Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 22, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We are in the Easter season. Two weeks ago on Easter itself I talked to you about how the first image of Easter is not the risen Christ but the empty tomb. In these weeks after Easter, however, we are reading the Gospel stories of the Resurrection appearances of the risen Christ. We had two of them this morning, the appearance to Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus that is set some significant amount of time after Easter and John’s story of Jesus appearing to seven disciples at the Sea of Galilee, here called the Sea of Tiberius, soon after Easter. There are some general things to say about the Resurrection appearance stories that are worth noting. All four canonical Gospels have an empty tomb, but no Resurrection appearance story appears in more than one Gospel. The Gospels that have Resurrection appearance stories all have different Resurrection appearance stories. I say “the Gospels that have Resurrection appearance stories” because the Gospel of Mark as it was originally written does not have a Resurrection appearance story. That Gospel, in its original form, ends with the empty tomb. The verses in Mark as we now have it that come after the empty tomb were added later by another author. The Resurrection appearance stories in Matthew, Luke, and John are all different. They have no story in common.

That being said it is also true that those different stories have at least a couple of common themes. In all of the stories the risen Christ appears first to women, either to Mary Magdalene alone or Mary Magdalene and some other women. Another common element among some of the stories, and the one I want to look at this morning, is that in several of the Resurrection appearance stories the disciples to whom Jesus appears at first do not recognize him. This theme appears first in Luke’s story of the two disciples walking on the road to Emmaus. Luke 24:13-35 In that story a stranger joins the disciples as they walk along and questions them about what has happened in Jerusalem. He speaks powerful words to them about the Scriptures. The disciples do not recognize the stranger as Jesus until he is at supper with them, and they recognize him in the breaking of the bread. This theme appears again in John’s story of Christ’s appearance to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. John 20:11-18 Mary takes Jesus to be the gardener until he speaks her name. Only then does she recognize him. The theme appears for the third and final time in our reading from John this morning. Seven disciples are in a boat fishing. Jesus appears on the shore. He speaks to them and directs them to a miraculous catch of fish, but “they did not know that it was Jesus.” John 20:4 NRSV Eventually that mysterious figure of John’s Gospel “the disciple whom Jesus loved” recognizes Jesus, but at first the disciples did not though he was standing on the shore in plain view.

Clearly there is something about the risen Christ that makes it hard for people to recognize him, even people who were his most intimate companions during his life. Maybe the problem for them was that the risen Christ, being the same person as Jesus during his lifetime yet somehow also different, more spiritual, more transcendent, could disguise his appearance until he was ready to reveal himself. Or maybe he exercised some kind of mysterious power over the disciples’ minds that kept them from recognizing him until he was ready to be recognized. Or maybe what we’re seeing here is just an example of how we humans tend to see what we’re looking for, what we expect to see, and don’t see what we aren’t looking for, what we don’t expect to see. Anyone who has ever ridden a motorcycle is familiar with that quirk of human perception. I really don’t know what the explanation is. I do know, however, that the difficulty the disciples had recognizing the risen Christ raises an important question for us. If Jesus’ closest friends and disciples had trouble recognizing the risen Christ only a short time after his death and resurrection, how are we supposed to recognize him in our lives so very long after his death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven? After all, we confess that he is still with us. In Matthew’s Gospel we hear him say: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:20b NRSV If he is still with us, how are we supposed to recognize him when he doesn’t even appear to us in the same kind of bodily form in which he appeared to those first disciples?

There are, I think, a couple of places and a couple of ways in which we can encounter and recognize the risen Christ. One of those places is in our own hearts. There are experiences that we sometimes have in which Jesus becomes very real and very present to us. I have had those experiences just hit me out of the blue. I have had them in personal devotion, and most of all I have had them here, in our worship together. How do we recognize Jesus in those experiences? We must first of all open our hearts to the possibility of meeting him. In John’s story of “Doubting Thomas” Jesus may appear to the disciples through locked doors, but in my experience at least he doesn’t appear to us through closed hearts. If then, with hearts open to the possibility, we experience a powerful, living connection with God in our work, our play, our prayer, or our worship, we can say that we have met and recognized the risen Christ. That, after all, is what Christ primarily does. He connects us with God and God with us. We can recognize Jesus in our own spiritual experiences of profound connection with God.

There is, however, another way in which we can encounter and recognize Jesus; and in the Gospels Jesus is a lot more explicit about this one even than he was about meeting us in our spiritual experiences. We see this way of recognizing Jesus most clearly in a passage from Matthew. It’s the famous judgment of the nations scene from Matthew 25, where Jesus says that when we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and the prisoners we feed, give drink to, clothe, and visit him. Matthew 25:31-40 This great passage from Matthew tells us that in our world today Jesus is the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, and the prisoners. They are him for us, and those who do God’s work with them minister to him too. We don’t have to look far to find Jesus. He’s all around us in the persons of those in need. He is those persons to us and for us.

But do we recognize him? I know I sure don’t most of the time. Sometimes it seems so impossible. After all, the poor, the sick, and the imprisoned aren’t the people that we most like to spend time with. They can be dirty, rude, anti-social, and ungrateful. A lot of those prisoners are truly unpleasant people, to put it mildly. It’s so much easier to hang out with people more like us. It’s so much more pleasant. The problem is, the Gospels don’t have Jesus saying insofar as you fed the well-fed, gave drink to the sated, clothed those with full closets, or visited the healthy and the free you did it to me. Jesus doesn’t say we’ll find him there, he says we’ll find him in the people we’d rather avoid or even pretend don’t exist, as most of the time in this town we pretend all those prisoners on that hill just down Main Street don’t exist. It’s so hard to recognize Jesus in those people, but we’re stuck with the fact that that’s where he said we’d find him.

I don’t know about you, but I know I’ve got a lot of soul work to do to get to the point where I can truly recognize Jesus in them. I’m like those seven disciples in the boat in John’s resurrection appearance story. Jesus is there, close enough to talk to me, close enough to ask me questions and give me directions just as he did from the shore of the Sea of Galilee with those disciples in the boat. He’s just down the street at the Women’s Gospel Mission. He’s sleeping under our bridges. He’s lined up at our food banks. He’s waiting in the emergency room of Valley General Hospital seeking medical care he can’t afford to pay for and can’t get any other way. He’s behind the bars of the Monroe Correctional Complex. He’s the child dying of hunger or malaria in Botswana or Bangladesh. He’s the young mother dying of AIDS in Rwanda because her macho husband refused to use protection, and she had no way to say no; and he’s the children she will leave behind. He’s the victim of a car bomb in Baghdad and of a war plane in Gaza. He is truly everywhere, all around us, all over the world.

And just like those seven disciples in that boat on the Sea of Galilee so long ago, I don’t recognize him. I pass him by every day. I turn my back on his appeals. I live my comfortable life. I do my enjoyable work. I hang out with people like me, not people like them, not people like him. And I feel guilty about it. I feel guilty about it, but I don’t change the way I live. So I feel myself caught between one thing I know to be true—that Jesus calls me to serve him in “the least of these”—and another thing I know to be true—that I can’t do it, not as fully as I know God calls me to. I know this is true of me, and I suspect that if it is true of me, it is probably true of some of you too. It is the dilemma of the Christian with a conscience living a life of privilege and of relative ease.

I have no solution, but I do have a suggestion. I think that God’s call to those of us who find ourselves in that dilemma is to live in the tension the dilemma creates. God calls us as citizens of a rich and powerful land to be our country’s conscience, to call ourselves and our country to greater awareness of the plight of those who are Christ in our world, the poor, and oppressed, and the marginalized and to a greater willingness to do what we can to ease their plight. God’s call to us in this place is not to leave this place but to be agents of God’s transformation in it. To do that we need to open our eyes and see Jesus standing on the shore, calling to us in the voices of the least and the lost. We cannot feed, house, clothe, cure, and free all of them. We can’t do that for more than a small handful of them. We can, however, be agents of transformation in our nation and in the world toward the end of helping all of the Christs that we meet achieve greater wholeness of life.

And so today I pray: Lord forgive my blindness and open my eyes to see you and to serve you. Make me an instrument of that divine transformation of the world for which we pray when we say “thy kingdom come.” May we all open our eyes and our hearts to see and to recognize the risen Christ. He’s there. There’s no doubt about that. But do we know it’s Jesus? Amen.