Risen, But Not Recognized

So this morning's message is titled, Reason But Not Recognized,

and we're going to read from Luke chapter 24, verses 13 through 32.

Luke 24:13–32

Now the same day, two of them were going to a village called Emmaus,

about seven miles from Jerusalem.

They were talking with each other about everything that had happened.

As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came

up and and walked along with them.

But they were kept from recognizing him. He asked them, What are you discussing

together as you walk along?

They stood still, their faces downcast.

One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem

who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?

What things, he asked, about Jesus of Nazareth?

They replied, He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people.

The chief priest and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him.

But we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.

And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place.

In addition, some of our women amazed us.

They went to the tomb early this morning, but didn't find his body.

They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels who said, he is alive. alive.

Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the woman

had said, but they did not see Jesus.

He said to them, How foolish are you, and how slow to believe all these prophets have spoken!

Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things, and then enter his glory?

And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was

said in all the scriptures concerning himself.

As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on

as if he was going further.

But they urged him strongly, stay with us, for it is nearly evening, the day is almost over.

So he went in and stayed with them.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks,

broke it, and began to give.

Heavenly Father, we thank you again for the reading of your word.

We thank you that your word is inspired by the Holy Spirit, but even more it

gives an accurate accounting of what has happened with our Christ and with our

Savior, you're the one whose name means God save.

We thank you for Jesus in Jesus' name. Amen.

So Christians are living in the afterglow of a great victory.

The light of our Lord's resurrection still surrounds us.

The fragrance, the lily, still clings to us.

And in our hearts, we echo the triumphant songs of Easter.

The song is, Love's redeeming work is done, Fought the fight,

the battle won, Death in vain forbids him rise, Christ hath opened paradise. Hallelujah.

We sing that at Easter oftentimes. We sing that most often and usually just

at Easter time when we sing that.

It's almost as if we don't want to even recognize that for the rest of the world,

but yet, or of the year, but we should. We should be recognizing that at all times.

Easter has changed everything for us and for the world.

The mighty God has vindicated his obedient son, allowing the condemnation of

death to be passed on to anyone who sets themselves against Christ and giving

the crown of life to all of us,

all of those who identify themselves with the Son's obedience.

In the words of Peter, written to a struggling martyred church,

he wrote this, we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection

of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Without having seen him, we love him, and though we do not now see him,

we believe in him and rejoice in his unutterable and exalted joy.

We are a hopeful people. We are people whose hope is built and stays on the

resurrection of Christ.

If the glorious good news of Christ's death and resurrection for us to Easter

didn't shake us up to the very core of our being,

if it didn't fill our souls with ecstatic praise for God,

if it didn't change our lives in in such a way so that we are living as the

praise of the glory of God, then the reason can only be that we have allowed the gospel story.

To become cold and indifferent. I remember in 1982 when I was moving from Greenville,

Illinois after college to Minnesota to take a job with my uncle,

I got stranded in a blizzard on the plains of Iowa.

I had to pull off and hole up in a motel for the night.

In the early afternoon, I was driving a little Chevy Love pickup with rear-wheel

drive in a a blizzard, with semis going by me, blasting past me.

My windshield wipers were freezing up every time they went.

And so I decided, well, I think I'm going to have to just pull over.

Not at all sleepy and bored out of my skull by being trapped in a motel room.

I watched ESPN on television.

So you know how bored and trapped I was. I watched the same basketball game

on television television three times that night. And you know what?

The players made the same stupid plays every time.

They committed the same fouls, the same bad calls by the ref.

It happened three times in a row.

It doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't they learn from their mistakes?

You'd think that after the third time, they would have done something right.

Now, that's the problem with the seasons of the Christian year for us,

especially Easter. No matter how many times we watch it, no matter how many

times we celebrate it, it always turns out the same.

During Holy Week, we are like an audience watching a play that we've seen many times before.

We observe the development of the story from Christmas to Easter,

and especially from Palm Sunday to Easter.

We repeat it year after year, time after time, detached from the actors of 2,000

years ago because we were not involved in that original drama.

We're looking at it as if we're watching a movie on television,

repeat it over and over and over again.

We know exactly how it's going to turn out. The good guy always wins and is

brought back to life from the grave, and the tube is empty.

We know it. It happens every year. After a while, the story becomes old hat for us.

And it begins to get boring. So we have to dress it up a little bit with our

pageants and our fan fairs and our kids running around the sanctuary with palm

branches in their hands as we do Palm Sunday.

And soon Easter becomes just all about our church services and our activities

and a hyped up feeling of joy that we know we must have at that time of year

and not about true worship of Jesus.

I wonder, do we in the Christian church in this day and age have a problem with

not entering the house of God for the purpose of really worshiping Jesus?

Are we coming here for just a show and a program?

Just a thought. My name is Tim. I'm your friend.

But we really can't know how the disciples felt because we weren't there.

If only we could become involved step by step and walk in in their steps,

and by using our imagination, put ourselves in the place of those who did not

know how the story was going to turn out.

They didn't know the end of the story.

Could we put ourselves in the place of the friends and disciples of Jesus whose

hearts were broken as they watched him die on that cross,

and who slunk away from Calvary's hill certain and convinced that they had seen

their teacher and friend.

Die, and seen him alive for the last time.

Let's join two of them as they pass through the city gate and walk northwards

and then turn off of the main highway to follow the narrow road that leads to

their home in the little village of Emmaus.

Their shoulders are slumped, their heads are bowed as they bear on their backs

the crushing weight and burden of dejection and disillusionment that comes sometimes

when we don't stay in the fullness of the message of the resurrection of Christ,

when we don't understand what is really happening.

They trudge with weary steps as if their shoes were weighted down with lead.

For a long time neither of them opens his mouth. They dare not speak for fear,

breaking into uncontrollable sighing and sobbing.

At last, with a convulsive sigh, the younger one of the two bursts out.

He's dead, dead like any other man, I say.

They killed him for crying out loud.

They were right and we were wrong.

They said, if you are the Messiah, come down for the cross. Well,

if he had been the Messiah, wouldn't he have come down?

Maybe they were right. How can we have been such fools all of this time?

Fools, you suppose we, yes, I suppose we are, replies the older man named Cleopas.

But who could blame us for that? He seemed like the Messiah.

He was all the way I ever believed that the Messiah would be.

He did everything that scriptures foretold that the Messiah would do.

Do you remember now that he, remember, explodes the younger one.

How can I forget anything about him?

I believed in him. I trusted him. I followed him. him. I spent three years at his side.

I was certain that God had sent him to redeem Israel, and now he's dead, I tell you.

And what good can a dead Messiah do?

Cleopas had no answer. For both of these disciples, the sun had set at midday

and their bottom had dropped out of their world.

Suddenly they were no longer walking alone.

While they had been dragging their tired feet, a man had been striding along the road behind them.

And as he came up alongside them, he spoke a greeting and asked if he could walk with them.

Sitting in the the audience and having seen this play over and over,

we know that this man is Jesus risen from the dead.

But how can we pretend that we do not know the story and put ourselves in the

place, in the shoes of these despondent disciples who didn't recognize their Messiah?

When we read the gospel accounts now, we do it from the perspective of 20-20 hindsight.

We have the story. We have it written for us. We have the historical chronicles

of what happened during that time.

We question how on earth could they not recognize Jesus?

And without putting ourselves in the situation in which these disciples found

themselves, we spiritualize the whole matter and relegate this to one of those

mysteries of God which we aren't supposed to understand.

We seem to think that God God himself blinded them from recognizing him.

But yet it's God's will to reveal himself to us, not to blind us from him.

What kind of loving God would purposely...

Keep from showing himself to people? What kind of loving God,

and God that's totally good, God that's totally righteous, God that's totally

pure, what kind of God like that would deceive,

his people and cover himself up so they couldn't know that it was him? Not our God.

But the passage does not say that God kept them from recognizing Jesus.

The gospel writer just simply says that they were kept from recognizing him.

That was literally true and quite understandable.

Reading the gospel accounts of the appearance of the resurrection reason Christ,

we see and we understand that even Mary didn't recognize Jesus at first.

We would come to the conclusion that the resurrected body of Jesus must have

been strikingly different from the flesh and blood and body that we have known

him to have before the resurrection,

except that we also know that he had the prints on his hands and his feet where

the nails had penetrated him.

In fact, some of the followers recognized him immediately.

Some of them didn't. Mary mistook him for a gardener. The disciples in the upper

room thought he was a ghost.

Thomas didn't believe it was him, even though he walked through the walls until

he touched his hands and his feet.

And then he said, my Savior and my God.

And to those two men on the road to Emmaus who had traveled with Jesus,

he now seemed no more than a traveling servant, a traveling stranger,

somebody who happened to come alongside them and walk with Literally,

their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

It's possible that Jesus came alongside them to walk with us,

and he walks with us, and we have failed to recognize him because he looks different.

Than what we were taught in the 20th century. We might not recognize him now,

because like the Jews, they were expecting something different.

They were expecting somebody to come and take over everything and redeem them

from an oppressive society.

Sometimes I think we wonder if Jesus is going to make this whole world right

and this government right and everything else, but yet Jesus came for the purpose

of making our life right.

Another thing we must understand is that these men and the others who had followed

Jesus were in the height of their despair.

They had just lost their best friend and brother. All that they had put their

hopes in was now wiped out by the crucifixion and death.

They had just spent an entire Saturday in silence and in darkness,

knowing that their teacher had been crucified and was dead and was in a grave behind a stone.

And they were living in fear that they might be next if they swore to be followers of his.

Their faces were downcast, the scripture says. They were looking down.

You know what happens when you look down at your toes while you're walking?

Especially when you're 66 years old, you stumble. humble.

You don't look where you're going. You could end up in a ditch,

even walking. It happens.

Just let you know. Their faces were downcast. Folks, they were looking down at the dirt.

It's difficult to see the road ahead when your faces, your eyes are on the dirt.

In the grieving process, they were still stuck in the denial stage. How could this be?

There was confusion and disillusionment. We had hoped that he would be the one

to redeem or to save Israel.

Their eyes were in the dirt. They were looking down.

They were kept from recognizing the resolution of all of their needs and desires.

They had been believing that Jesus would be the one to somehow rid them of their

Roman oppression, but this leader of the new way was now dead,

and they were turning despondently to their old ways, the apostles went back to fishing.

Isn't that the way it is with us sometimes? It's an old story.

It happens over and over and over.

It's repeated time and again. We remember it from year to year.

We celebrate it from year to year. But from Easter.

From Easter to Christmas, and from Christmas to Easter, our eyes begin to turn

downward when we think about all of the despair that's going on in our lives right now.

Is it possible that Jesus comes to walk alongside us too, but we fail to recognize

him because we are so bogged down in our despair and our despondency that we

fail to recognize his presence with us?

Is it possible that Jesus is present, ever present with us, called the Holy

Spirit, and we fail to recognize him?

Is it possible that we fail to recognize him walking alongside us because we

are too busy looking for his second coming and don't realize that he's been here all the time?

He's present all the time with us. Is it possible that after responding to Jesus

as Savior, we quickly return turn to our old ways of despair,

despondency, and complacency.

Is it possible that we are so caught up in our own troubles and our trials?

We love misery. Aren't we a misery-loving people? Look at how miserable I am. Jesus must love me.

Isn't it possible that we are so caught up in ourselves just a thought. My name is Tim.

I'm your friend. That we fail to recognize that Jesus is with us.

Then, too, these men on their way to Emmaus were probably already planning their

words to the people back home.

They were busy, involved in their conversation with each other,

and were too focused on these physical matters to notice anything of consequence around them.

They were already planning what they were going to be doing in business and

their their homes and everything around them, that they were not even sure what was going on.

Their master teacher that they had spent all this time with was gone,

and now they had to take up with their lives where they had left off.

Maybe they didn't recognize Jesus because of their busyness.

They were too focused on the events that had happened that they couldn't know Jesus was with them.

Is it possible that Jesus comes to walk alongside us too, and we're too busy

to recognize him? We have other things going on.

Is it possible we don't take the time to just sit at the feet of Jesus like Mary did?

We have our minds set on what we're going to do at work. We have mindset on

what we're going to do at the game or at prom or at the Christian concert or

at the family gathering.

Man, we already have our minds. I'm telling you right now, some of you already

have your minds on what you're going to have for lunch, right?

So I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to have for lunch.

Anyway, I have a picture that was hung in our church lobby in another church,

a picture that was given to me by somebody.

But it's a picture of a businessman sitting at his desk with Jesus sitting across

from him, and they are conversing.

It's like a natural conversation that they're just sitting talking there.

The man in the business suit is sitting there talking and listening to Jesus face-to-face.

How much would Jesus like to just sit and converse with us through the Bible

and through prayer, but we're too caught up with our activities and our other lives.

And still, those men were kept from recognizing Jesus because of their spiritual blindness.

It's the late afternoon of this Resurrection Sunday.

Jesus had risen from the dead, is wandering around in the springtime world.

He comes to his followers to dispel their gloom and then restore their hopes,

but blinded by unbelief, they don't recognize him. They saw the horrible death.

They witnessed it, and they couldn't believe what the women were saying was true.

In their spiritual blindness, they saw Jesus as a prophet sent from God,

but at this moment of time, they had not recognized him as the Son of God and the Son of Man.

Here we sit 2,000 years later wondering how on earth they could not see who Jesus was.

Why hadn't they all been waiting at the tomb on Sunday morning when Jesus had

said in three days he would rise again?

Why weren't they all sitting outside that tomb waiting for Jesus to come up?

Why didn't they understand the resurrection power of the Father?

Why didn't they recognize and expect the victorious power as evident in the life of Jesus?

I wonder even now, though, we know that but the second coming is going to be happening.

And we expect it. We want it.

But are we waiting for it and preparing for him to come again?

Are we going on with life as usual? But the scene on Emmaus Road is a small

picture of human situation today.

Christ is present in all of his victorious power, and yet man fails to comprehend

completely his glory and power.

The church makes a glib, repeated, cliché statement heralding Christ's power

and gives a cop-out statement that makes for good soundbite material,

but it's not found residing in the reality of the everyday,

and we act as if we understand Christ's victory.

The church celebrates the mighty act of God in raising Christ from the dead,

yet it is often characteristically and curiously insensitive to the presence of Christ in us now.

Absolutely, Christ is risen. risen not christ was risen christ is risen we have

our church services to recall and recount this triumphal truth we paint it up

in the christian world almost in a point of of gaudiness,

people of all religions crowd the streets

of old jerusalem to celebrate the historical account of

jesus people come to church on easter sunday who would never come there any

other time of year the most irreligious people of the crowds are shown on tv

singing praises to jesus on easter but the rest of the time not.

Very few people have died to their selfishness and allowed Jesus to live and

totally take over and totally consume their lives.

But now let's go back to the road of Emmaus, to Emmaus.

With Jesus walking beside them and opening their minds to understand the Scriptures,

the two disciples soon straightened their shoulders and began to get a little

bit hope, and they quickened their step as they felt their hearts burning with a new hope.

Let me ask you when was

the last time your heart burned with the

hope of christ and they began to burn

they said that their hearts were burning within them as

they heard this stranger telling them this story almost before they realized

that they had reached emmaus and as the stranger turned to say fellow well they

pleaded with him to share supper with them because it was late in the evening

and it was time not to be traveling on those roads after dark.

And the Scripture says, It was then that their eyes were opened,

and they recognized him.

When did they recognize him?

They recognized him after he had lifted their eyes off the road of despair and

despondency by walking alongside them.

When did they recognize Jesus? It was after he had caused their hearts to burn

from within them as he revealed to them the word of God to them.

When did they recognize him?

After they had begun to have faith in Jesus as Jesus revealed the fulfillment

of Scripture. When did they recognize Jesus?

After they had stopped being caught up in their own busyness and sat for a meal with Jesus.

When did they recognize him? When he did something that they had seen him do

many times before. Therefore, when he gave thanks and had supper with them,

broke the bread and had supper with them.

Jesus is walking alongside us now. It's not just at Easter.

It's every day of the year. He's walking alongside us, even in our despair and

despondency, in our lack of faith, in our busyness, in our confusion, our disillusionment.

Jesus is walking alongside us, looking for us to just converse with him and be in his presence.

As we celebrate the Lord's Supper, Jesus is waiting to break bread with us like

he did with the apostles in the upper room at the Last Supper.

Jesus is looking to share the cup with us.

Jesus is waiting to make himself known to us through what he's done every time and all the time.

As we celebrate this Lord's Supper, we are thankful that Christ has come,

that he has died, died, that his body has been broken for us,

that his blood has been spilled out for us, and we do this as a representation of what Christ has done.

This is not the actual body and blood of Christ. This is a representation of us.

We do this as a remembrance of what Christ has done for us, but the greatest

remembrance is not that he died.

The greatest remembrance is that he lives again, and he lives with us.

Heavenly Father, as we continue this time, we celebrate the Lord's Supper.

We thank you that you are present with us, you are present in us,

and you are present through us.

Father, we pray that even as we participate in this Lord's Supper,

as we celebrate this together,

that it would be a reminder for us of everything that you've done,

but even more than that, we ask that it would be an empowerment to us,

that we would be the presence of Christ to everyone around us.

When they see what we put on Facebook, when they see how we act and live and

speak in the community, when they see us at work or in the school,

may everything that we do be a representation of Christ.

That's a hard thought, Jesus. Help us to represent you well.

In Jesus' In Jesus' name, amen.