“PEACE BE WITH YOU”

“Peace be with you.”  A fairly common and non-threatening wish, right?  Meant to make you feel peaceful.  Not so much in this morning’s scripture.  Jesus’ followers had seen him die a painful human death and were not responsive to His appearance, even though Jesus told them what would happen to him. How was it they didn’t recognize him?

Prior to this scene with the eleven disciples in Luke, Jesus meets two of the eleven on the road to Emmaus.  Jesus asks them, “What is the subject of your discussion?”  They answer, “Are you the only one who does not know what has happened here?” It was only after they stopped walking and Jesus broke bread with them that they saw it was Jesus who was with them. And then, in a moment, Jesus was gone from them again. Then, they recalled, “Were not our hearts burning within us while we were talking to him on the road, explaining the scriptures to us?” Something was happening to them in that walk with Jesus. And still they did not see it was Jesus until he broke bread with them.

Jesus repeatedly told the disciples what was to happen to him. Yet Luke says, “They understood nothing about these things; in fact, what he said was hidden from them, for they did not grasp what was said.”

So after breaking bread with Jesus, one of the two men, named Cleophas, returns to the eleven in Jerusalem. He tells them about seeing Jesus. And while they were talking, Jesus appears among them saying, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified. It is hard to find fault with them for their fear. Jesus said, “Why are you frightened and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and feet. See that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as I have.”  

We can thank the gospel writer Luke for making it clear that this appearance, the seeing of Jesus, was no trick of the imagination or collective fantasy of the disciples. The risen Jesus was definitely there, alive, touchable, and even hungry, asking his friends for a piece of fish.

It is clear that Luke wants the physical details of Jesus’ appearances to be a form of proof, a cataloguing and fulfillment of the message they would carry into the world. They were first to hear it, as we have heard it in our faith lives. They saw him. He was and is alive.

The Good News of the New Testament is a combination of the teachings of Jesus; but even more so, a focus on the pivotal events of His death and resurrection. Jesus reminded them and us, this is not just philosophy about the Jesus story, but a real and resurrected person in whose name “repentance and forgiveness” would be proclaimed to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem.

Later, in the book of Acts, Luke tells us that the disciples did not go around the Roman world setting up Jesus societies or simply repeating his teachings. No, they insisted that Jesus was alive, they had seen him. They insisted that Jesus’ death and resurrection had marked the beginning of a new time when God would set a broken world to rightness – and that they had seen it all happen.

The disciples began to understand that after the Ascension of Jesus they were to continue to embody his scarred hands and feet, feeding a world hungry for the hope of salvation, wholeness and a promise of new life made possible by Jesus’ death and resurrection. They had witnessed something shockingly and overwhelmingly joyful. No matter how bizarre their stories sounded, they continued to be witnesses to the reality of the resurrection.

There on that day, that Sunday, Jesus recalled, explained, and connected just how the journey had been leading God’s people to a precise point in history. He led them on a biblical travelogue, so to speak, through the liberating stories of the Exodus, on to the warnings and challenges of the prophets, and through the pain and hope of the Psalms to his own way to the cross. Jesus death was an essential part of the journey, and was now to be seen as a celebration and the fulfillment  of  His  promise.    Jesus  in  the  incarnation became human, only to die in pain, and ultimately returning in amazing triumph. Because of Jesus, death is no longer our final destination. As the disciples demonstrate, there is more to the power of the resurrection than we might even be able to hold.

To believe that Jesus is risen and alive in the world is to believe that every person, place or thing is made more alive by His life. Whenever we feel more alive, more brave, strong and beautiful, we can be sure that Jesus is present with us. Not like on the road to Emmaus, but just as surely with us.  It is hard to recognize Jesus in our midst sometimes. Our eyes get accustomed to the darkness, don’t they?  Our faith grows dim, and we can miss the light, even if it blazes upon us like it did the on the disciples, right before our very eyes.

Frederick Buechner tells a beautiful and eloquent story about the movie Schindler’s List. In case you didn’t see it, Schindler’s List is a movie about the Holocaust. Oscar Schindler was a wartime profiteer, womanizer, boozer and a good friend of the Nazis. He became obsessed with saving as many Jews as he could. He got the Nazis to let him take hundreds of Jews to “work” in his factories. He saved 1,100 people in his effort. The movie is about a dark and anguished world where again and again in the faces of the persecuted Jews as they appear on the screen, we see the face of Jesus, while their  persecutors  saw  only  a  people to be eliminated from the earth. Schindler’s List is also the story of the young commandant of the camp, the Inhuman “ex-human” as Buechner describes him, who has “the face of a fallen angel, the face of someone in whom the Christ who is alive in all of us is as dead as dead can be.”

Filmed in black and white, the storyline follows a little girl in a bright red dress. Every now and then, usually in a crowd scene of children playing, you see, like a flame, one single touch of color – a young girl dressed in red. You see her hiding under her bed as the Nazis go about the systematic elimination of the Jews in the Krakow ghetto. You see her in her red dress, again and again, until finally for the last time, you see a patch of the same red dress buried almost out of sight in a mountain of the dead left when the massacre was ended.

Here’s the thing.  The two disciples did not recognize Jesus on the road to Emmaus, but he recognized them in their humanity, as if they are the only two people in the world. The reason the resurrection is far more than just an event in history, is that even some 2,000 years later, Jesus still sees each of us in our humanity. In our troubled world, with depths of great darkness, we sometimes fail to see through our un-recognizing eyes. Jesus is the one who even keeps his eyes on the varied birds at my birdfeeder. “He is also the one who sees each of us as the child in red,” says Buechner.

Today is the third anniversary of my lovely mother’s death. As I held her in my arms, I believe that in the last moments, the last breaths of her life, she looked across the room and saw Jesus and my father, ready to lead her to the new life in Salvation she had earned in her 93 years. There was no darkness in death for mom. As her last breath left her, I could sense her spirit was gone as well. She was on her road to Emmaus, she would encounter Jesus, glad  to share the bread of life, her new life, a new vision of light for her that would never be overcome by darkness. I am comforted to believe she lives in the resurrection of her life in Jesus Christ. “Peace be with you Mary, your fears are released.” She knows far more than I can even imagine.  Good for you Mom.

We are alive in the Easter Season. We can still hear the sound of the majestic music of Easter Sunday. There is no reason to silence it. Jesus is alive, the light of the world. Jesus is the saving and holy grace that sees each and every one of us like a little girl in a red dress in a black and white world. Peace be with you, Jesus said.  Release your fears.

Amen 

“PEACE BE WITH YOU”

Text: Luke 24:36-50

Rev. John C. Brink

Third Sunday of Easter

April 26, 2009