Homily for Sunday, April 30, 2017 Good Shepherd and Graves Chapel
We awake each
morning, some days with more enthusiasm than others, and we usually carry on
with our established routines. As we progress through life, an endeavor that
has often been compared to a journey, we feel the passage of time as a kind of
forward movement, like the revolving hands on old-fashioned clocks. As much as
we may wish we could return to a day or an event from our past, we can do so only
in memory. Our life journeys are marked by beginnings and endings and are
enlivened by the people and things we encounter as we move through our
days. As we grow older, when we say a
final goodbye to someone we have deeply loved, we confront the unavoidable
sadness of temporal endings. We experience death as a finality.
But God has no
beginning and no end. The Resurrection of Jesus surely illustrates that our
human sense of having a finite span of time has no meaning. In divine terms,
time is immeasurable—and life is eternal.
In today’s lesson
from Luke, we discover two disciples who are walking toward the town of Emmaus
on the very day of the Resurrection. As
disciples of a leader who has just been cruelly executed, no doubt they are fleeing
Jerusalem when they encounter the risen Lord on the highway—and fail to
recognize Him. It makes me wonder how
often on our various journeys, especially the ones taken in fear, that Jesus
appears to us, and like the distraught disciples, we fail to recognize
Him. After what must have been several
hours of walking and talking with Jesus, they take shelter for the night
together. But it is not until he breaks
bread with them that they finally recognize Jesus—in the familiar and the
profound.
I am blessed (and
have been for the last nine years) to work with physicists—those scientists
whose job it is to ponder the meaning of time, to consider the vast reaches of
the universe. I happen to work in a building that houses several electron
microscopes, including a Titan microscope, one of only 18 of its kind located
at American universities. Physicists, including the materials scientists in my
department, concern themselves not only with the entire universe, but also with
the smallest particles that exist. In studying phenomena at both ends of the
natural spectrum, physicists often discover the completely quirky and seemingly
unreasonable ways things work—and work in unanticipated concordance with one
another. Perhaps this explains why, as a
particular group of scientists, physicists tend more readily to express faith
in God than other scientists. Perhaps physicists have learned to trust that
faith really is about “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of
things not seen,” as we are told in Hebrews 11.
The disciples
walking on the road to Emmaus trust in the evidence of their own eyes that
their beloved leader has died on a cross and has been sealed into a tomb. Even
though Jesus had told the disciples before his crucifixion that he would be
raised on the third day and that he would be with them always, these two are
blind to the risen Lord when he appears to them. Such a thing would be simply
unreasonable, wouldn’t it? All of us
have difficulty at times seeing things we do not expect to see. And sometimes we find such unexpected things
to be too frightening to consider!
Now I wonder how
often I have failed to recognize the Lord’s presence with me. How many times
have I been too anxious, too impatient, too preoccupied with other things to
turn my attention to the Lord? I am
afraid this is the common predicament of people of faith. Like the disciples on
the road, we are generally too much in our own heads to see Jesus when he
stands right in front of us. Even so, I have had unmistakable moments of
closeness with God, including a couple of times when I surely heard my Lord’s
voice.
When Jesus spoke
her name, “Mary,” Mary Magdeline recognized Jesus as her “teacher” outside the
empty tomb. The disciples’ eyes are opened when Jesus takes the bread, blesses,
and breaks it. They are reminded of the last evening (and last supper) Jesus
had with the apostles in the Upper Room. He is known to them, as He wishes to
be known to us, in the breaking of bread. But does this mean that we fail to
see Him, as the disciples did, when he does not look the way we expect him to
look—or when he isn’t exactly what we want him to be?
We Christians may
not like to accept it, but we worship a God who suffers. The central and most
important symbol of our faith is a cross on which an innocent man bled and died
a cruel death. We believe he died this horrid death on our behalf. But we
haven’t really understood what that means if we believe Jesus suffered and died
so that we will not have to suffer.
Believing that, no wonder some Christians who become ill or deal with
any kind of calamity lose faith and shake their fists at God. But what the cross shows us, tells us, gives
us is the great truth that we all will suffer—and Christ will be right there in
that suffering with us, beside us, and within us through all of our most
difficult times.
That, my friends,
is the most fundamental lesson of the cross—that God, through Christ, endures
our pain with us, abides with us, holds us up when standing in the face of our
worst nightmare seems impossible. And what does the story of the encounter on
the road to Emmaus also teach us? Jesus appears to the disciples on the very
day of his Resurrection, greets them, speaks with them, and stays with them.
Even though they fail to recognize him at first since they are absorbed in
their grief over losing the one they called “Master,” the stranger is a comfort
to them. Hear what they say about the
encounter after they finally realize (after he leaves them) that it was Jesus
their Master all along: “Were
not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while
he was opening the scriptures to us?”
If the lesson of the cross is that
we worship a God who has suffered and understands suffering, a God who is with
us when we suffer, then the lesson of the Resurrection, as experienced by the
disciples on their way to Emmaus, is that our God is, as he promised, with us
always. Maybe we become more aware of God’s presence when we break bread
together, as the disciples did, but the truth of Christ’s being with us in our
bad times as well as in our better, more ordinary times, is that our faith is a
faith lived out in community—even when the only other one in our community is
the Lord. AMEN.
