And when He had said
this, He showed them His hands and His feet. While they still could not believe
it because of their joy and amazement, He said to them, "Have you anything
to eat?" - v.40-41
Collect
Our God and Father, Christ Our risen Lord
Displayed His strength through hunger and through scars.
Now grant us grace to show the world Your love
Through our own weakness and humility,
That at the heart of our faith all might find
The Christ who understands their every need.
And this we ask You in the holy name
Of Jesus Christ, Our Savior and Our Lord,
And to the glory of Our Mighty God,
The Father, Son, and Spirit three in one,
Who lives and reigns forever without end,
Amen.
Introduction
Last
Thursday, May 29, was Ascension Day - calculating forty days from Our Lord's
resurrection on Easter Sunday we arrive at that date for His return to the
right hand of the Father on high. (I know Luke makes it seem here as if it
happened all on one day, but he's compressing things in order to get the main
points of the story across. In the first chapter of Acts he expands his account
and mentions the actual time-frame [Acts 1.3]). For that reason, many churches
set today aside as Ascension Sunday, a time to remember and reflect on what it
means that Jesus returned to Heaven.
But
this is also Graduation Sunday, a day when many churches take time to do what
we are doing today - to praise God for those who have achieved significant
milestones in their education. And that is a good thing to do, because just as
Jesus entered a new phase of his life and a new ministry as our advocate before
the Father (1 Jo 2.1), you now enter a new phase of life which offers new
opportunities to bring the love of Christ to the world.
My
purpose this morning is to see if we can't bring those two events together -
Jesus' "graduation" to glory and your own graduation from school. And
I don't think I'm abusing the text to make that attempt: You see, the life of the
Christian basically consists of discovering what is true of Jesus and then
asking how that applies to our own experiences. Your classmates and colleagues
may be asking themselves, "Now how can I get a good job?" or, "Now
how can I get a scholarship for the next phase of my education?" Those are
good questions and you are probably asking them too, but ultimately the
Christian graduate asks: "Now how can I better represent Christ to the
world?"
Central Panel: Christ in the Text
So
we need to begin by looking at Jesus in this passage. As I do that, I see two
things I want to point out: I see that everything
is different but at the same time everything
is the same.
At
either end of this passage, we see that Jesus
has changed radically. At the beginning of this story he appears suddenly
on the inside of a room with a locked door. He doesn't pick the lock; he
doesn't batter it down; he doesn't even lift the latch and enter - he's just
sort of there all of a sudden. And at
the end of this story, he ascends into Heaven as the disciples stand watching.
But
in the center of this passage, we see that Jesus
remains radically the same. His changed body is merely the case that
carries and protects the precious jewel of radical continuity. Look at two
actions Jesus' resurrected body performs.
To begin with, He showed them his hands and his feet. That means he showed them
his wounds from the crucifixion. This is important for two reasons. First of
all, it is important in terms of proving the truth of the resurrection. You
cannot argue that the disciples mistook someone else for Jesus, that this was
some kind of hoax. More powerful than a fingerprint or a DNA sample, the wounds
were an irrefutable way of saying, "It's me. I'm the same guy you've
always known and whom you saw die on the cross."
But
second, and more important for our
purposes, it showed his weakness and woundedness. His sudden appearance didn't
convince them; his scarred flesh did.
Jesus,
who could smooth the scars of the lepers until their flesh was soft as the skin
of a newborn baby, kept his own scars! Jesus, who could command a mangled limb
to blossom into length and strength, left his own maimed skin unchanged. Jesus,
who could call life back into a dead body chose not to remove the marks of his
own death from his living flesh. At the moment of his greatest power he proves
his identity by showing his need.
Next, He said to them, "Have you anything here to eat?" Again, this is important in terms of
proving the resurrection. From the first Easter Sunday until today, people have
tried to dismiss the resurrection as a mirage, a mistake of mass hysteria in
which people hallucinated what they wanted so badly to see. But it takes a lot
of faith to believe that - too much faith for me. You have to believe that
multiple people saw the same thing at different times and places. And anyway,
Jesus eats a piece of fish, something a hallucination cannot do.
But again, the more important thing for
our purposes is that Jesus asked for their help! Apparently resurrection bodies
still get hungry, still need nourishment. And Jesus, who fed the five thousand
with five loaves and two fish, asks for
food! Jesus, who after his resurrection blessed his grieving disciples by
cooking their breakfast with his own hands (Jo 21.9), asks for
food! Jesus, who the night before he died fed the disciples and promised them
the food of his own flesh and blood, asks
for food!
Now here's the point: The ultimate
proof of Jesus' glory is not the ways in which he is different, but the ways in
which he is the same; not his power, but his poverty; not his divinity, but his
humanity. The miracle is not so much that he ascends into the Heavens as that
he takes his scars with him. The risen Lord, the King of kings, looks toward us
from the throne of glory and his wounded body cries out, "I live with
bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends."
And here's the real payoff: It is that Jesus who sits at the right hand of
the Father in Heaven and ever lives to make intercession for you! (Heb 7.25)
Hebrews 2.18 says of him that since He Himself was tempted in that which He has suffered, He is able to come to the
aid of those who are tempted.
Right Panel: Our World
in the Text
So what does
any of this have to do with graduation?
Well, in an
important sense, everything is different
for you now. True, you do not have a new body - yet - but you are wearing
very distinctive clothing, clothing you really can't wear to work or the mall
or the beach, clothing which says to everyone that you have passed a
significant milestone.
This clothing
says that you now have access to places from which you were previously locked
out! You high school graduates - you can now enter the doors of the university
to continue your education. You college and tech school graduates - you can now
enter the doors of graduate schools, jobs, and other places which would
otherwise be closed to you.
This clothing
also says that you are ready to ascend: not to Heaven, of course, but in the
ranks of society. You are ready to ascend financially. An American high school
graduate stands to earn fifty to one hundred percent more over a lifetime than
someone who drops out. College graduates on average earn nearly one hundred
percent more than those without a degree, the highest gap in our nation's history.
And for someone
who is not a Christian, I suppose that's enough: You can now enter elite places
and ascend the economic scale. But, of course, that's not enough for a follower
of Christ. We must always ask the same question of anything that happens in our
lives, including our graduation: How do I follow Christ in this experience? The
answer is, keep your humanity, compassion, and vulnerability at the core of
your achievement.
Look at the place that Jesus chose to go.
He could have walked through any locked door. He could have barged through the
locked door of the chamber of the Sanhedrin and taken his place as the
religious leader of Israel. He could have strolled through the locked door of
Pilate's palace and occupied the throne of political power. He could have
busted past the padlocked doors of the tax collectors and become the wealthiest
man in the world. Instead, he walked through the locked door of a pitiful band
of faithless and frightened disciples who were the basis of the local church.
With power that opened any door, he chose the door that opened into a place of
weakness and need.
So your calling
is to let your education open doors into places of need rather than places of
privilege, into places of want rather than places of wealth, into a powerless
church instead of a powerful world.
Look at the witness Jesus chose to show.
Jesus could have ascended to Heaven in invulnerable power. He could have burst
into the presence of the cherubim who surround the throne and ceaselessly cry
out "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts," and flaunted his
perfect palms and flawless feet and vaunted his invulnerability. Instead, he
retained his wounds as his most precious eternal possession.
Look at the hunger Jesus chose to know. He could have called forth a feast
with a wave of one wounded hand, yet instead he signals a hunger so sharp that
he's willing to gnaw a cold fish stick, humble enough to take pot luck and
hungry enough not to turn up his nose at leftovers!
So let your education continually remind you of the needs of the
uneducated. Let your achievement make you the servant of everyone around you.
Don't use your education as an escape hatch from lowlifes but as a port of
entry to a life of lowly service. Don't
let your knowledge make you an insufferable, stuck-up Somebody, but a scarred
and suffering servant. Don't think of your schooling as a way to be sure you
always have plenty to eat, but as a way of seeing that there are always plenty
of people you can feed!
"How can I use this experience to demonstrate the love of the
weak and wounded Christ?"
Left Panel: The
Individual in the Text
But now let's
broaden our reading of this passage. We have seen how it speaks specifically to
our graduates, and we can all understand how that applies to our own
achievements whatever they may be. But now I want to talk to those of you who
do not profess Christ as your Savior. It may be that you have factual or
intellectual problems with the Christian story. I have attempted to address
some of those from this passage, but I don't think it is usually those kinds of
things that keep people away from Jesus. I think that often those things are a
tool we resort to in order to cover up our real worry: That there is no way God
could ever love us, that our sin is too real and too raw and that even Jesus
cannot forgive.
Well, I want
you to look for a moment at the eternally hungry, eternally wounded Christ. He
sits at the right hand of the Father, and he has not forgotten what it is like.
I teach Greek
at the School of Christian Studies. In fact, your pastor just finished his
first year of studying that language. It's a difficult language to learn. I
once had a student who flew Harrier jump-jets in the Marine Corps. He told me
that flight training for that incredibly complex airplane was easier than New
Testament Greek.
Well, there's a
story that I always tell on the first day of class to every group of aspiring
Greek scholars. I tell them that in my first semester of Greek as a college student,
I made a D, the only D of my college career! Why do I tell them that? Well,
first of all, I'd rather they hear it from me than find out from someone else.
And then there's the encouragement factor: I struggled at first but eventually
managed to learn the language well enough to teach it. But mostly I tell them
that because I want to let them know - and to remind myself - that I know what
it's like to feel overwhelmed, confused, and utterly helpless in studying New
Testament Greek.
And that's the
real picture in this text: Jesus has not forgotten what it is like. Hebrews
4.15 says he has faced every temptation that you and I do. He remembers how, in
the wilderness, his body screamed for food so loudly that he was almost willing
to satisfy it instead of honoring his Father. He remembers how, in the Garden
of Gethsemane, he cried out for relief from what love demanded. He remembers
how, as he hung on the tree of Calvary, he felt abandoned by his own Father. He
has taken his wounds and his hunger into Heaven. There is nothing you have ever
experienced that he does not understand, and will not forgive.
