3rd Sunday of Easter

 

Luke 24:13-35

We have now reached the third week of the Easter season, but time passes slowly in the lectionary so believe it or not, our Gospel story for today still takes place on Easter Sunday.  Well Easter afternoon to be exact.  In fact, this story sandwiches itself neatly between the other stories we have heard from that fateful day over the last two weeks.  It takes place shortly after Mary and the women see the angels at the empty tomb, and if we read on, in the next few verses after the end of this story we would see that almost immediately after Cleopas and his friend return to Jerusalem, Jesus then appears to the apostles in the upper room in Luke’s version of last week’s story.  But here in the middle we get this beautiful story about Jesus’ journey with these two disciples on the road to Emmaus.

And in Luke’s Gospel, these two guys are actually the first people to see Jesus alive, which is kind of amazing because they are not otherwise key disciples.  They are explicitly not among the 12 apostles, we never hear of Cleopas again, though he may be the son of one of the women at the tomb that morning.  And the other disciple, well Luke doesn’t even bother to give us his name.  Yet Jesus chooses to seek out these two outsiders in order to make sure that they too experience the good news of the resurrection.

And when Jesus catches up to them, they don’t even recognize him.  And before they bother to find out who he is, they launch into this whole huge rant about how sad and confused they are about this guy Jesus they had been following.  About how great he was and all the great things he was going to do and how excited they were about him.  And how sad they are that he was executed.  And now people are saying maybe he is alive, but no one has actually seen him.  And even if he is alive the authorities still crushed him so what does that mean for their hopes that he was the Messiah sent to rule Israel?

And the amazing thing is Jesus just lets them go on and on like this.  You can almost picture it like a scene from a bad romantic comedy, they are talking and talking all about him but they don’t even realize that he is right there.  But he doesn’t stop them.  He doesn’t cut them off, or correct them.  He lets them say what they need to say.  Because he knows that they need this time, they need this moment before they can move on.  Because even though Jesus always knew what would happen, even though he told them about it in advance, this was still not the future the disciples had imagined for themselves.  And it takes a minute to process this change. They have to grieve the loss of the future they had imagined for themselves before they can move on to experience the real blessed future that Jesus has laid out for them.

And this is a real thing.  This kind of grief.  It has a real name. It called grieving lost hopes.  And it happens to all of us.  And I bet we have all felt it in some way before, especially in this time of uncertainty.  This is not the future that we envisioned for this country, these are not the leaders we had hoped for.  And even in our own personal lives, feeling this sort of grief is often a normal part of aging.  As our bodies age and place limits on us that we often don’t see coming, or as our now adult children make different choices than we had expected for them, or as our finances become less secure than we had hoped or planned for, we inevitably have to take some time to adjust to our new reality.  At some point we all face unexpected challenges, job losses, illness or family situations that challenge our expectations and require us to reorient our future.

And these two disciples had this experience too.  And what is amazing is that Jesus just lets them have this time to feel and express their grief.  In fact, he encourages them to do it.  He could have just run up and announced himself.  But instead he asks them what they are discussing, how they are feeling.  And once they started talking about him, he could have stopped them, he could have cut them off and corrected their mistaken assumptions and taken control of the situation.  But he doesn’t, because he knows how important it is to allow them to feel and express their grief.  Instead, he walks with them and listens to them maybe for hours, while they walk for 7 miles across the desert.  Because he knows they have to wade through the grief of letting their old expectation go before they can embrace the new reality that he wants to lay out for them.  It’s not that the disciples don’t believe the women and Peter, that Jesus is risen.  There is decent chance one of the women was Cleopas’ own mother.  But this is still a big change from the massive military takeover they once expected.  And they still have to feel their way through their own grief about that change to in order get to the next part.

And so do we.  So give yourself a little grace when you find yourself feeling anxious or sad about the unexpected future you see before you.  You are not going crazy. It’s grief and everyone experiences it.  Your feeling are your feelings, and you have the right to be sad, even if other people have it way worse, even if it’s over something seemingly trivial, even if it’s over something you never really had in the first place, you just hoped for.  So maybe take these disciple’s wise example and take a long walk or talk it though with someone, or better yet tell Jesus.  I promise, he put up with hours of these two disciples talking about him to his face, he will be happy to listen to you too.  Because it is worth it.  Because when these disciples had felt and released their grief, then their hearts were opened to hear the good news that Jesus wants to pour into them.

And that is exactly what Jesus does, he doesn’t just leave them in their grief, he fills their hearts with Good News.  But notice when Jesus gets going it’s not the head knowledge but the heart knowledge that makes the difference.  He spends a long time maybe hours explaining scripture to them, filling their minds with facts and proof and logic, until they know it all in their heads and their hearts begin to burn.  But they still don’t see him.  They still need something more and so Jesus gives them more.  A tangible sign of his presence in their lives.

And it is only then at the end that they finally know Jesus in the breaking of the bread.  It’s when the knowledge moves from the head to the heart that it’s real power is found.  When they do the thing that speaks to their hearts, that makes them remember everything they have always known, that’s when they finally see Jesus, when they truly see the glorious new and unexpected future that God’s love has in store for them.

And that table, that path is still open for you too.  There is power in this gathered community, there is power in that table, to open your eyes to the glorious future that God has in store for you.  We may not all see it yet, in all honestly it may not always come in your lifetimes here on Earth.  But God’s promise, the promise of the Risen Christ is here for you too.  Known to us in the breaking of the bread, in the table of Christ here in the Eucharist, and in the fellowship we share as a church family.  No matter what grief or anxiety you carry today, God’s promised blessed future is for you even, if it looks nothing like we expected.  Amen.