| April 14, 2002 Acts 2: 14,23-33 + 1 Peter 1 17-29 + John 24: 13-35 |
| We are looking during these Easter Sundays at the various people whose testimony is so essential to our faith. Without them, we would stuck on the death of Jesus. Without them and the accounts of their experience, we would be stopped dead at Good Friday First we had Mary Magdalene, then Thomas, and now these two. They’re good, these disciples. They’ve got it all down. They know what has happened, but they don’t know what it means, and that’s the trouble. They veiy nearly miss making the connection between Jesus of Nazareth and the God for whom they have such a thirst. |
| They’ve got all the details down: the death, the empty tomb reported and confirmed, but they fail to recognize the meaning, just as they fail to recognize the person of Jesus Christ. They call him a prophet, but they fail to recognize him as the one who redeems. Luke is clever with this. In the first chapter of his Gospel, Old Zechariah, filled with the Holy Spirit announces that “God has visited his people and set themfree.” In the second chapter, old Anna in the Temple saw the child and spoke of him as the one who would “set Jerusalemfree.” The word Luke uses for this deliverance is used only in the first and second chapters, and then he does not use it again until this final chapter when these two struggle in their disappointment because they had hoped that Jesus would be the one to set themfree. |
| This becomes a stoiy of recognition, and they almost miss it. He is about to go on when they suddenly discover that for which they have longed. a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. As they look around that table, they recognize more than Jesus in that room. They recognize themselves, and they recognize what has happened to them in the breaking of the bread. They have been set free. What was promised at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel has been fulfilled, and all that remains now is for them to recognize what that means. |
| In their suddenly recognized freedom, they leave that room and hasten back to Jerusalem, free from the sadness, free from the disappointment that kept them from recognizing what had really been going on in Jerusalem those earlier days. It wasn’t just about Jesus, it was about them too. It was about their deliverance from all that would keep them joy, from all that would keep them recognizing Christ in their midst, and claiming the relationship with God for which they longed. It was about their future and the burning hearts as they now lived with what they knew but could not prove. |
| What seems like the end of this Gospel is just the beginning. What seems like the end of Christ’s life is also the real beginning, and so it is with us as well. What sometimes seems like the end is just the beginning: when we think we’re done in, crushed, beaten down one last time, we are simply failing to recognize what has happened during those days in Jerusalem. It was not the end. |
| They knew it, but they couldn’t prove it right then. It took the rest of their lives to give the final witness, and they must have done a good job of it, because we have the story to tell and the faith with which to pass it on. My friends, we have some bread to break here and a blessing to share, and every one of us knows someone who is walking through this day of their life sadly and ftlled with disappointment. Some of us know people who think they’re at the end. Our hearts ought to be burning right now as we think of them and plan to join them and stay with them until they can recognize the God who has come to set them free. |