March 31, 2013 at Saint Mark Catholic Church in Norman, OK
Acts of the Apostles 10, 34, 37-43 + Psalm 118 + Colossians 3, 103 + Luke 24, 13–35
I don’t believe there is anyone in this church who does not understand and has not experienced part of what Luke is describing in this Gospel. Everyone of us has had our faith in Jesus Christ shaken. Those two men walking along were leaving Jerusalem. I believe they had given up. They were turning their back on that place where their hopes had been raised. They left the apostles behind. They were walking away from Jesus Christ turning their backs to him.
How could God let this happen? How could God have abandoned Jesus leaving him to die at the hands of those fanatics? How could all that he had promised and the hope he raised be so quickly destroyed? We’ve all been there. How could God let me lose my job with a family to feed and shelter? How could my child, so full of life and promise be so sick and die so young? How could that doctor tell me there is no hope? I’ve always been so faithful to prayer, and now this happens.
This world is full of people who have struggled against evil and sadness, disappointment and broken promises. Some of you are here today barely hanging on, and some have already turned their backs in disappointment and discouragement. Some of us bear the scars and memories of our own trouble but have managed to hang on just a little while longer.
These two men in Luke’s Gospel are all of us, and their story is ours. The whole story: we all know the first part really well, but today we must hear the second part which can stir our hope and soften our hearts. This is a message of hope. We don’t need to hear the story of Christ’s resurrection today. We know it very well. We do not need to hear about the women coming first and then Peter and John on the run to look in wonder and dare to believe.
What you have just heard proclaimed today is also a resurrection story. It is also the story of life’s victory over death, of hope’s triumph over disappointment. This story reaches into our experience. We’ve never seen an empty tomb. We’ve never heard angels talking or seen men dressed in white announcing that “He is not here.” At least I hope you haven’t . That would complicate things. But we have known our share of disappointments when probably more than once things in our lives have not turned out the way we expected.
Yet for many people like the men of this story, and those in John’s Gospel, Matthew’s or Mark’s, there is the promise made by Christ to all who follow him and listen to his word: the promise that he would not leave us, that he would remain with us, and all the healing, the forgiveness, the new life he granted to lepers, the blind, the lame, and the possessed in the Gospels would be ours as well. It is a promise that people of faith celebrate week after week, year after year. Those who have tragedies, disappointment, and brokenness without turning their back on Christ or running away from their fellow believers stand as witness to the resurrection: their own.
We live in the hope that Christ will find us, walk with us, and be revealed to us in the unity we share as Church. We rejoice in the resurrection today for more than Christ’s resurrection. I rejoice when I look at so many of you whose lives are a story of the resurrection, whose lives haves not turned out the way you thought they might, who had hoped that one thing or another would have been different. I rejoice because you have found the grace, the courage, and the spirit to rise up and be made new. To dry the tears of others who weep, and to strengthen the faith of those whose faith may be shaken from time to time and make them want to run away.
We do not run. We do not turn our back on Jerusalem, Luke’s symbol of the church. We continue to break open the Word of God, and let that word open our hearts and eyes to see the presence of Christ in the faces of those around us. We cling to these great truths because we know them to be true. We have risen again from every little death that would put us down. All our lives are in this story. We are either running toward Emmaus or we are running back to Jerusalem. Where ever you are in this story today here in this church, take hope, risk believing, you are never alone, we are, all of us rising again and again proclaiming with Joy that THIS IS THE DAY THE LORD HAS MADE. This is the day of our salvation.