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The Rebirth of Hope
Luke 24:13-35
March 30, 2008
Brent James 
Luke 24:13-35
That same day two of them were walking to the village Emmaus, about seven miles out of Jerusalem. They were deep in conversation, going over all these things that had happened. In the middle of their talk and questions, Jesus came up and walked along with them. But they were not able to recognize who he was. He asked, “What’s this you’re discussing so intently as you walk along?” They just stood there, long-faced, like they had lost their best friend. Then one of them, his name was Cleopas, said, “Are you the only one in Jerusalem who hasn’t heard what’s happened during the last few days?” He said, “What has happened?” They said, “The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene. He was a man of God, a prophet, dynamic in work and word, blessed by both God and all the people. Then our high priests and leaders betrayed him, got him sentenced to death, and crucified him. And we had our hopes up that he was the One, the One about to deliver Israel. And it is now the third day since it happened. But now some of our women have completely confused us. Early this morning they were at the tomb and couldn’t find his body. They came back with the story that they had seen a vision of angels who said he was alive. Some of our friends went off to the tomb to check and found it empty just as the women said, but they didn’t see Jesus.” Then he said to them, “So thick-headed! So slow-hearted! Why can’t you simply believe all that the prophets said? Don’t you see that these things had to happen, that the Messiah had to suffer and only then enter into his glory?” Then he started at the beginning, with the Books of Moses, and went on through all the Prophets, pointing out everything in the Scriptures that referred to him. They came to the edge of the village where they were headed. He acted as if he were going on but they pressed him: “Stay and have supper with us. It’s nearly evening; the day is done.” So he went in with them. And here is what happened: He sat down at the table with them. Taking the bread, he blessed and broke and gave it to them. At that moment, open-eyed, wide-eyed, they recognized him. And then he disappeared. Back and forth they talked. “Didn’t we feel on fire as he conversed with us on the road, as he opened up the Scriptures for us?”
Our scripture opens up on Easter Sunday, probably later in the afternoon, and these two disciples are heading out from the walls of Jerusalem to a village about seven miles down the road. As they walked, they must have felt somewhat like we all felt in the moments and hours after the World Trade Center buildings fell—shell-shocked, trying to piece together some sense of meaning from the horror and the carnage that they had watched unfold during the last 36 hours. Their man, their Rabbi, Jesus, had been stripped naked, beaten bloody, and had been nailed to a tree.
Somewhere along the way, these disciples had been invited to join “Team Jesus,” and I would imagine this brought about great hopes for their country and great hopes for their own lives. To have a Rabbi accept you as a disciple was an honor. To learn from a Rabbi, to have access to education, this was a privilege, and much like our own society, it was usually set aside for the privileged, the higher classes. But Jesus didn’t choose the brightest and the best, he didn’t choose the sons of men who had significant connections to the power elite in Jerusalem; no, Jesus chose fishermen, zealots (military grunts), teenagers, blue-collar type of folk. For them, Jesus represented opportunity, perhaps an open door to a better life, even more so because Jesus was no mere Rabbi. Jesus claimed he was the Christ, the anointed one, from the lineage of David, and he kept talking about this coming Kingdom, this Kingdom of God; and if you were a first century, Roman-occupied Judean, how could you expect anything else from that kind of talk than the defeat and overthrow of this Roman scum who oppressed and taxed your people while making a mockery of your values and your God? Jesus was preparin’ to whoop up on some Roman... backside, or so they thought. Because, as it happened, it is a Roman official, Pontius Pilate, who orders Jesus’ horrific death by crucifixion, and in an act of brazen mockery places a piece of propaganda above his dying body, a sign that read cynically and bluntly, the King of the Jews. If you were a Jew, you got the joke. And this man, who had just last Hanukah, just four months ago, had boldly declared that, “I and the Father are one,” is now crying out “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” And then he said, “It is finished,” and then he died. With his death, all of the hopes these young men died with him. And so they are leaving the great city of Jerusalem, and they are heading back, presumably back home to a little village called Emmaus.
You might not know it, but I grew up in a little village. When people ask me where I’m from, I always answer Merced, because there might be some small chance that they’ll actually know where Merced is in California; but I didn’t grow up in Merced. Merced was the big town for me. I actually grew up in a little village outside of Merced called Winton. Winton, CA, the town we’re nuts about. Let me tell you, growing up I was not so nuts about Winton. What’s in Winton? Almond orchards, peach orchards, a Mexican restaurant called the Tequila Café, and a little strip of retail that hasn’t seen real business since the 60’s. If you want a picture, think Madras, OR or Prineville, OR, or Boring without the beauty. There’s no particular social cachet gained from being from Winton, not really a great deal of opportunity outside of working the orchards. It’s just a small village. And so I empathize with Cleopas and his friend as they leave the big city of Jerusalem. Think San Francisco, think Seattle, and now they’re headed back to the village of Emmaus.
And so these emotionally blitzed disciples are talking to one another, and from behind them comes this busybody stranger who gets into their business—it’s funny how Jesus always likes to get in your business—and he asks this question, “So, what are you guys talking about?” And Cleopas, so dismayed by this out of left field question, that he actually mistakes Jesus as a traveling stranger. You can almost hear Cleopas tone, “Uh, HELLO, Jesus of Nazareth!? Um have you been in Jerusalem for the last couple of days?” You know when your security and sense of self esteem is wrapped up in another the person, the only thing worse than having your guy, your candidate implode, is for someone to not know who your guy was to begin with. And I wonder whether Jesus might have feigned ignorance, “Jesus, hmmm, Jesus, sounds familiar.” And then I think Cleopas utters one of the most honest, and yet one of the saddest lines in all of scripture, in the NRSV “But we...had...hoped.” You know, hope by its definition isn’t really a past-tense verb; if you use hope in the past tense you don’t really have hope. What you have is disappointment, dismay, despair. We had hoped that Jesus was the one to deliver Israel—Eugene Peterson uses “deliver” in his translation, you could just as easily use the word liberate—we had hoped that Jesus would liberate Israel. These are bread-and-butter hopes. Jesus was supposed to have overthrown the government; Jesus was going to have a revolution; there was supposed to be a new kingdom, and these boys from the little village of Emmaus, maybe they had dreams of running the ministry of defense or serving on Jesus’ new Sanhedrin. Have you ever driven by some of these McMansions around here, these giant homes, and wondered to yourself, what must it be like to live in a house like that? In Jesus’ day, those kinds of homes were owned by the temple elite, the religious establishment, homes decked out in marble and gold. And there must have been a little twinkle, a little tinge of excitement, “You know if this Jesus thing goes well, Daddy might be livin’ pretty nice.” “If this Jesus thing pops, we’re going to be living the good life.” But those hopes were nailed to a tree, and they died three days ago. And now they’re headed back to Emmaus. We...had...hoped, some of the saddest words in the Bible.
Last weekend, a little girl of maybe seven or eight stunned me with a question after the 11:00 service. She came up to me, and yanked on my coat and said, “I have a question for you, so what does the Easter Bunny have to do with Easter?” Whoa, how do you answer that one? Being a good seminary graduate, I leaned over and said, “Let me understand if I am getting your question correct, are you asking whether a bunny on Easter has any substantial soteriological or salvific qualities, or are you asking what part bunnies play in the larger resurrection narratives of the Christian perspective?” And she just blinked and stared and stumbled away, but it sure got me out of the hot seat. No that’s not what happened, but it was a great question. I think in a way she was asking, what’s true meaning of Easter, and I think the true meaning of Easter is HOPE.
So, Lake Grove Presbyterian Church, my question to you this morning is; where is our Easter hope? Is Easter just a day of bright new clothes, trumpets, bunnies and ham? You know, we spend 40 days in Lent, 40 days of Lenten preparation, and yet, for many of us Easter comes and goes in about 50 minutes. I love what the author N.T. Wright says. He makes the case that we ought to celebrate Easter by drinking champagne for at least as many days as we’ve fasted for Lent. We prepare our hearts for so many days, and yet do we ever take a second to stop and ponder outside of the annual Easter message, this radical notion of Christian thought called resurrection life, this bedrock, this foundational belief of the Church? Jesus cries out “I am the resurrection and the life, he that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” We’ve listened to those words so many times, that the sheer audacity of them now escapes us. Jesus offers us a life free from the fear of death, one of lines of our apostle’s creed states it succinctly, “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Do we even get how radical that is? Where is our Easter hope?
Let me talk briefly about two kinds of hope that miss the mark of Easter. Probably for many of us, I would bet that like Cleopas we have pretty secular, bread-and-butter kind of hopes. I hope my son or daughter gets into the Ivy League, I hope that I can get enough money stored away for retirement, or for a down payment on a house, or maybe just to get out of debt. Maybe we tend to see salvation through the lens that Cleopas looked through, governmental change, a sense that if we could get the right people in place, if everyone would follow the law our society would progress, through right living and wise decision-making, perhaps a government overthrow here or there, we can ourselves evolve into salvation that we seek. People used to refer to it as a social gospel, but it misses the mark. You don’t really need a savior or a resurrection body for that kind of hope; any good man, any catalyst will do. And by the way, have you read the history of the 20th century? Have you read the headlines during the last decade? Have you read the headlines from last week? If you think that looks like moral evolution, I’d love to have a cup of coffee with you. Let’s chat, because I just don’t see it! I think those hopes miss the mark of Easter hope.
But then there’s another type of “missing the mark” hope that we see all over the evangelical Christian landscape today, it permeates so much of our thought. It’s in our hymns; it’s in our writings, for me its borderline tattooed on my brain. We tend to see the hope of resurrection life only in terms of Heaven, as it’s been derided, pie in the sky when we die by and by. We give up on any kind of hope for social change or justice; we deceive ourselves into believing that the world is full of sin and sinners and the only way this sucker’s going to get any better is when it’s flame-broiled in God’s great judgment. Hope is only in heaven above, so for the meantime sin as least as possible. Perhaps Marvin Gaye sang it best, with the line, “Who’s willing to try, to save a world that is destined to die?” Well the answer is Jesus. Jesus was willing, Jesus did die, and Jesus’ body, his physical body, was resurrected. If we place all of our hope in Heaven, then what use is the incarnation? Why did Jesus come in flesh? Why was his body resurrected? God didn’t send Jesus to this world to say, “You know, the first batch didn’t work out so good, so God and I are going to start again from scratch.” No, in one way Cleopas got it right; Jesus did come to deliver us, to redeem us, to liberate us, but he came to liberate us from the bondage of death; as Martin Luther put it, the body may kill, God’s truth abideth still, and His Kingdom is forever. Christ came to put us in right relationship to God, that our hopes our will might be engrafted into His hopes and His will, that His life might become our life. I think this is what gets Jesus so upset in our text, when he says you knuckleheads, you dimwits (BJV—Brent James Version), have you been listening to anything I’ve said over the last three years from Moses and the prophets? Let’s go over this again! And in vs 46 a little later on in the text, we get the conclusion of His teaching, thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations beginning from Jerusalem.
That’s a God-sized hope. God’s hope is you and me. God’s Easter hope is the 124,796 people who live in a seven-mile radius, in the five zip codes that surround this church. God’s Easter hope is that we’ll care enough about them spiritually, enough to proclaim the good news that God loves them and that He wants to be in right relationship with them, and that we would care enough about them socially, to reach out to them and invite them into this community—into His community, into the family of God—by standing up for them and by standing up to the injustice they face. You don’t think there’s such a thing as injustice here, in a pretty little town like Lake Oswego? Try building affordable housing for senior citizens, and watch the litigation fly—“not in my backyard, buddy.” My friends, God’s Easter hope, our Easter hope, is people, and if you know Jesus Christ as your Savior, then that hope is planted in you.
So let me ask you a final question this morning. What is your hope? Don’t tell me it’s a Bentley, or a zip code, or another vacation. What is your hope? Let me put it another way—what is the dragon of injustice that God designed you to slay? Where is the fortress of spiritual darkness that He has called you to invade? The one he perfectly formed you to fight? Because that hope is there, deep down, it’s there inside of you. Programmed into your very DNA is the Hope of God. Maybe somewhere a long time ago it got lost in the morass of materialism, but it’s still there, and it’s just aching to be set free; and our Easter Hope, dear friend, is that death itself cannot conquer you. That dragon may strike back, but we have the hope of Resurrection life. Hold fast to the promise of the apostle Paul: What you do in this life is not in vain, when it’s done in Jesus Christ. Somehow, don’t ask me to explain, but somehow what we do in the Kingdom of this world has consequences in God’s kingdom coming; it has eternal value. Our Easter hope is not either secular or sacred, but it is both/and. Let thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven, Amen? It’s both/and. God wants to use you—you. God wants to use you to bring hope!
If you are desperate for meaning in your life, meet the God who is desperate to impart purpose and a bright hope for your future. Don’t settle for a life of hope in the past tense, but be reborn to the purpose, to the hope, to which God has called you. May this not be just another second week of Easter for you, but may it be the beginning of resurrection life; may it be a rebirth of hope. May our Risen Savior accost you on your Emmaus road, and may you of your own free will be compelled back unto Jerusalem, back unto the communion of saints, unto the city of God’s perfect peace. May the kingdoms of this world, through the hope God has placed within you, become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.
In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit, Amen.
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