On the Sundays after Easter, we get to read from several passages of the Gospel that are like “snapshots” of the Resurrection: We are told of the experience of the disciples, the eleven and others, at different times, places and how they came to have an encounter with the Risen Christ. But one of the things that is always striking to me, year after year, is to take the measure of the gap there is between this first Easter and the way we celebrate it in most places: No trumpet, no cymbals, no lilies, no even perhaps, an Alleluia. And of course no tender spring colors, and no bunnies. It does not necessarily means that we do it wrong, after all if we don’t celebrate in Easter, when should we celebrate? But I am afraid that year after year, it makes us lose track of what it is to encounter the Risen Christ. Because the thing is: as it is for Christmas, Easter also happens in the dark: The dark of the dawn, the dark of the tomb, and even more deeply, the darkness of our world, the darkness of human violence, in the shadow of the cross, in the midst of the disciples’ confusion, disbelief and even despair. Actually, the stories of the usually do not linger on the disciples’ emotions, except for a few of those post Easter narratives, and to me this is especially true with the passage we have today. We can imagine only too well those two disciples walking home from Jerusalem after those events that indeed nobody could ignore: “The things about Jesus of Nazareth,who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how [the] chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him”.
You know, it was a big deal for the Jews to go to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, it was a great joy and a great honor to be in the Temple, in the Holy city. Going there with Jesus, although some of the disciples had some concerns because of the religious leaders’ hostility, they would have expected something great to happen: Jesus would finally reveal himself, be acknowledged by all as the Messiah, and be installed as King. Instead, something horrible happens: Jesus is betrayed, arrested, tortured and put to death in the worst way. The disciples are going home with heavy hearts, they have lost everything: their friend, their Messiah, their trust in God, their trust in their own friends, on top of that they are probably very ashamed with themselves for having let Jesus down and flee when he was arrested, and we talked about all of that last week when we told the story of Thomas. They have lost the one they loved and nothing makes sense anymore – we all know the feeling only too well. But as I was re-reading the text, I started to notice something different, and strange in what the two disciples say: They talk about the testimonies of the women and of the others disciples who have seen the empty tomb and even had vision of angels, and the way they talk about it it’s like it’s adding to their distress and to their confusion. The possibility that Jesus is indeed risen from the dead seems to add to their distress and to their confusion. It seems quite puzzling and yet not that much if you start to think about it: The disciples mentions themselves that they had hoped that Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel. They are just starting to accept that now Jesus is dead, that it’s not going to happen, and then, some women come and it’s like they are told to have hope again, an even greater hope than the one they had before, not just a reasonable hope that they would have a new king, but a really crazy hope that Jesus has risen from the dead. How are they to carry this hope? How would they dare to believe that such a thing is possible? After having had their hearts broken a first time, could they put themselves back together for a while at the risk to have their hearts broken all over again?
It’s hard to carry hope. It is to me one of the secrets of being human, one of a secret of being Christian that we are the less told about. It’s so much easier to renounce to have any real hope. I am not talking about depression, actually people who despair suffer from the loss of hope, they long for hope, so they certainly hope in their own way, no, I am talking about all the ways we can settle with having no hope at all, no hope for something bigger than we way the world is and what it has to offer.
When we get disappointed, for most of us, the only way to move forward is to go back to business as usual, to fall back on selfish pleasures, and disappointment after disappointment, we get a little more numb, a little more indifferent and it’s not extra fun but this how we manage life and most of the times we get quite comfortable with that. Sometimes we even call that growing up, or growing older. I imagine only too well the disciples coming home to their families, they were altogether quite young, in their twenties, and their mom and dad telling them: I told you so, I told you it would end badly all these dreams of yours. And indeed the disciples start to realize how hard it is to have hope, how much it hurts when we are disappointed and now they wonder if they should again cling to any hope at all. Losing this new hope would cut even deeper.
It’s hard to carry hope, and it’s not the way most people choose to live their lives. Of course we still hope, for the little good things in life, and of course there are self centered fantasies and unrealistic expectations we have to outgrow, but how often do we put God on the shelf in the process and give up on the fundamental hope that this world was born out of goodness, that we are made to care for each other, that we are loved beyond words and that we are bound for eternal life. It’s hard to carry this hope in a world of violence and wars, ecological disaster, cynicism and systemic racism and hate. I was raised in a very traditional religious setting where I was told that Christians are to carry their cross. They have to bear with their sufferings like Jesus. That’s certainly part of the truth. It took me time though to realize that we are to carry the Resurrection as well, everywhere we go and whatever we do and no matter how we feel. And that’s the hardest thing of all, but it is also the most wonderful. The challenge of Christian life is not just to carry the cross, it’s to dare to believe in something good, something so good that we could only shake our heads in disbelief.
So how do we do that?
Well, if there is one thing the Easter stories of the disciples teach us is that we don’t do anything. We meet the risen Christ or rather, we let the risen Christ come to meet us. This the only way, we cannot convince ourselves with such a hope, and we’re a fraud if we pretend to be convinced when we aren’t really. We have to receive this hope directly from him. The thing is, most of the time, we miss him, we don’t see him and that’s exactly what happens to the two disciples at the beginning. Luke tells us: Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. There is no trumpet and no cymbals to announce the risen Christ, Jesus appears as a foreigner they meet on the way, no angels surrounding him. But Jesus makes his presence known in the Scriptures, how they all point to him, how they make sense of everything he said and did, and Jesus shows up at table, in the breaking of the bread which he had told them to remember him with.
So what Luke i doing is that he tells the story so his community will know they will encounter Christ when they meet for church, in what we still call today the liturgy of the word and in the liturgy of the table. Church you see, is not something of the past, a tradition, a memory. It’s not just a memory, it’s re-membrance, a coming back together, the risen Christ makes himself present and makes himself known in the midst of us as we recall what Jesus said and did a long time ago. Most days there is nothing more we need to do than to show up, listen, be together and let ourselves be encountered by Him. It may not seem of feel like much at the beginning,it certainly does not feel like Easter everyday, no trumpet, no cymbals, but little by little we are awaken from the slumber of the world, our eyes open and we start to receive the hope Christ wants to give us.Of course we can meet Christ anywhere in the world, but I think that it is at church that we learn to speak his language, that we learn to identify his face, that we learn to recognize him.That’s what generations after generations of Christians have been doing, and my guess is that if the church is still there today is because they haven’t disappointed. Actually, the risen Christ gives us the only hope that doesn’t disappoint, the only hope that does not end up being swallowed by the grave.
So continue to dream and to work for something better, and keep coming.