbled onto.[3]
When the first disciples stumbled onto the radical newness of the crucified Jesus risen from the dead, they didn’t see much of anything until they let the risen Lord open their eyes and minds, and the scriptures. It was the interplay between Christ’s presence and his guidance in the study of the scriptures that gave them the words to speak about the meaning of Jesus in its true magnitude for the life of the world.
Harvey Cox used to teach an undergraduate course at Harvard, “Jesus and the Moral Life.” Some of the students were Christians, and many were not, but apparently the content of the course was so compelling that Cox had to move the class to a theater usually reserved for rock concerts. And what theologian doesn’t quietly dream of rock star status? In his book, When Jesus Came to Harvard, Cox talks about why he initially ended his class with the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and death. The students came from a variety of religious backgrounds, he explains, but
there was another reason why I had been trying to steer around the Easter story: Classrooms, at least the ones I teach in, are not viewed as the proper venue for testimonies. What is supposed to go on in classrooms is ‘explanation.’ But not only did I not know how to explain the Resurrection to the class, I was not even sure what ‘explaining’ it might mean.[4]
Having taught the course a few times, he began to suspect, that by leaving out this part of the story he was “being intellectually dishonest, a little lazy, and cowardly.” And so he decided that he would “sketch out some of the current interpretations of the Resurrection and suggest that [the students] would have to decide among them on their own.” But when he began his sketch, he was in for a big surprise. He had his mind opened by the witness of the prophets.
It immediately became evident that stories of raising the dead in the Old Testament did not have to do with immortality. They are about God’s justice.… They did not spring up from a yearning for life after death, but from the conviction that ultimately a truly just God simply had to vindicate the victims of the callous and the powerful.[5]
Resurrection hope was a thirst for justice, a hunger for righteousness to be real on earth as it is in heaven—and in raising Jesus from the dead, God affirmed and fulfilled that hope. “To restore a dead person to life is to strike a blow at mortality,” wrote Cox, “but to restore a crucified man to life is to strike a blow at the violent system that executed him.”
We’re all of us “slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared.”[6] But the Risen One is among us, opening hearts, opening minds, and never tiring of guiding our feet into the way of peace.[7] Somebody may ask, “Do you have something to eat?” and you may invite them to lunch and great joy may erupt. You hear Jesus say, “Peace be with you,” and it sounds just like, “Good morning.” But then, a week later, you hear him say it again, “Peace be with you,” and it sounds like he’s shouting across the whole world and across all ages, and what you hear is, “Shalom, all y’all! Nothing will stop the peace of God from reigning over earth and heaven!”
[1] The gospel reading for the Second Sunday of Easter was John 20:19-31
[2] Joseph Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV. The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 1572.
[3] Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Lost Mariner,” The New Yorker (October 14, 2002) http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/10/14/the-lost-mariner
[4] When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 273-274.
[5] Ibid., 274.
[6] Luke 24:25
[7] Luke 1:79