3rd Sunday of Easter

Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Today’s gospel story takes place on Easter Day. Just two days ago, Jesus had died on the cross. This very morning, Mary Magdalene had met the risen Christ at the empty tomb and told all the disciples, but they couldn’t believe what she was saying. They were all still caught in sadness and grief and confusion and despair.

Two of them decide it’s time to leave Jerusalem and go home. Their hopes and dreams had died along with Jesus on the cross. Obviously, they had been wrong about Jesus. Obviously, God had let them down. Obviously, this Jesus movement was over, and it was time to go back to the old life.

So Kleopas and his companion walk away from the city, away from the place where their faith had experienced its highest hopes and then had been crushed.

I attended a retreat this week where we were all asked to walk the way we imagined these two disciples were walking. We all slouched in posture and shuffled our feet and looked down at the ground and let our hair hang over our faces. Yes, we know how one walks when one is sad and confused and disappointed.

Jesus joins them on their walk. For some reason they are not able to recognize him. This always puzzled me. They had spent all this time with him. How come they don’t recognize who this man is?

There is a psychological experiment that might help us understand how this could have happened. I am about to show you a brief film clip of two teams of young people tossing basketballs to each other. One team is clad in white shirts, the other in black. Your job is to count how many times the white-clad team passes the ball to each other.

If you have seen this before, please be kind and don’t reveal anything.

Are you all ready? Kids, youth, adults – you can all do this. Count how many times the ball passes between white-clad players. Here we go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

The first time I saw this clip, I was stunned. I had not seen the gorilla at all! I had been so focused on my task of counting passes that I did not notice that big gorilla passing right through the players. Maybe that happened to you? Amazing, isn’t it? Amazing, how our brain can be so focused on one thing that we can’t see this big ape walking right in front of our eyes.

The commentator who connected this clip with the story about the Emmaus disciples helped me understand how it can be that these close friends of Jesus’ can’t recognize him. They were focused on something else. Their brain was concentrated on their loss, their grief, their disappointment. As a result, it can’t compute what is happening right in front of their eyes.

We finally saw the gorilla when the announcer pointed it out to us. Then we couldn’t believe how blind we had been.

Once Jesus’ real resurrected presence was pointed out to the disciples, they could indeed see Jesus, and they couldn’t believe how blind they had been.

What helped them finally see Jesus? What pointed him out, like the announcer pointed out the gorilla? Several things:

One: Bible study. Jesus uses the scriptures they know to explain what had happened to the two disciples.

Two: Compassionate relationship. Jesus takes his time with these two. He begins by asking them what is going on their lives, listens to their story, enters their grief, and then uses something familiar to them, the Bible, to help them grasp a deeper meaning.

Three: Worship ritual. Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to his disciples. This is something they have see Jesus do many times. Jesus had just done it three days ago at the last supper. This familiar gesture of receiving blessed bread makes the final connection for them. Suddenly their eyes are opened. They see Jesus right there in their living room.

Amazed and overjoyed they get up and hasten back to the city to tell all the others. Jesus is alive. The story will continue. God has not deserted them. Jesus is alive and present with them. Alleluia!

This experience of the disciples made me ponder times when I had been like them; when I had gone through a disorienting time and had felt like Jesus had abandoned me, only to have someone open my eyes and point out his presence.

When I came to the US to live, I was 25 years old and had been through a whirlwind summer. In the span of two months, I graduated from seminary, got married, moved to the US, and started my first real job – in a foreign language. At first, I was high on adrenaline.

After three months I crashed. I was completely overwhelmed by the many adjustments. I was homesick. I ate way too much chocolate. I was constantly in tears. And I felt like God had abandoned me.

However, God had not abandoned me at all. God had blessed me with a great husband and a supportive family of in-laws. God had blessed me with an understanding supervisor and a compassionate peer group in my chaplaincy training that year. God had blessed me with a faith family, the congregation where Eric did his internship that year and where I sang in the choir and helped with VBS, and where many people invited us to dinner. God had done all that for me, but for quite a while I couldn’t see it. I was too focused on what wasn’t there to see what was.

What finally opened my eyes?

Bible study: All the scripture passages I had memorized in my life were spooking around my head and reminding me of the love of our divine good shepherd.

Compassionate relationships: Family members, colleagues, and church friends took time to listen to me, to walk with me, and to share their faith with me.

Worship ritual: The celebration of worship and especially of holy communion connected me with the faith of my stronger years. It helped me feel the presence of Christ in bread and wine, and that sense of Jesus walking with me gave me the assurance I needed to emerge from my slump.

I imagine each and every person will have such periods in our lives, periods when God feels distant, periods when we are tempted to give up and walk away from faith.

My prayer is that at those times, we will be surrounded by compassionate people who open our eyes to the love and presence of our risen Savior. May there always be people who dig with you into scripture, who walk with you and listen to your story, and who share the rituals of our faith with you that draw you to Christ.

My prayer is also that we would be those people doing the eye-opening for others. Whenever we see people struggling, let us walk alongside them and offer our faith and compassion.

That’s what Jesus did, and it made an amazing difference.

That’s what our mission statement calls us to do: As followers of Jesus, we are called to be an inclusive and compassionate community, where everyone is connected in relationship with God and each other to foster wholeness of mind and soul.

That’s what it means to live as the Easter people of God: We are generous with our love and faith and time and compassion so we can open each other’s eyes to see, not a gorilla passing through, but the loving presence of Jesus abiding with us and blessing us with hope and joy. For alleluia, Christ is risen – He is risen indeed. Alleluia!