Two Tables
By Rev. J. Mary Luti
April 06, 2008
Third Sunday of Easter
Lessons: Luke 24: 13-27
“We had hoped…”, the disciples tell the stranger on the road to Emmaus. Are there any words in the language more familiar to us than these, or any sadder? “We had hoped, but…”
This is the refrain of an ancient human lament—the lament of things slipping away, of our inability to make things work as we are persuaded they ought to, of our helplessness in the face of a force we can’t seem to master. “We had hoped…” It is the theme song of human mortality.
Underneath this evocation of the sadness caused by disappointed hopes, Luke is speaking to us about the pervasive desolation human beings always feel when we face the unavoidable fact of death in one of its infinite disguises.
Luke was theologically convinced that the power of death ruled the world. Death was all we had to look forward to. And it was death’s business to pull every rug we ever stand on out from under us, coldly, and without the slightest compunction.
Death would always take our hope and dash it, take our faith and defraud it, take our loves and sour them. And it would always consign us to oblivion. Not even Jesus, God’s treasure, would escape it. The terrifying reign of death is the deep subtext of this story.
Now, this story of Emmaus is much more familiar to us as a story of comfort. We don’t connect it in our minds with the terrors of death! And indeed it is a great comfort to read this wondrous episode and know that in all our human grief, loss and failure, someone loving walks beside us on the road; someone is with us, helping us make sense of things. It is immensely consoling to know that this same someone stays with us even as night closes in, sharing bread with us in a way that makes us know that God is near, that God knows what we have been through. Who doesn’t welcome this companion, this presence, this wisdom, this God who knows what it’s like to die?
But for Luke and the early Christian community that shaped this story, Easter is not just about consolation in our disappointments, companionship along life’s hard roads, or the acquisition of wisdom and insight. The meaning of the resurrection of Jesus is rooted in a conviction about the fate of the world that is ruled by death. For the early church, Easter is nothing less that the rout of death itself, the release of the world from death’s stranglehold, the inauguration of a new world of indestructible life.
Death is all done ruling. It no longer holds Jesus, and if it does not hold him, the fully human one, it does not hold us either, or the creation. Easter is a revolution. The joy of Easter is not simply that Jesus is still walking beside us. The joy of Easter is that because he lives, death is dead, and dead for good!
Here in Boston we know something about curses, and about reversing them. In Luke’s biblical imagination, that’s what Easter is—a cosmic curse reversed. Early Christians believed that the first humans, Adam and Eve, were ungrateful and disobeyed God. As a consequence of that “origina;” sin, death was allowed to lord it over life, and all creation had to live under its curse. When creatures died, we died for good.
But Luke also believed that Jesus, the new human, was gratefully responsive to God all his life—and in death. As a consequence of his unyielding faitfulness, death’s power to snatch us from God’s hand and consign us to oblivion has been forever broken. Life has been given the last word. And the first word. In fact, there is now no other word. Life is everything. Because Jesus lives, so do we. The curse is reversed.
Luke placed a strong hint of this reversal in the Emmaus story. Did you catch it? Think of the story of the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis. The author of tat story says that Eve gave the fruit to Adam. They ate it, and in that instant, their eyes were opened and they saw that they were naked—they recognized their mortality. In the Emmaus story, Luke says that Jesus took bread and gave it to the disciples to eat, and in that moment their eyes were opened, and they saw that it was Jesus. They recognized life in the broken bread.
This is no accidental echo. Luke wants us to think about two kinds of eating, two meals, two tables. One kind of taking and eating brought eternal death, another kind of taking and eating brought indestructible life. One kind of meal led to alienation and sorrow, another opened a new world of inclusion and joy. One kind of table turned us all into feared strangers, another turned strangers into friends.
Now, you don’t have to adopt Luke’s neat theological parallels between Adam and Eve and Jesus to know this truth: There are many tables in this world at which fear, self-interest, and ambition reign. Those who sit down at those tables rush in to grab the best places, they complain that there isn’t enough, they quarrel over scraps, they kill to get them. Outside the doors of those dining rooms many suffer, and few care.
But there are other tables in this world at which meekness, mutual love, and hospitality rule. As one of our hymns says, those who sit down at tables like these “sense despair reversed.” Even “crumbs that dust their palms… “ leave them satisfied. They share their bread gladly, there is always enough. There are no doors at all. Anyone can come in, sit down, and eat. “There’s room for thousands side by side.”
Setting these welcome tables characterized Jesus’ ministry. The open tables to which he welcomed all kinds of people shocked and scandalized everyone, fellow Jews and pagans alike. And he kept it up even after he was raised. It’s what the early church did, too, imitating him.
I believe it is the church’s mission is in every age to set out these tables of inclusion. Jesus knew that being welcomed to the right kind of table with the wrong kinds of people was the key to the human heart’s conversion to the God of sweeping mercy and unfathomable love.
People sometimes say to me, “How can you preach the defeat of death and the triumph of life? We all still die. Injustice still rules the world. Our best efforts at peace still come to nothing.”
There is little we can say to such objections. Our eyes see one thing, our hearts another, and even the best theological words fall short. We can’t talk people into faith in the triumph of life over death.
But we can show it in the way we eat. In the way we eat together, across separation barriers and human borders. We can eat with each other in such a way that our eating mends the death-dealing divisions of this world. We can eat across boundaries in such a way that it becomes self-evident that death is truly dead.
Some scholars claim that despite all the emphasis on preaching the word in the New Testament, what really persuaded people was the open table. It spoke for itself. Rich and poor, slave and free, male and female, Jew and Gentile, sick and well, righteous and sinners… all kinds of people around the table. That table was the only place in all the world where such a thing happened. At every other table, only like sat with like.
Now, if you have longed to be seated at some table but have been turned away because you are somehow “unlike”, then you know it’s true. You know that if there were a table where everyone could sit, no questions asked, a table at which each one and all of us together were the object of unquestioning and eternal affection, once you were sitting at that table your heart would burn within you. Sitting at that table and sharing that meal, you would know, without having to say a word, that death had fled and that life had won.
Which brings us to the question of our own table in here, and who is seated at it and who is not. And to the question of other tables out there, and who is seated at them and who is not. A question about the sandwiches we are going to make shortly for Jed’s church out there, and the communion we are going to share with each other in here. A question about whether it seems odd to anyone that even at this celebration of these real, loving connections among human beings, there remains a bewildering “us and them” that haunts our hearts.
If it is communion, if it is Easter, if we are saying, “Alleluia! Death is dead, and Life is living”, let’s allow this question to rise and this strange division to haunt us. If we do not try to hide the question or the distance between us from our hearts, facing it will itself be a sign of the Easter mystery growing stronger in us.
And when at Jesus’ invitation you come for the bread and cup today, you will be able to pledge yourselves to be people of the life he won for us. Then you must go and do what your burning heart prompts you to do.