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Good morning.
My name is Carrie Moulton and I'm a member of the Welcome Team and a scripture reader.
And the Gospel lesson for today is a reading for the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 24,
verses 1 through 35.
On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they
had prepared and went to the tomb.
They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the
body of the Lord Jesus.
While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning
stood beside them.
In their fright, the women bowed down with their faces to the ground.
But the men said to them, Why do you look for the living among the dead?
He is not here.
He has risen.
Remember how he told you while he was still with you in Galilee.
The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified, and on the
third day be raised again.
Then they remembered his words.
When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the eleven and to all the
others.
It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told
this to the apostles.
But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.
Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb.
Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to
himself what had happened.
Now that 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 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 priests 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 they didn't find his body.
They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels who said he was alive.
Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said.
But they did not see Jesus.
He said to them, how foolish you are and how slow to believe all that the 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 were
going farther.
But they urged him strongly, stay with us, for it is nearly evening.
The day is almost over.
So he went in to stay with them.
When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and began to give
it to them.
Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him and he disappeared from their sight.
They asked each other, were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on
the road and opened the scriptures to us?
They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem.
There they found the eleven and those with them assembled together and saying, it is true,
the Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.
Then the two told what had happened on the way and how Jesus was recognized by them when
he broke the bread.
This is the gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Christ.
Happy Easter, Christ Church.
It's so good to see you all this morning.
And for those of you who are guests with us today, maybe you came with a friend or Googled
church near me.
We are delighted that you're here.
My name is Jonathan.
I'm one of the other pastors here.
And this is such a rich chapter of scripture.
In fact, we didn't even read the whole chapter.
We're going to read the rest and talk about the rest next week.
But there's so much here today.
We're just going to dive straight in.
And we're going to talk today about three headings.
We're just going to explore this story under three headings.
And we're going to talk about wondering minds.
Wondering minds, burning hearts, and opening eyes.
Those are three things that are happening in this story.
Wondering minds, burning hearts, and opening eyes.
And I just want to let you know, give you a heads up that my last point is going to be
much shorter than my first two points.
So if you find yourself getting nervous, feeling a little anxious, just know I probably want
to get to the Easter reception more than you do.
So we're going to make it happen.
All right?
But we're going to talk first about wondering minds.
Luke, he recounts the details of this first Easter morning.
And in doing so, in verse 10, he names these female disciples of Jesus.
Mary, Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James, and the other women.
And he says that they took spices to the tomb.
Why did they do that?
Well, they wanted to honor Jesus one last time by embalming his corpse with these spices.
And they were not thinking, hey, we've got the spices in case he's still dead.
But let's hope that he's alive again and we can all sing the Hallelujah Chorus.
Right?
They knew what we know, which is that dead bodies stay dead.
And this is not a princess bride situation.
If you grew up in that movie where Jesus is mostly dead but a little bit alive.
Right?
The Romans were masters at crucifixion.
Jesus is all dead.
And these women were not at all prepared for what they would find.
When they arrived at the tomb, they had an incredible shock.
And they're asking themselves, like, who rolled away this massive stone?
What happened to the Roman guard that was here guarding this place?
And why is Jesus' body not inside the tomb?
And it says in verse 4 that they were wondering.
Their minds were wondering.
They were perplexed.
They were bewildered.
And maybe that's how you feel today.
You're wondering.
Well, suddenly, just like in the Christmas story with the angels that come to those shepherds in the field of Bethlehem,
these heavenly, angelic beings, these messengers from God,
they come and announce this crazy, breaking news that Jesus is living.
And here's what they say in verse 5.
They say,
Why do you look for the living among the dead?
He is not here.
He has risen.
Remember how he told you while he was still with you in Galilee,
the Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners,
be crucified, and on the third day be raised again.
The message from God to these women is that Jesus is passed from the realm of the dead,
from the realm of the dying where we all exist.
And he's gone through death, out the other side, into the life of the age to come.
And there he is the living one in this new resurrected glorious body
as the first fruits of God's new creation.
And some of us might read this story and say,
Ah, I see what's going on.
Jesus is metaphorically living.
Jesus is spiritually risen.
That this is a wonderful mythic symbol.
That good triumphs over evil.
And that life continues in the face of death.
And that as dark as things get, there's always the dawn.
No matter how bad life is, we can always have hope.
And so the question is, is this a spiritual metaphor?
Is this a legend that never happened?
And the angels there, they say,
No.
Jesus told you ahead of time that he would be raised from the dead,
physically, bodily, in the space-time matter universe.
And some of you say, Well, wait a minute.
I'm not so sure that I can believe all of this.
I mean, maybe these women, they're so exhausted.
They're so grieving.
They've got this unprocessed trauma from having witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus.
Maybe they're hallucinating.
Maybe they're imagining things.
And if you think that, you're actually not the first to doubt and to dismiss their story.
In fact, in verse 9, it says,
When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the eleven and to all the others.
And then in verse 11, it says,
But they did not believe the women because their words seemed to them like nonsense.
If the resurrection of Jesus seems like nonsense to you,
if it seems like absolute rubbish,
you are in really good company.
Because it seemed that way to all the apostles as well.
None of them believed it.
Peter, James, John, all of Jesus' male disciples were skeptics.
They said, This is absurd.
This is ridiculous.
This is irrational.
This is unbelievable.
Well, what is it that caused them to change their minds?
What convinced them to go out and leave their homes eventually and give their lives and to even die
for this message that Jesus had been raised to the life of the age to come with a new body?
Why would they die for a lie?
Why would they die for a legend that they made up?
I mean, what is it that convinced them this was true?
And if you notice in verse 12, it says that Peter, however,
he got up and he ran to the tomb, bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves,
and he went away wondering, there's that word again,
he was wondering to himself what had happened.
See, Peter was intellectually open-minded and curious enough to go and examine the evidence for himself.
It was absolutely essential that Peter heard that eyewitness testimony from the women,
but he was not content with their conclusions,
and so he wanted to personally and directly analyze the data and test and verify their hypothesis.
And so it was essential that Peter would go to see the empty tomb and the grave clothes.
And it's interesting that Luke emphasizes this.
He says that Peter bent down to look inside the empty tomb,
and he, quote, saw the strips of linen lying by themselves,
and this is what seems to be the thing that causes Peter to wonder in his mind what has just happened.
His mind is wondering, it's marveling, it's amazed.
Why is that?
Well, on Good Friday, Jesus' dead body had been wrapped in linen cloth with about 75 pounds worth of spices.
And those liquid spices, they settled and they solidified like a cocoon around the shape of Jesus' body.
And the only way, humanly speaking, that a body could be removed from such encrusted burial wrappings
would be by cutting those strips of linen cloth from end to end
and laying back each side so that you could pull the body out of the grave clothes.
And when Peter and these women and other disciples came and they saw these strips of linen uncut
and undisturbed, just as they had been when the body of Jesus lay within them,
but the grave clothes were empty in the shape of Jesus' body,
well, they were wondering.
Jesus' resurrection body apparently passed through these grave clothes.
And next week, we're going to talk about how, this is so totally bizarre, I get it.
We're going to talk next week about Jesus' body, right?
This glorified, amazing, crazy body and all of its powers.
But, you know, Peter, at this point, he's heard the eyewitness testimony.
He's heard about the message that God had sent.
He's seen the empty tomb.
He's seen those grave clothes.
But that was not enough for Peter to go out and become a martyr for this message.
Peter's skepticism could only be dispelled with the indisputable evidence
of seeing the resurrected Jesus with his own eyes.
And that's what verse 34 tells us, that the Lord has risen and he appeared to Simon.
He appeared to Peter.
Peter, along with many, many others, we're told in the New Testament,
over 500 people.
They saw the resurrected Jesus with their eyes.
They heard him with their ears.
They touched him with their hands.
And they could not unexperience that experience.
And so for those of you who are here and this message of the bodily resurrection of Jesus,
it just seems like nonsense to you.
We want you to know that you are so welcome here.
Your questions are so welcome here that just like those women, their minds were wondering.
And just like Peter, his mind was wondering what happened.
And we're so glad that you would come and wonder about these things with us.
And if you, like Peter, would like to channel that wondering of your mind,
I would encourage you and invite you into a process of intellectual curiosity,
a process of exploration.
If it were possible for us to build a time machine and to somehow go back and experience these things,
this unique event for ourselves, if we could do that, I would be a very rich man if I could build such a time machine.
But since that's not possible to do for any period of historical inquiry, we can do this.
A couple things for you.
If you're wondering in your mind, here's some things you can do.
First of all, you can, if you've never read the primary sources,
if you've never just sat down and read the eyewitness accounts of the people who saw Jesus,
I would just say, what are you waiting for?
Go and listen to it.
Go and examine the evidence for yourself.
Go and see what it is that they claim to see and hear and touch.
And ask yourself, why would they be making this up?
Why would they die for this?
The second thing you can do is exercise the tools of abductive reasoning.
This is what historians do.
They use the tools of abductive reasoning and inference to the best explanation.
And you can ask yourself the question,
what hypothesis best explains all the historical data with the least amount of strain?
Right?
What best explains this empty tomb and the eyewitness sightings of Jesus,
the transformed lives and the martyrdoms of the disciples, the eyewitnesses?
What best explains the sudden birth of the church?
What best explains this new and utterly distinct worldview that came into being overnight?
What best explains the explosion of the Christian movement throughout the Roman Empire
over the next three centuries in the face of intense persecution?
If Jesus didn't rise from the dead,
what alternative explanation that's plausibly historical can we give for these strange events?
I want to just encourage you that if you engage all the various hypotheses
that this was a fraud, this was a hallucination, this was a legend, this is a metaphor,
I think you'll conclude, you can conclude with your wandering mind
that the bodily resurrection of Jesus makes the best sense of all the data.
And the final thing I want to encourage you to do as you apply your wandering mind
to examine all this evidence,
I want you to consider the possibility that if Jesus died for you and if he's alive,
then you can meet him.
You can actually discover him for yourself.
You can discover the reality that we're talking about.
You might find that as you examine the evidence,
that actually someone is there examining you.
That someone is there eager to show himself to you.
Someone is there who's wanting to enter into a loving relationship with you.
And so that's my first point about wandering minds, okay?
But then I want to talk not just about wandering minds,
I want to talk about burning hearts, burning hearts.
Luke turns our attention to these two disciples on the road to Emmaus.
It's about a seven-mile walk, two and a half miles to walk from Jerusalem back to their home in Emmaus.
And in verse 17, he tells us that their faces are downcast,
which means that their hearts are heavy and downcast.
And then when you look at the end of the story in verse 33, it says this.
Verse 32,
They asked each other,
Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?
What caused this change?
It says that they had downcast hearts,
And then at the end, it says they had burning hearts.
Jesus, as we know, he was crucified on Friday.
These Jews are there for the Passover, which lasted through the weekend.
And now they're walking home, and this stranger walks up alongside them and says,
What's up?
What's the latest?
And they're amazed at his cluelessness,
and so they begin to tell him about Jesus.
And they say in verse 19,
Remember when God redeemed Israel?
Remember the Exodus?
Remember when he brought about a great redemption for his people?
We thought and we hoped that Jesus was going to be that person for us,
that he was going to bring about deliverance for us.
But we're sad.
We're downcast because we're living in a world without redemption.
We're living in a world where no one's going to be delivered.
We're living in a world where death apparently has the last word,
and there is no hope.
They say our friends, they came and told us some strange things earlier today.
They went and visited the tomb of Jesus,
and they said that it was empty, his body wasn't there, that he's alive.
But that is absolutely nonsense.
It's because crucified people stay dead.
Can you imagine this conversation?
Can you imagine telling the resurrected Jesus everything he needs to know about Jesus?
And Jesus begins to turn their downcast hearts into burning hearts.
And here's what it says in verse 25.
He said to them,
How foolish you are and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken.
He tells these defeated friends that you are, in the Greek he says,
You are a neity.
You are without mind.
You are without understanding.
He says,
Because you're dull in your heads,
and you're kind of slow and sad in your hearts,
you're not grasping the truth.
You're not trusting the truth that God has given through his prophets.
And how does Jesus change their downcast hearts into burning hearts?
Well, he says in verse 26,
He says,
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.
You know, it's amazing to me that the first thing that Jesus does after defeating death,
the first thing he does after his resurrection,
is he gives a fresh reading,
a fresh exposition,
a fresh interpretation of the Bible.
Can you imagine sitting in this master class with Jesus?
Jesus.
These downcast disciples,
they'd been reading their Bible,
but they'd been reading it through an interpretive grid
that was causing them to miss its meaning.
And so Jesus comes to them and he says,
I have the golden key
that can unlock the deepest meaning of God's word.
He says to them,
I have fresh new lenses for you
that when you put them on,
you will be able to see as you were meant to see
with fresh eyes
in a way that will turn your sad and downcast hearts
into burning hearts.
And he says,
let me unpack for you
the truest truths of the universe
from God himself.
And Jesus says,
look,
when you read Moses,
when you read the prophets,
when you read the Psalms,
when you read what we call the Old Testament,
he says,
I want you to look at what God is revealing
about his Messiah,
and I want you to look at what he's revealing
about me.
And in verse 26,
he says,
did not the Messiah have to suffer,
that is to be crucified,
and did not the Messiah then
have to enter into his glory,
that is to be resurrected?
How does this question from Jesus
put fire into the downcast hearts
of his disciples
and make them burn with zeal?
Jesus begins to go through
all the historical precedents,
all of the prophetic promises,
all the psalmist's prayers,
and he shows his disciples
a pattern that they just cannot see.
And I imagine he began
at the beginning.
He goes back to Genesis, right?
And he takes them through
Genesis 3.15.
That great mother promise,
that first announcement
of the gospel
that says that the offspring
of the woman
is going to come
and be terribly wounded,
but is going to crush
the head of the serpent.
That that great representative
of the human race
is going to come
and he's going to suffer horribly,
but he will trample on evil
and he will triumph in glory.
And I imagine Jesus
just begins there
and he works them through
the book of Genesis,
and when he's done with that,
he goes on into Exodus,
and he says,
you remember how Israel's sufferings
increased in Egypt
until it got to the screaming point?
And then redemption came,
and then glory came,
and he takes them through Exodus
and on into Leviticus
and Numbers and Deuteronomy,
and he goes out into Joshua,
Judges, Samuel, and Kings,
and he says,
don't you remember that
when Israel cried to the Lord
and her sufferings,
then God would raise up judges
and kings to deliver his people?
And he goes on into the Psalms,
I'm sure,
and he talked about
how God's king
suffers terribly,
how God's king is rejected
by the nations,
he's rejected by even his own people,
and yet he cries out to God
and God rescues him,
God vindicates him,
and then I'm sure Jesus went on
into the prophets,
he went to Isaiah,
Isaiah chapters 40 to 66,
and he said,
look,
look at the servant of Yahweh
who suffers
because he's taking on to himself
all the sin and the punishment
of other people,
but then notice how he's glorified
and he carries all of his beloved people
to glory
as their savior.
If we had all day today,
it wouldn't be enough
to explore this amazing question
that Jesus asked in verse 26,
was it not necessary,
was it not a divine necessity
that the Messiah must suffer these things
and then enter his glory?
Jesus is telling us
that the scriptures
come to their climax
in the suffering and glory
of God's Messiah.
Now how might this
Easter Sunday Bible study
with the resurrected Jesus
transform our downcast hearts
into burning hearts?
How might this put fire in us
and cause them to burn
with zeal?
I want to suggest
three points of application.
Number one,
that we need to apply
the Messiah scriptures
to our lives.
The experience of the burning heart
comes from the scriptures
freshly read
and properly interpreted.
If one of the first things
that the glorified
and resurrected Messiah did
when he stepped out of the tomb
to begin his new creation
was to open up the scriptures
to teach us
what should be one of the first things
that we do
when we step out of the bed
to begin a new day.
The more we read,
the more we understand
the story and the scriptures
about the Messiah,
the more the resurrected Jesus
will cause our downcast hearts
to catch fire
and begin to burn.
And if you don't have
a scripture reading plan,
I've printed a bunch
of these for you.
It's called
the Essential 100 Plan.
It takes you through
50 readings of the Old Testament,
50 readings of the New Testament.
It's back there
on the back table.
It's also with the welcome gifts
in our community hall.
And I'd encourage you
to begin a new day tomorrow
reading the Messiah scriptures.
The second application
I would like to make
is that we need to apply
the Messiah's sufferings
to our lives.
These downcast disciples,
they thought that
the suffering
and crucified Messiah
was the devastation
of all hope
for being redeemed
and delivered by God.
But Jesus says to them,
no.
The suffering
and crucifixion
of the Messiah
was a divine necessity.
There was no other way
for God to redeem you
from your sin,
for God to deliver you
from death.
And you see,
when God transformed
that dead body
of the Messiah,
and He brought Him
into the glory
of a new
and resurrected body,
God was vindicating,
God was validating
all the claims
that Jesus made
for Himself
about being the Messiah.
That on that Easter day,
in that resurrection,
God was giving
His verdict
on the Messiah's suffering.
And the resurrection
is God's way
of saying to us
that what the Messiah
accomplished
in His suffering
on the cross
was effective
for you.
That His
atoning sacrifice
for your sins
in your place
was utterly
satisfactory
to God.
And that there's
nothing more
that needs to be done
for you to be
redeemed.
Right?
The new glory
of the resurrected Messiah
shows us
the sufficiency
and the finality
of Jesus'
sufferings
in our place.
It shows us
that the resurrection
is actually not
the reversal
of a defeat.
The resurrection
is the manifestation
of a victory.
And that
vicarious
and victorious
suffering
of the Messiah
for you
and in your place,
that is what will
change your downcast heart
into a burning heart.
The third thing
I think we need to do
is to apply
not just the Messiah's
scriptures
and not just the Messiah's
sufferings,
we need to apply
the Messiah's
glory to our lives.
I read a story
this past week
about an Old Testament
scholar in Australia.
His name
was Frank Anderson
and he died
in 2020.
And in his
later years
as he was getting
physically run down
and there was just
not a lot of strength
left in him,
you would go
and you would ask him,
you'd say,
Frank,
how's it going?
And Frank would respond
and he would say,
oh,
I'm not suffering
from anything
a good resurrection
can't fix.
Don't you love that?
This Old Testament
scholar Frank,
he understood
the pattern
of the Messiah's
scriptures
and therefore
he understood
the pattern
of the Messiah
himself
and therefore
he understood
the pattern
of all who
belong to the Messiah.
Friends,
that pattern
is first suffering
then glory
and
we
are
living our lives
between
the completed
resurrection
of Jesus
in the past
and the coming
resurrection
of our bodies
in the future
and that means
that we can have
burning hearts
now in the present
because our God
is planning to do
for us
what he did
to our Messiah.
That is,
our suffering
will turn
into glory.
And let me just
read to you
a few words
about this coming
glory from the
apostle Paul.
He says in
Philippians chapter 3,
he says,
we eagerly await
a savior from heaven,
the Lord Jesus Christ
who by the power
that enables him
to bring everything
under his control
will transform
our lowly bodies
so that they will be
like his glorious body.
Paul says in
2 Corinthians chapter 4
verse 14,
he says,
we know
that the one
who raised the Lord
Jesus from the dead
will also raise us
with Jesus
so that what is mortal
may be swallowed up
by life.
And then Paul says
in Romans 8,
he says,
if the spirit of him
who raised Jesus
from the dead
is living in you,
he who raised Christ
from the dead
will also give life
to your mortal bodies
because of his spirit
who lives in you.
And so the question
today is,
friends,
what kind of heart
do you have?
Do you have
a downcast heart?
Do you want
a burning heart?
Do you want
a heart that's filled
with the very spirit
of the one
who raised Christ
from the dead?
Do you want
a heart that's able
to say,
even in the midst
of the most horrific
suffering,
oh, I'm not suffering
from anything
a good resurrection
cannot fix.
You see,
if our suffering
Messiah has been glorified,
if he's been raised
from the dead,
then this guarantees
for us a hopeful
and a joyful future
in which God
will raise all
who belong to Jesus
and he will,
in fact,
resurrect the whole
material world.
And if this is
our future,
friends,
everything is going
to be okay.
Everything that is sad
is going to become
untrue.
All that is broken
is going to be mended.
All that is causing
our hearts to be heavy
and downcast,
it's going to be put
to rest.
Your life,
like the Messiah's life,
is not going to end
in suffering.
It's going to end
in glory.
And that is what turns
a downcast heart
into a burning heart.
So,
wandering minds,
burning hearts,
and the last thing
is opening eyes.
And again,
don't worry
because this third point
is much,
much shorter
than the first two points,
okay?
Opening eyes.
Jesus has just given
the most mind-blowing
Bible study
in the history
of the world.
The downcast hearts
of these disciples
are changing
from,
into burning hearts
and they say,
Jesus,
we don't want this
to end.
We want this
to keep going on
and so they strongly
urge him to stay.
They say,
stay with us.
Please come.
And eat with us.
And how does Jesus respond
when people plead to him
and request of him,
please,
please give us more?
It says that Jesus
shared the table
with these two travelers
and in the same way
that he shared
that last supper
with his disciples,
right,
when he took,
blessed,
broke,
and gave the bread,
it says that he took,
blessed,
broke,
and gave the bread
to them.
And when he shared
this meal with them,
what happens
to their eyes?
It says that their eyes
are opened.
It says that they,
they begin to recognize
the resurrected Jesus.
They're given
a new understanding.
And you see,
this is a clue
as to why we break
the bread
at this table
every Sunday.
because it's an opportunity
for the resurrected Jesus
to reveal himself
to us
in a fresh and deep way.
And it's an opportunity
for us to experience
the very presence
and the power
of the living one
as the bread
is broken.
This table,
I think,
goes a long way
to explain
what it is about
Christianity
that grasps us
and that holds us
in the face
of so much
that is wrong
with the world,
so much that's wrong
with the church,
so much that's wrong
with our very selves.
And I want you
to think about this
as we prepare
to come to this table
in just a moment.
I want you to remember
that first meal
that's recorded
for us in the Bible.
You remember that first meal
in the Bible?
It says there
in Genesis chapter 3
verse 6,
the woman took
some of the fruit
and ate it.
She gave it to her husband
and he ate it
and then the eyes
of both of them
were opened.
And they knew
that they were naked.
This is the beginning
of all of our woes.
This is the beginning
of all the cursedness,
all the heaviness
that came upon
our human race.
Death itself
can be traced
all the way back
to that meal
and that moment
of rebellion
where the whole creation
became subject
to decay
and futility
and absolute sorrow
and misery.
But now,
here in this story
is an echo
of that story
but in this story
it's the meal,
the first meal
of the new creation
where Jesus says
in verse 30,
it says he took
the bread,
he blessed it,
he broke it,
he gave it to them
and the eyes of them
were both,
what?
Opened.
But this time
what did they see?
This time
they recognized
Jesus.
It says their eyes
were opened
and they knew
Jesus.
You see,
at this table
and in this meal
disciples for over
2,000 years,
disciples around the world
and every culture today
have discovered
that the long curse
on the human race
has in fact been broken
and that death itself
has been defeated
and that bursting in
upon this world
of decay
and absolute sorrow
is God's new creation
that's brimming
with life,
it's brimming with joy,
it's brimming with power,
it's brimming with
new possibilities
because Christ
is risen from the dead.
And so the question
for us is
as we come to this table
are you hungry
for all that?
and do you want
your eyes
to be open
to Jesus?
And even more than that
are you ready
to sit down
and to eat
and share this feast
with the resurrected
Jesus himself?
I hope that you are.
In the name of the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.