During Easter I’ll get to preach on Luke 24:13-35. It’s worth a read if you have time. It’s one of the very few stories of Jesus meeting His disciples after the resurrection. In the story, two disciples are walking the seven-mile road from Jerusalem to a town called Emmaus. On their journey they’re debriefing the crazy events that happened to them and to Jesus from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. I love that their debriefing together on a walk. How often have you debriefed life with somebody on a walk in order wrap your head around amazing or difficult happenings? Apparently, people have been doing that for thousands of years. I like that. It makes me feel normal.
On their walk one of them says something important. He says, “We were hoping Jesus would be the one who would redeem Israel.” The word he uses for “redeem” is the Greek Word “Lutroo,” which might better be translated in this context as “liberate.” These two disciples had hoped Jesus would fix the power imbalance between Rome and Israel. They hoped Jesus would liberate the Jewish people from Roman power. None of that happened, and it wasn’t going to happen. Not in their lifetime. So, what were they debriefing? Loss. Loss of a future they hoped Jesus would bring. Loss of a hope they carried for years. Loss.
To that end, Jesus meets the on the road and decides to explain some things to them, but they don’t recognize Him. As a perceived stranger, he explains that God’s savior had to suffer and die; that death and resurrection were part of God’s story the entire time, that God wasn’t out to destroy empires, God in Jesus was destroying sin and death. And after Jesus is finished explaining all these things to them and breaking bread with them, Luke tells us, “Something like scales fell from their eyes,” and they finally recognize Jesus sitting in front of them. In short, they finally see the New Thing God is doing in the resurrected Jesus.
It makes me wonder, how often do we mistake the resurrection and new life God brings as some weird sort of redo rather than actually something NEW.
When old marriages fail, we oftentimes think new life should come in the form of a new marriage that works. What if instead, new life comes in the form of a really blessed single life where we deepen relationships with extended family members and friends? After a move we oftentimes search for new life in the form of the same type of friends, the same type of job, the same type of lifestyle in our new locations that we left in the old locations. What if new life means meeting vastly different people than the ones we left? What if new life means engaging in vastly different forms of employment? What if new life means a whole new lifestyle, not just a resuscitation of something old? When sin damages our relationships, we oftentimes think new life means God will bring the people we hurt back into our lives. Unfortunately, sometimes when people walk away, they stay gone. What if new life means having the courage to engage with new people and communities, forming new relationships we never had before.
My point is, new life isn’t a redo of something old. It isn’t pumping life into a dead corpse hoping it will get up in the same way it went down. New life means the things around us, the people around us, the geography around us, the thoughts in our heads, the values in our hearts, the energies from our bodies, all of it, might actually change and become something brand, spankin’, NEW.
God doesn’t promise a redo in the Easter Story. God promises something NEW. Thank God for new life.
