“Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures” (Luke 24:45)
Throughout the gospels, the question is: Who is Jesus? Or as we fairly quickly come to realise: What sort of person is Jesus? The gospels seldom give us a straight answer.
Chiefly, Jesus is described and called, or alluded to, as the Son of Man or Son of God, the latter expressly and apparently literally in John’s gospel. While this tells us much about Jesus filial relationship to God, a relationship to which we may aspire, it is no more literally straight forward than Jesus being a Bridegroom, a Vine, the Bread of life, a Shepherd, a Lamb and the Way, all of which tell us something about Jesus’ nature, but a far from a complete answer.
There is, of course, something inevitable about this vagueness and variety of allusion and imagery: how could God, at least represented by, or actually Jesus, be confined to some definition devised by mere human beings?
Luke , and the other synoptics, also seek to place Jesus in the context of Messianic expectations-is Jesus John the Baptist come back from the dead, or Elijah or some other prophet? No, at a crucial point, Peter declares that he is the Christ of God – that is the Messiah, although this “confession” is quickly followed by the very un-messianic prediction of suffering and death.
We might, however, have expected to be told more clearly who he was in the resurrection stories; the crucifixion had after all been a convincing dashing of all the obvious answers. Whatever opinions the disciples, and we, might have formed from experiencing or being told of Jesus’ birth, teaching and miracles, they would have been unlikely to survive the, apparent, utter disaster of ignominious and painful death on a cross. A dead criminal is not much of a healer, not much of a teacher, certainly not the saviour of Israel from foreign domination; and whatever his relationship with God, it must have broken down on Good Friday. So, we might expect the Resurrection, reversing all this disappointment and despair, to have provided some clarity. And so it does for the disciples and those who encounter the risen Jesus, but it’s still somewhat opaque for us.
In Luke’s resurrection stories the emphasis is on the fulfilling of scripture. Jesus is, however still veiled in mystery; his identity is not expressly revealed, but his authority and his message are established. Tantalisingly we are told that Jesus explained the scriptures both to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus and straight after to the eleven gathered that night- but we are not told how; we don’t know what he said. (The reference to rising again on the third day seems to be to Hosea 6:2 but save in the most general way that verse will not leave you any wiser.)
It rather presumptuous, to guess what he might have said, but one answer may be that he explained his life, death and resurrection in the context of the grand narrative of the Old Testament; the story which repeats and refers, so often, to of an Eden or Promised Land, marred by human pride and greed and fear, leading to exile and enslavement followed by redemption. This redemption is brought about by a compassionate God, but through human agency, in Moses and later Cyrus the Great who releases the exiled Jews from Babylon. This release from Babylon is the background to the later chapters of Isaiah, and Isaiah’s seems to be the prophesy which most influenced the gospel writers, at least Matthew, Mark and
Luke, who have Jesus himself quoting from Isaiah at the start of his ministry in Capernaum- “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” and, release, healing and liberty.
I expect too, Jesus would have referred to the mysterious Suffering Servant who appears in later Isaiah, and in our reading this evening; the Saviour who “in all their affliction [he] was afflicted”. This is the essence of the incarnation; a saving God who identifies with human suffering to overcome it. That identification reveals itself in the gospels in the way in which the salvation which Jesus brings is personal, immediate and intimate. Even the grand gesture of feeding Five Thousand or calming a storm have a personal encounter or immediate threat to close individuals at their centre. For all the human realism of the miracle accounts, however, there is usually (perhaps always if we knew more) a reference back to scripture, to the miracles of Moses or Elijah, or to the cosmic imagery of the Psalms, so “raising the poor from the dust and lifting the needy from the ash heap” as we heard in Psalm113 verse7) is a theme that characterises Luke’ gospel and the calming of the storm echoes imagery we hear in Psalm 114 where the sea looks back and flees (Verse 3).
This was perhaps some of the stuff of Jesus explanation of the scriptures, which naturally found its way into the gospel telling of these events. This sense of fulfilling scripture is why the Old Testament matters to us. One might think the new creation brought in by the Resurrection, renders obsolete the stories about creation and God’s reaction and interaction with it in previous history and myth. It is true too that more than anything Jesus said, it is his actions which announce the Good News he brought, but I have tried to show that even the actions need to be see in a scriptural context to be understood. That I think, is what Jesus explained on the way to Emmaus, and again, as we heard, when the two disciples had returned and rejoined the others.
The Resurrection teaches us how to see our own lives, and the world we live in with new eyes, but ones that are conscious of history and aware of the suffering and the successes which it contains. Although 2000 and more years old, the Old Testament expresses that sorrow and joy better, I suggest that any other record. Awareness of that significance of the Resurrection is more the point of the Good News than any attempt to define of who Jesus is. Amen