Sermon for Easter Monday
“And they rose up … and returned to Jerusalem”
They were running away from Jerusalem in fear and perplexity about the events of the crucifixion, about everything, we might say “concerning Jesus of Nazareth”. The Resurrection changes everything. It literally turns us around. They rose up and returned to Jerusalem. How and why? Because Christ runs out after us.
The Passion of Christ is God’s suffering with us in our suffering world, God in the midst of our confusions, our sins, our fears, our tempers; in short, our evil and unloveliness. The whole of the Passion is about Christ in the midst. He is even crucified between two thieves. The Resurrection is the same. It is about Christ in the midst, making himself known in the radical truth of his being with the Father.
Easter Monday presents us with one of the classic stories of the Resurrection, the story of the Road to Emmaus. Two unnamed disciples are fleeing Jerusalem. Jesus runs out after them and “himself drew near, and went with them,” unrecognized by them. They were not, after all, expecting him. They were, after all, consumed and preoccupied in their confusions and uncertainties, not altogether unlike us in the face of Covid-19, clinging to our ‘technologies’, worshipping them in our idolatry even as they are at the heart of the problem of globalization, itself a technocratic artifice.
Jesus draws near and enters into their conversation. Why? To draw out of them precisely their confusion and perplexity. The two unnamed disciples give us a very complete account of the crucifixion, its immediate aftermath, their dashed hopes and expectations about Jesus, and their bewilderment about the empty tomb, about the testimony of angels, and even about the witness of the women! “We trusted,” they say, “that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.” His crucifixion and death they were not expecting and cannot understand. The paradox is wonderful. It is precisely through his Passion and Death that Christ redeems Israel, the greater Israel, we may say, of our humanity, for such is the greater vocation and meaning of Israel.
“Foolish ones and slow of heart,” Jesus says to them and proceeds to unpack the radical meaning of his Passion and Death. He opens out to them “in all of the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” In a way, it is very much about how we read, how we think and understand God and his dealing with us. In a way, God has to break us in order to make us, to make us new. “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” as the poet/ preacher John Donne says, evoking the extravagant language of violence and even rape. It is not enough, it seems, for God simply to “knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend,” the gentler forms of some of the more sentimental biblical images of God’s care. No. “Break, blow, burn, and make me new,” the poet demands of God. For only so might we be able to stand. And if that were not troubling enough, he cries out “imprison me, for I except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” Extravagant language, indeed, and yet language that complements the wonder of the story of the Road to Emmaus. Why?
