Lessons:
Jesus himself stood among the disciples and said to them:
Peace be with you.
They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them:
Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?
Look at my hands and my feet;
see that it is I myself.
In the Gospel of Luke, the resurrected Jesus visits his disciples twice. Jesus first comes to them in the story that we call the Road to Emmaus: two friends, rocked by the injustice and the trauma of the crucifixion, are walking away from Jerusalem when they encounter a stranger. This stranger says to them: How come you guys are sad?
The friends are in disbelief. It turns out that they have just met the only person in the world who has not heard about the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, about the last meal and the washing of feet, about the betrayal in the garden, about the trial before Pilate, about the cross.
And so they tell the stranger the story as they walk. And when they reach their destination and the stranger makes to keep on going, they invite him in to share a meal. It is in sharing a meal that they understand that it is Jesus who is with them. And then Jesus is gone.
The two friends run back to Jerusalem to tell everyone else what has happened.
The friends’ story ends with word that we sometimes say or sing here in church.
The disciples knew the Lord Jesus in the breaking of the bread.
Immediately after they get back home, Luke tells us the story that we hear this morning. Indeed, Luke makes it clear that the Jesus’ two appearances are consecutive not just in the text but they are also consecutive as the disciples experience them. The one happens right after the other. The lectionary cuts off the opening words that we find in Luke: “While they were talking about this.” While they were talking about what had just happened in Emmaus, “Jesus himself stood among the disciples.”
Luke tells that these two stories, these two appearances of the resurrected Jesus to his friends, are interconnected, that we are to understand them together.
In the story that we hear today there is, as on the Road to Emmaus, confusion. And this time there is the additional element of fear. Jesus says, “Peace be with you.” But peace is not what his friends feel. They feel something more like panic. They reckon that they are encountering a ghost.
But then something wonderful and strange happens.
Now, I have seen enough action movies and read enough fantasy novels to know that when you think that a beloved character is dead but they really are not, what that character generally does when they reappear is to explain how they avoided the avalanche by hiding in a cave, how they escaped the villain’s laser beam by using the mirror hidden in their shoe, how the bullet was stopped by the Bible in their pocket.
The hero’s friends say: We thought that you were dead! And the hero replies: I’m just fine. See?
But when Jesus’ friends say: We thought that you were dead! Jesus replies:
You were right. I was dead. Look at the mortal wounds on my body.
And somehow, it is in seeing the wounds that they understand that they are not looking at a ghost but, rather, that they are talking to their teacher and friend.
Is there an equivalent to the end of the Emmaus story here? The disciples knew the Lord Jesus in the breaking of the bread. And the disciples knew the Lord Jesus…
in his woundedness and pain.
What do these consecutive stories in the Gospel of Luke tell us about who Jesus is?
Let’s try out an answer or two to that question. This won’t be – this can’t be – an exhaustive list. The resurrection of Jesus pushes the boundaries of our understanding, of our imagination, of our faith. The resurrection always contains more meaning that we could hope to define. But here is a beginning.
Knowing Jesus in bread and in hurt means that God is to be found in the peak and the pit of human experience. Bread – in Jesus’ time and ours – is a symbol of celebration. Right now, we live in a ritually impoverished time. But we still understand that a necessary component of marking a big occasion is food. It would be odd to have a birthday party without cake, to have a wedding in which you sent everyone away without feeding them. We understand that breaking bread marks a joyous occasion.
Sometimes we stand on a mountaintop (be it a literal or a figurative mountaintop) in which we encounter God, in which we reach out and touch God’s face. And when we come down from the mountain, we say, “God was with us.” And we’re right.
Sometimes we have a near miss in a car or we dodge some other kind of disaster and, as we sit shaking under the streetlight, we say that God was with us. And we’re right when we say that.
Jesus in bread tells us that God is present in these moments. But Jesus in his woundedness tells us that Jesus is with us in what the psalms call the pit as well. Jesus is with us when the other car doesn’t miss, when it hits us square on and the metal crumples, when our lives change or end in an instant. Jesus is with us on the day that we start the chemo. Jesus is with us when we sign the papers finalizing the divorce. Jesus is with us when we get the phone call that changes everything.
A second way of reading bread and hurt – and I can’t decide if this is contradictory or complementary – is that Jesus is present not just in the peak and the pit but also in the everyday. There is nothing more normal, more daily than sitting down for a meal. We name this normality in the Lord’s Prayer: give us today our daily bread. A kitchen is where life happens. The resurrected Jesus says that God is with us not just in the peak and the valley but also in the valley when we are wandering around buying groceries or working on our taxes or vacuuming.
And if bread is everyday, so is hurt. There is nothing more normal, more daily than suffering. To live any kind of life is to know pain, to know disappointment, to know injustice, to know grief. All of us are coming here wounded. And Jesus is with us in that too.
Whether we are talking about peak or pit or valley, in the resurrection, we see holy confirmation of what we see across Jesus’ life before he went to the cross: that Jesus shares with us in everything; that the promise of Christmas is true and Jesus really is Emmanuel, God with us.
Maybe another way of expressing God’s steadfast presence is to say that knowing Jesus in bread and in hurt means that God’s great qualities are not so much power and might as they are vulnerability and solidarity. God is willing to risk sharing with us in our joy and our pain. In the resurrected Christ, we see proof that Jesus knows life in its hard and beautiful fullness. Jesus breaks the bread and he shows us his wounds and he says: I know life completely. I have risked sharing it with you, and I have celebrated and suffered as a consequence. There is nothing so mundane that you cannot say to me: Lord, you know what this is like. There is nothing so awful or unfair that you cannot say to me: Lord, you know what this is like.
I wonder. I wonder if the solidarity and vulnerability of God are what we are talking about when we use the word communion.
The late author and theologian Nancy Eiesland wrote extensively about her understanding of faith as a person with a physical disability. Eiesland tells the story of leading a Bible study with a group of people with spinal cord injuries, more than one of whom were operating their wheelchairs with a sip-puff, with a straw that allows the person in the chair to control its speed and direction. Eiesland says that she asked the gathered group of people:
How would you know if God was with you and understood your experience?
After a long pause, a young man replied: If God was in a sip-puff, maybe God would understand.
Eiesland suggests that when Jesus shows his wounds to us that he is demonstrating that this young man got his wish. Jesus says: Look at my disability, look at what the new normal is for me. In the bread, Jesus says that he is with us in our joy. And in his woundedness, Jesus says that he is with us in our pain.
I am here in the sip-puff. I am the one being waterboarded in the secret room. I am the one being evicted with nowhere to go. I am the one being deported to a country he doesn’t know after 20 years in America. I am the one who is gunned down in the school shooting.
The vulnerability and the solidarity of the resurrection are an embodiment of what Jesus teaches us when he says: Just as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.
God is not watching from a distance. God literally has skin in the game. And as a consequence, God is deeply and personally invested in healing, in justice, in creativity, in love, in reconciliation.
Jesus breaks the bread.
Jesus show us his wounds.
He says:
See.
See that it is I myself.