Acts 2:14a,36-47 Ps. 116:10-17
1 Peter 1:17-23 Luke 24:13-35
Lectionary Link
In the accounts of what happened after Jesus died, his followers experienced disappointment and unrequited expectations, as was expressed in the words of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They were speaking with the incognito Risen Christ who had engaged them in conversation and they said the sad words of regret: "But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel."
In the accounts of what happened after Jesus died, his followers experienced disappointment and unrequited expectations, as was expressed in the words of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They were speaking with the incognito Risen Christ who had engaged them in conversation and they said the sad words of regret: "But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel."
In many ways the Gospels are an explanation for this disappointment. What had been the expectations for Jesus of Nazareth by those who followed and for those with prevailing notions of what a future superhero messiah would do for Israel?
In short, one of the messianic expectations was for Israel to be redeemed and this kind of redemption would mean that the people would be delivered from the oppression of the Roman occupiers. One of the prevalent notions of the messiah was that he would be one like David, a military liberator.
The incognito Risen Christ walking on the Emmaus road with the disciples became a scholar of the Hebrew Scriptures. He began to point out that there was other attributes of the Messiah which could be found in the Scriptures, particularly the phase of the Messiah when he would be a suffering servant.
The suffering servant Messiah is a harder messiah to convince about to people who are also suffering and under the conditions of oppression.
So the question might be, what can this suffering servant Messiah do for us now? How can his Messiahship be relevant to the lives of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth now that Jesus had died upon the cross?
Can we appreciate how this wisdom anecdote encapsulates the features of life experience of the members of the Lucan communities? Can we appreciate the insights which this story has for us who live in the era of the post-crucified Jesus of Nazareth who is not seen but still is somehow able to register a dynamic connection which is characterized by the confession of there being a Real Presence of the Risen Christ?
The incognito Risen Christ suddenly hit his "reveal button." And when did it happen? When they sat down to break bread together, and then "poof" he suddenly disappeared.
The writer of the Gospel of Luke believed that his community lived in the era of the stealth of the Risen Christ. In stealth, the Risen Christ, who is all and in all, could be known everywhere. In particular, that presence could be made serendipitously recognized at any given moment especially within the gathering of people who met with expectant hearts following the command of Jesus to eat bread and drink wine together as one way of realizing a particular presence of the Risen Christ. The particular presences of the Risen Christ rose from the general presence of the Christ, who is all and in all. The Risen Christ is known in Scripture and the breaking of bread without these two modes of presence exhausting the general presence of Christ.
You are invited to this dynamic on this continuum between the Risen Christ being known as all and in all in a sort of sustaining general mystical oceanic presence and the particular moments when the waves of the dynamic presence reaches the shores of our conscious life. And in such moments, we confess with hindsight wisdom like Jacob of God, "God was here and I did not know it."
Or confess in the hindsight words of the Emmaus disciples,"Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”
How many unrequited expectations cloud or baffle our lives today in our world with excruciating events which seem to hide or betray any seeming presence of God in Christ who is love? How many times do we think, "but we had hope that there would be peace, healing, equity in a world without need or hunger?"
The truth is that the death of Jesus and the post-resurrection appearances of Christ are compatible with and co-exist with the awesome conditions of freedom in this world where the whole continuum of agony to ecstasy get chances at probable occurrence.
With the presence of the Risen Christ within our lives, we are commissioned to make the Risen Christ present in the effects of Christ like love and justice within the awesome free conditions of this world. Why?
Because the best way to honor freedom in this world is through love and justice and to unite within this tradition of the death and resurrection of Christ to give greater effervescence to the goodness of love. We commit ourselves to know the presence of the Risen Christ in obvious and unobvious ways so that we can honor the field of freedom of many probabilities with a distinct preponderance for the triumph of goodness and love.
By accepting the reality of the suffering servant Messiah, we commit ourselves to being acquainted with grief and sorrow of others so that the good news of the love of Christ can come to be honored in freedom.
Let us always overcome our unrequited expectations with the hope of a better and greater plan of God's love which is honest to the conditions of our lives. Amen.
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