An Intimate Stranger [Easter 3A]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Luke 24:13-35

An Intimate Stranger

One of the things that makes Easter so popular is that it is so familiar. Everyone knows what to expect: the aisles at Target fill with plastic grass and chocolate bunnies; circulars advertise great deals on pastel colored clothing; the church smells like lilies and brass musicians blast out the opening chords of “Jesus Christ is risen today.” On Easter the pews are full and the Alleluias hearty.

Even the scripture readings are predictable. Unlike those Ordinary Sundays of the summer when Jesus' whereabouts and agenda are all over the map – some weeks it's a healing, others a parable, sometimes even an uncomfortable confrontation – on Easter we know exactly where Jesus is and what he is doing. He's in that garden and he is risen.

It is always the same. It is ever familiar. Every Easter Sunday greets us with the same gospel story. We always follow Mary Magdalene to the tomb early in the morning. The stone is always rolled away. The body is missing – every single time. Mary weeps the same tears that stained her face the year before. Jesus always says her name. And the gospeller always says “Rabbouni” which means teacher and every year we think to ourselves “Rabbouni is a strange word.”

And, then the next Sunday, which despite popular opinion is not officially called Low Sunday, on Easter 2, we hear yet another familiar Gospel. On Easter Sunday we hear the same Gospel every year. On Easter 2 the same is true. Every year on the second Sunday of Easter we hear the Gospel in which the Risen Christ appears to the disciples sans Thomas. The disciples are always afraid. And every year Jesus somehow walks through the wall in his resurrected body. Every year he breathes on them, gifting them with the Holy Spirit. Every year Thomas is out on an errand. Every year he finds the story a little hard to believe because, let's be honest, it is a little hard to believe. Every year Jesus shows back up and invites Thomas to put his hand into Jesus' side – which is always uncomfortable to picture. And every year the Rector finds someone else to preach that Gospel because after Holy Week and Easter he could use a break from writing sermons.

There is just something familiar about Easter. We have sung these songs. And heard these Gospels. And shouted these Alleluias. And talked about this Resurrection. For two thousand years. And while that is comforting in many good and helpful ways, it also threatens to lull us into thinking that the Easter experience is in any way normal or familiar.

Christ is risen. And there is nothing ordinary, nothing normal, nothing familiar, about that.

The first Easter was different; that Easter would have been very unfamiliar to us. There were no hymns of praise, no Easter lilies, no egg hunts or pastel bonnets. Instead, there was the lonely road out of town. There were tears of disappointment. There were dashed hopes and shattered dreams.

“We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” We had hoped... That is what they said, on the road out of town. There was no need to complete the thought; what was implied in that statement was: But he wasn't. We had hoped he was, but he wasn't. Facts were facts; it happened very publicly. Jesus was dead. Crucified on a cross. They no longer had a reason to stay in Jerusalem. They no longer had a reason to hope for a better world. And so they were on the road, making the slow walk home. To pick up the pieces...or whatever.

Now, they had heard about the empty tomb and the angels. But they react much like the disciples reacted: dismissal or disbelief or disinterest. I don't know exactly what they made of the reports presented by Mary Magdalene and the other women, but nobody buys in. The disciples hide out. These followers leave Jerusalem – hopeless and heart-broken. Despite the women's testimony, it seems the Jesus movement is over; it died with Jesus on that Friday afternoon on that Roman cross.

Jesus' death was very public. But his resurrection was not at all. In fact, considering that it was an unprecedented, unheard of event, the immediate impact of the resurrection was apparently pretty subtle. No witnesses. No political regime change. No rainbow in the sky. Mostly just an empty tomb and some implausible rumors.

The death felt more believable than the promise of new life. These travelers, these followers of Jesus were human – like us. They carried around the little deaths of their past – like us. The battles lost, the failures, the disappointments, the shards of broken relationships, the dashed hopes: they were real. And they were carrying them back to Emmaus. Because all of those little deaths, all of that hurt and all of that pain, felt more believable than any chance at new life.

And then Jesus showed up. But they could not see it. They were expecting death and he was alive. They were followers of Jesus and they didn't even recognize him. To them he was just another nosy stranger prying into their broken hearts. They loved Jesus but maybe they never really knew him.

And their experience was a common experience. We hear this every year; in our familiar Gospels Jesus is always a stranger. In the garden, on Easter morning, outside of the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene fails to recognize Jesus. She loves him deeply enough to risk her life at his tomb, the accomplice of a condemned man, and yet when she first encounters the Risen Christ she mistakes him for the gardener. The disciples were with Jesus his entire ministry; they walked with him and ate with him and stayed with him, and yet when Jesus shows up in that locked room the Gospel tells us that his own disciples did not recognize Jesus until he showed them his wounds. And so it should be no surprise that the two on the road to Emmaus fail also to recognize Jesus.

They thought they knew him. But when Jesus comes to his followers in the new Easter reality, in the world after the resurrection, he comes to them as a stranger. Rowan Williams writes, “[Jesus] is not what they have thought him to be, and thus they must 'learn' him afresh, as from the beginning.”¹

Somehow, like his earliest followers, we discover that Jesus, our brother and friend, the Savior whose death and resurrection we celebrate every year in this all too familiar season, with these familiar hymns, and familiar Gospel readings is in fact wholly unfamiliar. There is a stranger in our midst.

Mary should have known him. The disciples should have known him. We should know him. We read the stories about him. We offer our most intimate prayers to him. We are baptized in his name – into his death and resurrection. He is, after all, in our hearts, as close to us as the air we breathe, we consume his body and his blood; he is a part of us, inside of us.

And still he is a stranger. Williams again writes, “The risen Jesus is strange and yet deeply familiar, a question to what we have known, loved, and desired, and yet continuous with the friend we have known and loved. His strangeness and his recognizably are both shocking, standing as they do in such inseparable connection. The risen Jesus returns as a loved friend and brother, and at the same time holds us off.... [He] is both unimaginably close and unimaginably strange.”²

We are, it seems, in love with an intimate stranger – a contradiction that is undeniably true. As close as the heart beating in your chest and yet impossibly elusive. No matter how strong our gaze, we only get glimpses. And as soon as we recognize him, he vanishes from our sight. But the glimpse is as intoxicating as it is life-changing; that glimpse, however fleeting, is enough to set our hearts on fire.

The glimpse of Jesus, however fleeting, sends us staggering into this Easter world desperate for more – to see, touch, taste, hear the Risen Christ. We live in an Easter world that is at once familiar and yet forever haunted by the strangeness of the Jesus who invades our lives and yet evades our grasp. And even while our hearts today burn with his resurrection power, we find that we are forever in pursuit of a mystery, for ever courting an intimate stranger.

1Williams, Rowan, Resurrection, 75.

2Ibid, 84.