Poolesville Presbyterian Church
04.19.15; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Luke 24: 36b-48
Listen to Audio Here:
I am not the hugest fan of surprises. I don’t think, to be honest, that most of us are.
We startle easy, we humans do. It’s part of our factory firmware, to the point where we can almost make it a form of entertainment. This may just be for dads amusing themselves by inducing the startle-reflex in our little ones when they’re babies...you know, when they’re lying there on the changing table, minding their own business, when suddenly out of nowhere you...whoosh...gently blow on their faces and they suddenly stick their arms and legs straight out and get all wide-eyed and shivery.
Boingggg...they’d go. Whoosh, you’d go. Boinggg...they’d go, almost as much fun as having one of those crazy little fainting goats for a pet.
Not that I would ever have done that as a father. Of course not. My goodness.
Although if it worked on teenagers I’d probably still be doing it. Whoosh. Boinggg.
The Moro Reflex, it’s called, named after early twentieth century Austrian pediatrician Ernst Moro, who apparently spent a great deal of time in his practice startling babies. This may or may not be on the list of questions you should ask when you’re trying to decide on whether to go to a new pediatrician.
Whichever way, Moro found that pretty much every human being has that hardwired reaction to things they weren’t expecting.
The sudden or the radically unexpected just isn’t something we welcome, even when we’re grown up. It’s the heart of our fear, in many ways. Bam, the jumpscare, the laziest form of fear, like walking up behind someone and shouting boo. Our heart races, we shriek, and then express our annoyance at the person who should know that JUST ISN”T FUNNY.
Generally, the unexpected tends not to be a good thing. We don’t react well to those things that startle us, or that surprise us.
In today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke, we hear a story of the intensity of surprise. In this final chapter, Luke’s narrative of the Gospel is wrapping up, in preparation for the sequel in the Book of Acts. In the opening verses of chapter 24, Luke has shared with us that women arrived at the tomb and found it empty. This isn’t the sort of thing you keep to yourselves, so they tried to report what they had encountered. They returned to the others, and said that angels had told them that Jesus was risen, but...unlike the story in John...the apostles wouldn’t listen. They don’t believe them for a minute. “Them crazy wimmins and their wild stories.”
We’ve heard about how two disciples were walking the road to Emmaus, and on that journey encountered a stranger who turned out maybe to have possibly been Jesus. And still, they’re having some trouble processing what it is that they’re encountering. “Did he look like Jesus?” Well, no. “Well how did you know, then?” Um.
With these stories dismissed from their minds as just crazy talk, Jesus is suddenly among them, which just scares the bejabbers out of them. He offers them a greeting, a simple “Peace be with you,” no more than the Hebrew greeting shalom aleichem that you’d say in encountering a friend.
But this is a dead friend, a person who they know, from pretty much every interaction ever, cannot possibly be there wishing them peace. Peace? Peace would be the farthest thing they would be feeling right then. It would have been an impossibly overwhelming moment, the kind of instant that would simply be too much to process.
It reminds me a little bit of one of my favorite moments in any film ever, a little snippet of brilliance that occurred in the 1991 British film Truly Madly Deeply, which starred the lamentably not-known British television actress Juliet Stevenson and the decades before Severus Snape Alan Rickman. They were playing two young lovers, both musicians, and...well...he dies. Even before the film starts. We are introduced to her in the depth of a mourning she can’t shake, which is one sign that this is definitely a European film. She just can’t bring herself to get past his death, lost in a deep and inescapable depression.
Until, and this is no spoiler, he comes back. That scene is, well, perfect. It is just exactly right, exactly the way you would feel in that moment. I’m a hard mark when it comes to tear-jerkers, but this moment just gets me every single time. That and the end of Monsters Inc., which I suppose means I’m not quite as hard a mark as I like to say I am.
That scene, which you can watch on Facebook this very afternoon, is what it would be like, in that room in Jerusalem. Hysteria. Snot and joy and wailing panic, times twelve.
At this point in Luke’s story, Jesus takes three specific actions. In verse 39, he offers them his hands and feet, to see and to hold, as a sign that he is really and truly with them. In verse 41, he takes a bit of fish and eats it, again, to show the reality of his actual, material presence among them.
These actions are mirrored in the post-resurrection story told in John’s Gospel. Even though John and Luke are drawing on very different oral and written traditions about Jesus, they both contain nearly identical reminders of Christ’s physical presence. In the passage we heard last week from the first letter of John, the community that had gathered around that Gospel reflected on how important it was that they knew his tangible self, his hands and his side, as proof that he truly is risen.
Two totally different traditions, both sharing a core remembrance of what that post-Easter experience was like for disciples.
In Luke, that moment means that the disciples need some help overcoming their first reaction. If they’re going to embrace a new thing, it needs to be made real for them, and their fear needs to be overcome.
That can be the challenge for us, as we strive and wrestle and struggle to find new paths and new directions in life. We can be averse to those things, as the patterns of whatever sorrow or pain we find ourselves in prevents us from seeing the possibility offered up in each moment. Depression is like that. Addiction is like that. Carefully held anger is like that. When we encounter an opportunity to turn our life for the better, those states of being prevent us from recognizing and embracing that hope.
Depression did not expect that it would turn out as well as it did, and that you’d feel alive again for a moment. Addiction did not imagine that you could say, no, no I’m not going to do that, not this time. Anger did not expect that that person you’ve been angry with forever would seem so genuinely kind and willing to make peace, not after you had carefully made that forty three bullet point list of all the ways that person done did you wrong.
And when faced with a reality that is completely, startlingly different from the comforting darkness we inhabit, we tend to resist it. We can’t believe that it could be so. We can’t imagine that this new thing is real, and so we freak out a little bit.
That’s where the reaction of Jesus is so important, and where what he does mingles with what he says.
“Peace,” he says, hushing us down a little bit. But to reinforce that peace, he makes it clear that what he brings is real. He invites them to see that he’s really part of their world. Hands and feet and a shared meal, because what he offers to them is real.
And there, again this week, we have a reminder of what is necessary to bring about Kingdom change in our lives and in the lives of others. For us to be transformed and changed, we have to be willing to get over our own resistance to Gospel possibility, to overcome fears that have embedded themselves deep within us.
For us to be agents of that change, and help spread it in a world filled with sorrow and dark patterns of being, we have to make that good news manifest. Here, we can say, as we live it out. See this thing. Touch this thing. See how we eat and live out this new Way among you.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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