Luke
24:36-48
In
John’s gospel, there’s the scene that we heard about last week, where the
disciple Thomas doesn’t believe Jesus was really and truly raised from the dead
until Jesus appears and offers to let him touch the places where he was wounded
on the cross. Luke takes the same story
but it isn’t just Thomas who has this experience. It’s all the disciples together, each and
every one of them.
“While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among
them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They
were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you
frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that
it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as
you see that I have.’ And when he
had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.” [Luke 24:36-40]
I love the detail that Luke
throws in, where Jesus offers them this proof of his own, physical being:
“He said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their
presence.”
[Luke 24:41-42]
Again, there’s a slightly different version of the same detail
in John, where Jesus cooks the fish himself and they all eat it.
For me, the way
that those versions differ makes me feel better about taking the Bible
seriously. The gospels did not start out as
literary compositions. Luke set down
what he could gather from various sources.
He tells us that. We know from
Paul’s letters that Luke was one of Paul’s travelling companions, so it’s not
unlikely that some of his material came through Paul or others whom they met on
their journeys. Like any news reports,
there are going to be witnesses who see or remember things differently, and a
good reporter will not hide that. Having
four gospels, four accounts of the good news, side by side is a sign of
reliability and honesty. Jesus told his
followers
“You are witnesses of these things.” [Luke 24:48]
They
took him seriously, and shared what they knew for themselves. They shared their experience of Jesus, and
that has always been how faith has spread from one person to another to another
to another. There is no other way.
What’s your story? What witness do you have to offer? Who needs to hear it, and how do you share it
in the right way? Those are not easy questions
but they need to be asked.
Your story may be dramatic or it may
not. It is your story. It belongs to you. It helps if you share it, though. The spectacular ones may make better movie
scripts. A soldier named Francis
returned to his hometown of Assisi after being held as a prisoner of war. Unsurprisingly, he showed signs of
post-traumatic stress disorder.
Fortunately for him, his father was rich and he could take time
wandering around the countryside to recover a sense of peace and it was in the
course of one of those long walks that he heard the voice of Jesus speak to
him. In 1736, a missionary named Wesley
had had a really bad breakup with a woman named Sophie Hopkey. She was the niece of the governor of Georgia,
which was where they had met, and before it was over Wesley had to leave
Savannah at night in a canoe and travel to South Carolina to get a ship back to
London before it got any worse. Back in
London, he was a mess and questioned what he was doing with his life, when a
friend dragged him along to a Bible study one night, and he had an experience
of Jesus speaking to his heart about how we don’t live by anything but God’s
grace and that that is enough.
Those are great examples. They’re not my story, though. Me? I
heard about Jesus at Sunday School from a lady named Kitty Sakers and a bunch
of her friends whose names escape me. I
saw the people around me take food to the South Side Center in Chester because
people there needed it. My friends and I
talked about religion and faith as well as about “Mork and Mindy” and school. At Pocono Plateau, I remember a campfire
where we were invited to take Jesus more seriously and to stick around
afterward and pray about it with the counselors if we wanted to. I had a good teacher for confirmation class
and in high school when we had a Sunday School teacher who was not so good,
they found us another who helped us think for ourselves. In college, I made some good friends who had
similar backgrounds and we learned from each other. Not very exciting, huh? All the same, I can tell you that it
convinced me that God’s grace is all around and that Jesus’ love is real, and
that his life could not be bottled up in a grave.
Your story: what is it? Maybe there’s someone who needs to hear that
Jesus is around for people whose troubles and challenges are those that
everybody faces. I suspect that it is
utterly important to be a witness to the way that he helps out everyday people
in everyday situations. Jesus showed his
followers that he was not a ghost. The
life that he helps us lead is not the life of ghosts, either, but the life of
flesh-and-bones people.
Those people have to be you and
me. There is no other way. Jesus said,
“You
are witnesses of these things.” [Luke 24:48]
We
have to be open enough to say, “I had to make a really hard decision at work
today, and I’m not sure I made the best choice, but I prayed about it
first.” We have to be humble enough to
admit, “I really messed things up at home last week, but my family
understood. I can only imagine what God
goes through with me.” We have to be
confident enough to say, “This may sound crazy, but I have a feeling there’s
something that God is asking me to do.”
We have to be aware enough of the people around us to say to someone
hurting, “Hey, this is what helped me when I was in a similar place.”
Rachel Held Evans writes about her
faith life and those of her friends, and emphasizes that what matters is not
packaging, but substance. She puts it in
terms of young adults, but it really applies across the board. She says,
“… I’m often asked to speak to my fellow evangelical
leaders about why millennials are leaving the church.
Armed with the latest
surveys, along with personal testimonies from friends and readers, I
explain how young adults perceive evangelical Christianity to be too political,
too exclusive, old-fashioned, unconcerned with social justice and hostile to
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
I point to
research that shows young evangelicals often feel they have to choose between
their intellectual integrity and their faith, between science and Christianity,
between compassion and holiness.
I talk about how
the evangelical obsession with sex can make Christian living seem like little
more than sticking to a list of rules, and how millennials long for faith
communities in which they are safe asking tough questions and wrestling with
doubt.
Invariably,
after I’ve finished my presentation and opened the floor to questions, a pastor
raises his hand and says, ‘So what you’re saying is we need hipper worship
bands. …’
Sharing
our faith is more than being trendy or polished or doctrinally exact. It is more, too, than being on the right side
of controversial issues or the cutting edge of social action. It is being forthright about what Jesus has
done for us, and open about the ways that he’s still working with us.
“You
are witnesses of these things.”
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