As I have been reflecting this Easter season, it has come to me how
ethereal the resurrection experiences were. The risen
Christ flits
hither and yon, certainly not at the direction of any of the disciples,
in places where they least expected to meet him.
While the risen Jesus was met ever so briefly near Jerusalem, it was
really only to get the message across that he was going before them to
Galilee – and there is the quite definite expectation that they were to
follow, to go to Galilee to look and find him there. Jesus
appears to
the disciples in the upper room, but they are told to go –
elsewhere.
It wasn't specified where they were to go. It didn't really
matter,
as long as they didn't stay stationery, they didn't stay in
Jerusalem. Jesus comes to the disciples after they had left
Jerusalem
to return to Galilee to go fishing, to the two as they journey away
from Jerusalem to Emmaus.
And as I thought about this it came to me that other significant things
happened to people as they journeyed away from Jerusalem.
There was
the story that Jesus told of the Jew on his way from Jerusalem to
Jericho, the one who fell among thieves. But he wasn't the
only one
on that path. There were also the priest and the Levite
travelling
the same road, and, confronted with their fellow countryman lying
injured on the road, passed by on the other side. They met
the King,
but in terms of Matthew 23, they didn't recognise the King, lying there
on the road in a pool of blood. Help came to the injured
Jew, the
King in need, from someone who could not be expected to recognise the
King, a heretic and a foreigner. And we might also conclude
that the
Jew who was attacked by the brigands, met the Christ too, as he
travelled away from Jerusalem in the most unlikely of persons – the
despised foreigner who came to his aid.
Another person met the risen Christ on his way away from Jerusalem on
the road to Damascus, and that, of course, was Saul. He
'met' the
risen Christ in the persons he was going to persecute.
Acts tells us that the eunuch from Ethiopia was also travelling away
from Jerusalem – travelling back home, where he was met by Philip, and
in Philip, the risen Christ. As I read the account of their
meeting
the other evening, I thought, here was a deformed foreigner leaving
after being excluded from the Temple, continuing to seek the Lord by
reading the scriptures of the very people who had excluded
him! The
words he was reading were 'like a lamb who was lead to the slaughter
..' He asks Philip who was this person, Isaiah or
someone else.
Philip is said to have talked about the Christ, but no doubt the eunuch
would have felt as despised and outcast as Jesus. He met
the risen
Christ in Philip, and he met the risen Christ in himself.
We meet the risen Christ away from Jerusalem, away from our sacred
space, in the people we meet – if (of course) we are looking. And
the
people we meet, meet the risen Christ in us – if (of course) we intend
for them so to do. Time and again those who had walked with
Jesus for
the years of his ministry completely failed to recognise the risen
Christ before them. And we who have worshipped the risen
Christ all
our lives, the ones who claim this special and personal relationship
with him, are as likely to miss him as well, for he is in others who
are not so 'privileged' as ourselves in the divine relationship stakes.
Which brings my thoughts to the tower of Babel, that ancient attempt to
attain the heights of heaven that the apple Adam ate promised.
How
strange that Western folk law says that Yuri Gagarin who became the
first man to travel into space on 12 April 1961 said "I don't see any
God up here." (No such words appear in the verbatim record of
Gagarin's conversations with the Earth during the space-flight –
Wikipedia) God never has been 'up there', and it is not our
job to
attain the heights of heaven. The constant command has been
to love
our neighbour, whoever he or she might be. And the
confusion of
languages means that we have to listen to our neighbour and learn his
or her language, not expect others to join us in a fruitless 'wild
goose chase' for God somewhere else, where God isn't. God
never has
been anywhere else, and therefore doesn't want us to try.
To return to my first statement: 'how ethereal the resurrection
experiences were'. If the primary purpose of our Lord was
to get
everyone to believe in the resurrection, then it seems we could do with
a little more help from the risen Jesus in this task! If
the primary
purpose of the resurrection was to get everyone to believe it, then why
on earth doesn't Jesus appear to one and all in Damascus road type
experiences each and every day? Not just our friends and
neighbours,
but people of all nations, cultures, and creeds. Then they
would have
no excuse for their recalcitrance in accepting the faith!
But the risen Jesus excuses people for their recalcitrance, their
denial, their doubts and hesitations, their failure to recognise, their
complete misunderstanding. This is the constant witness of
all of the
resurrection experiences. The very paucity of resurrection
experiences shows me that my belief in the bodily resurrection is of
secondary importance to doing what Jesus says, not trying to go where
Jesus went in terms of some personal corporal identification, but
meeting the risen Christ in others along the road, in the real world,
as I travel away from the sanctuary I have constructed – the safe haven
I have built for me and my god.
We can use our religion, our church or indeed our friends and family to
avoid moving. We can avoid moving theologically as well as
physically
- as we expect others to save us from having to make hard decisions,
like moving into supported accommodation. In my sermon for
two weeks
ago, I spoke about the difficulty of deciding to leave the family home
after many years, but also of the blessings of making such a
move.
‘Where I am going you cannot come’. We are not to follow Jesus in
that
physical death and resurrection, we are not to attempt to follow Jesus
into heaven - whatever we conceive this to be. Twice Jesus
said this
to his disciples, here and just afterwards he repeated it to Peter,
before predicting Peter’s denial. And immediately he goes
on to talk
about us loving one another. While Jesus might be with us
always,
this doesn’t mean we can dismiss others as irrelevant, expendable, or
unworthy. Jesus is with us - to embrace others that might
be
considered irrelevant, expendable or unworthy. In is in
precisely
these others that we will find the risen Christ, and come to really
know that he is with us, to the close of the age.