One of the downsides of the liturgical calendar is that, since it runs in a three year cycle (A, B, and C), some of my favorite gospel stories only show up in the Sunday lectionary once every three years. Today is no exception. The Year C Third Sunday of Easter gospel reading from John is an important one, with Jesus performing a post-resurrection miracle and having an important conversation with Peter. But the Year A Third Sunday after Easter gospel reading from Luke is one of my all-time favorite stories from scripture. Here’s how I treat it in my forthcoming book A Year of Faith and Philosophy: Exploring Spiritual Growth Through the Liturgical Cycle.
Hope and Reality
“Now faith, hope, and love abide . . . and the greatest of these is love.” These words from the apostle Paul are heard at many, perhaps most, weddings. Everyone wants to believe that love is the greatest, especially on their wedding day. Faith is part of my DNA—challenging it, trying to get rid of it, redefining it, being confused by it, and generally struggling with the “f-word” (as I call it in the classroom) has shaped me for as long as I can remember. I’m not so sure about hope.
Several years ago I asked Jeanne what she thought the opposite of faith is. She first answered “despair,” then immediately took it back and said, “I guess despair’s the opposite of hope.” After a quick check on Google, I found that she was right (again). The immediate etymological root of “despair” is the Old French despoir: hopelessness. So, what is hope?
On the Road to Emmaus
Although Easter is certainly about love and faith, it is arguably mostly about hope. There is no shortage of material to consider during the Easter season—the empty tomb, Peter and John racing to take a look, the authorities scrambling to explain what happened, the poignant exchange between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. But my personal favorite Easter-related story is the Easter 3 Year A gospel—Luke’s account of two disciples on the road to Emmaus. It’s such a human story—the bitter sadness and devastation of Cleopas and his unnamed companion (call him Bob) is palpable.
The usual take on the story is that Jesus is risen and walking with Cleopas and Bob, but they are either too dense or blinded by tears to know it’s him. Jesus gives them a free and unsolicited theology lesson; as soon as they recognize him after he breaks the bread at dinner he vanishes. Three words are particularly resonant: “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” We had hoped. And our hope was in vain.
It’s Been Jesus All the Time
Hope is a tough nut to crack. Every human life is marked by “we had hoped” moments that we never quite get over. I hoped that I would become a concert pianist. Jeanne hoped she would marry someone who could dance. But the dashed hopes of Cleopas and Bob are far more crushing. It’s easy to criticize Cleopas and Bob for failing to recognize that what they had hoped for was walking with them for seven miles, but that’s not entirely fair.
True, Jesus does `“redeem Israel,” and everybody else for that matter, but the redemption Cleopas, Bob, and others were hoping for was a political redemption and establishment of an earthly kingdom by the Messiah. And it’s very telling that the Jesus-guided tour through the Jewish Scriptures touching on prophetic texts indicating that the Messiah would suffer and die doesn’t do anything for Cleopas and Bob. It’s not until the three of them have a meal, a human experience rather than a classroom experience, that they see it’s been Jesus all the time.
Many Instances of Mistaken Identity
This is where the story usually ends, but it gets even more interesting. Cleopas and Bob run back to Jerusalem and report to the disciples what happened; in the middle of their story, Jesus reappears. And in another human, all too human moment—Cleopas, Bob, the eleven disciples, and everyone else is scared out of their wits. They think he’s a ghost. It’s not until Jesus lets them check out his body with its scars, as he invited Thomas to do in the previous Sunday’s gospel, and eats a piece of fish in front of them that they realize it’s really him. The whole story is fraught with humor, fallibility, and humanity.
In Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris asks, “Does it ever surprise you that God chooses to be revealed in so fallible a fashion?” Yes, it does. All the time. Even when our greatest hopes are satisfied, it’s always in some sideways, back door, behind the scenes, fuzzy, and oblique sort of way. And that can be frustrating. Jesus’s resurrection, the most spectacular and crucial event in human history, is surrounded by so many instances of mistaken identity, fumbling around, uncertainty, and missteps that it is truly comical.
Daily and Mundane
But it makes perfect sense and brings the central pillars of the Christian faith—the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection—together. The whole idea of incarnation, of God becoming human through and through, is outrageous and ludicrous at its core. What self-respecting creator of the universe would do it this way? Only one that loves what was created so much that becoming part of it, miraculously, is not a step down but is actually the only way to accomplish what has to be accomplished. We know that we are flawed, incomplete, jumbled, and messed-up creatures, so why should we be surprised that our hopes get addressed in that way?
The divinely infused cycle of death and resurrection is around us everywhere, in nature coming alive after a long winter, in church services populated by octogenarians and infants, in the annual arrival of new late teens ready to be taught on campus, just to name a few examples from my own daily life. It is not at all surprising that the resurrected Jesus, the hope of the world, was revealed in the midst of the daily and mundane rather than in power and glory. Kathleen Norris once again: “In a religion based on a human incarnation of the divine, when ideology battles experience, it is fallible, ordinary experience that must win.”
For reflection: In Downton Abbey, the dowager countess Violet says that “hope is a tease to prevent us from accepting reality.” How would you respond?
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