May 8, 2011
(Third Sunday of Easter)
(From The Lectionary Page)
Right Before Our Eyes
Joseph Campbell once said that, “We have to be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.” There is something about this idea that finds fertile ground in today’s gospel reading. This discipleship thing with Jesus, just hasn’t worked out the way his followers had planned. Good Friday seemed to them like the end of that chapter of their lives. Stories beginning to circulate about the empty tomb haven’t changed anything for them. They will have to be shocked into Easter.
A friend once shared this story with me: He was walking through a bookstore with his teenage son Stephen, both of them keeping an eye open for a possible mother’s day gift. As they walked through the store, Stephen was describing the difficult time he was having with a friend. The father was trying to keep an ear open, and at the same time keep an eye out for that perfect but elusive gift. But it seems that this father was afflicted with a condition that he shares with many other men his age. He had very little talent in the multi-tasking department. Most of his responses to the son’s story had been of the variety that try to indicate that he’s listening, but in reality, communicate somewhat the opposite: “Really!” “Oh yeah?” “Huh!”, and so on.
Stephen was just about to give up the idea, that dad might engage his issue, when the two of them walked by the children’s area of the bookstore. They stopped as two little guys wearing cowboy suits and hats raced by them.
The two boys ran up to a little stage area, and began an obviously much rehearsed scene, involving cowboy activities as they understood them. Stephen’s father watched intently.
His full attention shifted briefly to the cowboy scene, and as he watched, the two young cowboys became his own son at that age with one of his friends. “I remember when you were that age,” he said with a melancholy smile. But he was shaken from his trip back to the golden years, when Stephen harmlessly asked, “Do you wish I was still that age?”
The moment in today’s gospel when the disciples’ eyes are opened, is just such a moment. They have been told about the resurrection. They have the proclamation of women that the grave is empty. But that information has not changed anything. These disciples were too busy living with the memory of the crucified Jesus to experience Jesus in the present. This is the challenge that Easter presents us with.
Rowan Williams has written some great stuff on this topic. In his book titled simply, “Resurrection,” he wrote that “[Easter] does not allow [Jesus] to be a consoling memory, a past hero; … he is risen…his life continues, and is not to be sealed off with a martyr’s death.”[1] We are not allowed to hold onto the Jesus of Good Friday, because it blinds us to Jesus in front of our nose.
The man that told me the story about he and his son at the bookstore, told it as one convicted of living with his eyes partly closed. He hadn’t been at all aware of it before his son’s question. What he heard in Stephen’s question was this: “I am right here with you, but you don’t even see me. You can’t really be with me, because your memory of what I was, keeps you from what I now am.” This father’s eyes were opened. He tried to re-engage with Stephen about his struggle with his friend, but that moment had passed. It too had disappeared.
But things were different now for this father. He had been convicted, and was now determined to change. Over the coming weeks, he went out of his way to ask Stephen about his life, his friends, his hopes and his dreams. What he discovered in this process of repentance was this: a really neat kid who loved having his dad back. The father had not been aware that he ever left, but in the new life that their relationship now had, he could see that his road somehow, somewhere, had turned away from Jerusalem toward Emmaus. But in the very hour that his eyes were opened, he had turned around and come back. He was now prepared to breathe new life into his relationship with a teenage Stephen, rather than continuing to look for the idealized little boy he once knew.
The road to Emmaus is our perpetual reminder, that “The Church is not simply an institution that preserves and recalls the words and deeds of Jesus; it is the community of those who meet him as risen, and the place where all the world may meet him as risen.”[2] With all the plans, hopes, disappointments and setbacks that are part of our lives, we are bound to find ourselves repeatedly back on the road to Emmaus. So we must repeatedly be shocked, into hightailing it back to Jerusalem, back to where our ministry with Jesus must continue. Every now and then, we still have to let go of the life we planned, in order to accept the life that is waiting for us.” The risen Jesus awaits.
Amen.
[1] Rowan Williams. Resurrection: Interpreting
the Easter Gospel (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 1982, 2002) p. 71
[2] ibid Williams, p. 74
