LAKE JAMES

NORTH CAROLINA

The III Sunday of Easter + 4/6/08 + St. Paul’s Church, Lake James

+ In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

   The Holy Gospel for today describes a time of confusion, uncertainty, and fear among the disciples.  Jesus had been crucified  (no one denied that).  He was dead!  (There was no doubt about that!)  The Blessed Virgin and Saint John had seen him die, even if most all the others had run away.  St. Joseph of Arimathea had personally given the lifeless body reverent and decent burial.  The overwhelming emotion expressed by those who had been the followers of the rabbi from Nazareth was, at best, intense disappointment, grief, and perhaps some bewilderment thrown in for good measure.  What to do now? Now that the movement (if it could even be called that) was no more.  Without Jesus as leader, it seemed that nothing was left.  Nothing.  But then, Mary Magdalene came around with strange news – the body was gone!  Peter claimed that Jesus had appeared to him, and, as today’s Gospel reading tells us, shortly after, two other disciples, (Cleopas and one whose name we don’t know) rushed back from Emmaus with similar news!

    The disciples, as you can easily understand, tried to make sense of the various stories.  As you read the Bible, the impression is left that most of those who came to the meeting of the disciples did so NOT really believing that the stories could really be true.  But, as the meeting went on, suddenly Jesus Himself appeared in their midst – and, wouldn’t you know it, even then, the disciples found it hard to believe!  St. Luke, describing the scene, says that the disciples were “startled” and they were “frightened.”  Since they knew that Jesus had truly died, what were they to make of this sudden apparition?  Rather than just accept what they saw, and believe that Christ had risen from the dead, they groped for other explanations.  He must be a ghost!  He couldn’t be alive – he couldn’t be real! What a wonderfully realistic verbal picture St. Luke gives us! Jesus tries to reassure the disciples that it is, indeed, He, that he is not a ghost or a figment of their imaginations.  “Handle me” he says.  “See for yourselves – I have flesh and bones!”  But the disciples still couldn’t believe it!  They couldn’t even accept the evidence of their senses!  In St. Luke’s words, “They disbelieved for joy” or, as we might say if we won the lottery, “I just can’t believe it – it’s too good to be true!” 

    It’s fascinating to see how Jesus handles that situation.  He looks at them and asks “Do you have anything here to eat?”  It sounds like a child coming home from school and asking for a snack!  It’s so ordinary, so common!   But it did the job! Then, and only then, was Jesus able to go about his intended purpose, which was to open the minds of the disciples so that they could truly understand the Scriptures.  He taught them.  He prepared them for the new responsibility which was to become theirs, that of preaching and teaching all nations, all people, beginning in Jerusalem and going from there to bring the Good News to men and women everywhere. 

    Notice, if you will, that what Jesus used to break through to the disbelieving disciples was food, common ordinary food.  Nor was that an isolated incident.  So often, food has played a significant role in enabling great events to take place.  If we think about it, that’s not strange, because food is both a necessity for life and an occasion for human relationships.  Without straining the point, consider that it is when we share the consecrated Bread and Wine of the Holy Eucharist that we also experience a special manifestation of our Lord’s presence.  It is in the fellowship of coffee hours or parish breakfasts that we also enact the wonderful reality of being the Mystical Body of Christ, - the Holy Church - on earth. 

    With that in mind, I would like to consider what today’s liturgy might be saying to us, to you and to me, over two thousand years after Christ’s earthly ministry, and to do that, I turn to the collect for today. I have often referred to the collects in my sermons, usually mentioning when they were written, and whether they came from the ancient Gregorian, Leonine, or Gelesian Sacramentaries.  Today’s collect comes from “none of the above.”  Rather than being an ancient prayer, it was composed less than one hundred years ago by an American priest specifically for use in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.  In that collect, we saw that, as the Bible says, the disciples knew the Lord Jesus in the Breaking of the Bread (or, as we would say in contemporary language, “in the Eucharist”).  The prayer adds the petition that God would “open the eyes of our faith” so that we could behold – see and recognize Him in all His redeeming works. 

   “The eyes of our faith” – what an interesting expression! But what might it mean?  Remember that the disciples could see quite well, at least as far as their eyes were concerned.  They could see trees, people, fish, but they couldn’t recognize Jesus – Jesus whom they knew and loved!  The one they had expected to serve for the rest of their lives!

    Easter Day has come and gone, but the season of Easter is still very much with us.  For 50 days, the Church sustains and nourishes us with a continual unfolding of the Paschal message of resurrection and renewed Life.  Just as the Easter candle burns, symbolizing the presence of the Risen Lord, so the Bible readings share with us the various accounts of Christ’s appearances. One thing all those accounts have in common is the consistent inability of the disciples to recognize Jesus when they first see him.  Today’s collect makes it clear that we are not perfect, Christ-centered people hearing with amazement about the blindness of those first century Christians, but rather, we are men and women with the very same problem – for so often, we don’t recognize Jesus either!  “The eyes of our faith” so often seem to be closed, or blinded.  We do need those eyes to be opened so that we can see Jesus in all his redeeming works – in his holy Word, the Bible, in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, and in each other.  But also, so that we can see and know him in our times of sickness, pain, and anguish, whether that sickness or pain be ours or the affliction of loved ones.  We need the eyes of our faith to be opened so that we can see and recognize Jesus and know his loving presence even in the turmoil of broken relationships, in the boredom of seemingly meaningless and empty lives, as well as in the times of joy in loving, the excitement of victories, and the triumph of successes, because we are apt to be equally blind to Christ’s presence in our ups as well as in our downs.

    Jesus said to his disciples “It is you who are the witnesses to it all.”  Jesus says to us, “You are my witnesses to the world of your day.  How can we be witnesses unless the eyes of our faith are open? 

     Most of us find that the eyes of our faith are remarkably similar to the sleepy eyes of a tired child at bedtime.  The hard thing is not only opening those eyes, but keeping them open!  The fact is that we find life to be an on-going struggle with our eyes of faith because they seem so prone to closing. 

    A very fine priest, a former colleague, after hearing some sermons, used to ask “but where was the Good News?”  The Good News being preached in this sermon is that God gives us brothers and sisters in Christ to remind us of our need to open, and reopen, the eyes of our faith, and that same God responds to our prayers so that we may, indeed, see and recognize Jesus in all his redeeming works. 

    If we really want to.

+ In the Name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

The Reverend Alfred T. K. Zadig, Sr.

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