I began a new experiment in my life this week, and I hope it’s not one I regret. I’m filling in for two months teaching 8th grade religion at the school my three daughters attend. That’s a recipe for trouble. I’m on my daughters’ territory. They each told me it was fine if I did this but I was given two instructions: First: I may never mention their names. Second: I may speak to them in the hall but only if they speak to me first. So I had trouble even before I got into the classroom and that’s when I encountered my second problem, which is what I had to walk in cold and start teaching: the resurrection.
I got an earful about the resurrection in my very first class. “I don’t get it,” one of my students said. “They say you can’t prove that Jesus rose from the dead, but then on the same page it says we have to believe that it happened. How’s that work?” This is in the first five minutes. They were buying lots of other things about Jesus’s life: the parables, the sermon on the mount, the crucifixion that clearly everyone could see. It all happened. And then all of a sudden this resurrection, which seems like it has such flimsy evidence supporting it, just a few people who really believed they’d experienced Jesus alive when no one else could see him.
This is a smart kid, and it’s not a new problem. Since Day One of the resurrection, which is literally the day we’re talking about in the gospel we’re hearing today, people have been a little disappointed in how unspectacular and even fuzzy the resurrection is, even to people who knew Jesus in his life.
These two disciples on the road to Emmaus, are facing the same problem. The significance of their being on the road to Emmaus is that it’s the road out of town. We don’t know anything about these two disciples, except that they are not the important ones, not the big names. But they were on their way out of Jerusalem, probably headed home. Everything that happened to them, everything that drew them into the city, has all ended in a great letdown, all these grand events and great hopes, thinking that the Messiah was going to change everything. There was going to be a revolution, and the whole world would be different. Nothing worked out the way everyone thought. It all ended in violence and confusion and disappointment. They did hear unconfirmed reports that Jesus is missing, maybe risen from the dead, or maybe not. But whatever happened, it’s not very convincing, after all, if he rose from the dead, wouldn’t everybody know? So they’re headed out of there back to someplace safer. Some resurrection.
Disappointed hopes are hard to talk about. They wanted their story to have a great ending. We do too, and not many of them do. We sometimes feel a little embarrassed thinking about the hopes we’ve had in our lives, it’s hard to talk about all the things we wish had happened, or that we wish were true. It’s not just the resurrection. It’s all the dreams we’ve had of the way life should be, but where it hasn’t turned out that way. Ever so gradually, it sends us into checking out of life because it all didn’t come true the way we think it should have. Maybe you have been hurt by people you thought would never hurt you. Maybe you thought the church would or should be more or better than it is. Maybe you thought you yourself would turn out to be a better person, that you’d be an example to others, maybe you once hoped that Jesus would be more real to you and close to you than he seems. The disappointment may have set in so long ago that it’s become part of the way you approach life, but it is a disappointment that still hurts, that we wish we could turn around.
There is only one way that we can turn discouragement like that around. and it is the way Jesus literally turns this story around. The risen Christ in this story isn’t someone it’s easy to recognize, not immediately. He seems ordinary, he is a stranger, these two only realize they have seen Jesus hours later when they make the connection. But when we manage to recognize Jesus risen on his terms, not ours, something happens. We see him. And we move. The risen Jesus sends these two disciples right back to Jerusalem, back where they didn’t want to be, the place where they were disillusioned, back to where they were so disappointed before. They turned around and headed back because they saw the risen Christ.
But seeing him was not so simple, was it? that this stranger the same Jesus they had been looking for. It’s isn’t so easy for us to see the risen Christ either, most of us will only see Jesus like this, in people that don’t look very much like Jesus risen from the dead unless our eyes are opened to it. The only path to it seems to be what Jesus showed these disciples how to do: reading scriptures, breaking bread, suddenly seeing Christ where we did not notice him. Then, turning around and leaving our disappointment behind, and heading back in.
It’s easy to lose heart about what we’re called to do, But the answer is not to head for somewhere safe. The answer is look for Christ risen where we do not imagine he would be. Jesus will be with us there, in a face that will be hard to recognize at first, but will give us the strength to turn around.