STUCK (LIKE A DOPE) ON A THING CALLED HOPE!
Luke 24.13-35 1 Peter 3.13-22
Warner M. Bailey
The road to Easter travels from ugliness to beauty; from sadness to joy. The road to Easter travels from loneliness to community; from separateness to family; from being scattered to being gathered together again. The road to Easter travels from subsisting off of dead traditions to living by Scriptures that flame up in your hearts. The road to Easter travels from hopes, dashed to the depths, to the heights of hopes unheard of; from the abyss of cynicism toward life in a reborn commitment to live fully because, after all is said and done, it is worth the living.
This is road down which the Easter message traveled when disciples made the trip from Jerusalem to Emmaeus and back again. Their body language gave away how much they were crushed inside. When Jesus asked them what was going on, to give an account of themselves, all they could do was to tell him of how their hopes had been ripped out of their hearts. When Jesus began opening the Scriptures to them in a way they had never heard them explained before, their hearts began to flame up in a strange new way. When they asked Jesus into their home and gave him hospitality, he helped them in the breaking of the bread to make the final connection that the message of resurrection was indeed true. Immediately they got up from the dinner table and walked half the night back to Jerusalem to gather again with the disciples in the intensity of that first Easter’s joy. “We have seen the Lord in the breaking of the bread!”
Our Epistle Lesson today challenges us: “Always be ready to give an account of the hope that is within you.” Disciples on the road to Emmaeus were no-count in the category of hope, could give no account of hope. Only by Jesus making a home with them through Word and Sacrament did their hearts flame with hope and they desire to return to be with God’s people.
Easter challenges us with the question: Can you give an account of the hope that is within you? And our times ante-up that challenge by adding to it: Under pressure, can you give an account of the hope that is within you? Like when teenagers are staring at the muzzle of a gun. Like when a doctor tells you that what you or someone you dearly love have will make you or someone you dearly love die. Like when you are faced with separation from those you love. Can you give an account of the hope that is within you?
In the musical South Pacific Nellie Forbush sings, “But I’m stuck (like a dope!) on a thing called hope, and I can’t get it out of my heart.” Is she a cock-eyed optimist? Are we dopes for hoping with Easter hope? Is God’s act at placing Jesus at absolute risk on the cross stupid? Is the unqualified self-offering of love’s endeavor, love’s expense “for sinners such as I” wasteful in the extreme? Certainly to a secular world we are dopes. Our world trades on power built up through superiority in knowledge, competency, notoriety, success, networks, sensations and pleasure. Who’s the most powerful gets to make all the weaker ones afraid and compliant. Persons who place themselves at absolute risk, who make unqualified self-offerings, get nailed to the crosses of the powerful. The powerful send the message of death to make the weaker ones fearful and compliant.
In the world of rule by the powerful, fear is the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. All the more striking, then, how Jesus placed himself at absolute risk. Jesus made an unqualified self-offering. Jesus ended up on a cross. There is no human suffering that has not been suffered in the agony of Jesus on the cross, no human death that he has not lived. In a world of fear and hurt, he became the fearful and hurting one for us all.
But God raised him and only him from death. Thus fear has lost its sting with Jesus. Fear cannot lay a glove on Jesus. What can fear do to a man who has triumphed over the worst thing fear can do?
This is the man who brought disciples on the road to Emmaeus from cynicism to exuberance, from defeatism to unswerving confidence. This is the man who was made known in the breaking of the bread and who made hearts flame up in the opening of the Scriptures. This is the man who wants you to set him as Lord in your hearts. He does not want you to fear what the world fears, and you do not have to with the one who has conquered death in your heart. He does not want you to let the world squeeze you into its ways of intimidation, and you can resist that pressure by setting apart in your heart the one whose ways of gentleness and respect was brought back from death. Threatened of being judged inadequate by the false gods of success, notoriety, competence, and pleasure, this man wants you to be able to say in your defense, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God.” (Job 19.23-27)