What We Don’t See

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

May 4, 2014

What We Don’t See

Luke 24:13-16

“Their eyes were kept from recognizing him”?

Really?

“Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”

They were kept from recognizing the risen Jesus?

                          

These two men,

a man named Cleopas,

and another man, unnamed,

walking on Easter Sunday, the first Easter Sunday,

walking in sadness, grief,

despondency, dejection,

walking away from Jerusalem,

walking away from all their hopes;

the two of them immersed deep in conversation,

as those filled with grief often are,

reminiscing, reflecting,

wondering what went wrong,

punctuating their words with deep sighs.

Two days earlier they watched as their Master,

their Teacher, their Lord

had been nailed to a cross

and left to die in agony and shame.

Then earlier that very morning

they heard from some of the women

who had gone to the tomb

to finish preparing Jesus’ body for burial,

that the tomb was empty.

The women said that Jesus was risen, alive!

        

The men dismissed the story.

The very idea was absurd.

They knew Jesus was dead.

All those who had followed him,

listened to him,

pinned their hopes on him –

they all knew he was dead, gone.

By late morning on that first Easter Sunday,

the news of the empty tomb

only reinforced what they knew,

what they all knew,

the 11 and all the others:

there was nothing left for them to do

but return home,

return to the vocations they’d left behind,

return to the lives they lived

before they encountered Jesus,

before they followed Jesus.

And so they walked, these two,

and as they walked, Jesus,

the Risen Jesus,

joined them;

talked with them;

taught them from Scripture,

taught them about himself.

Why didn’t they recognize him?

Why couldn’t they recognize him?

The way the passage is written,

we’re inclined to think that Jesus himself

closed their eyes to his identity.

That there was a divine hand,

a divine purpose at work here.

But why?

Why would Jesus close their eyes?

In a later addition to the gospel of Mark,

an addition we don’t believe was part of the original gospel,

the writer tried to explain what might have happened

by saying that Jesus appeared to them,

“in another form ….”

(Mark 16:12-13)

as though Jesus was disguised.

But again, why?

We can understand why Mary might not have

recognized Jesus in the garden,

why she might have mistaken the Risen Jesus

for the gardener:

It was early in the morning,

the sun had not yet risen.

Combine exhaustion, grief, shock,

confusion and the dim light of early morning,

and it would be easy to mistake one person for another,

not to recognize someone you know well.

But these two men were walking the road to Emmaus

in the afternoon,

in the bright full light of day.

Their eyes were closed because they had closed them,

closed their eyes, their minds,

their ears, their hearts,

closed them so that they could see only

what they chose to see.

To them the idea that Jesus might be alive,

risen from the grave,

was unthinkable,

and so, of course,

they would not recognize the risen Jesus,

they couldn’t recognize the risen Jesus.

They’d close their mind to the very possibility,

and in closing their minds,

they’d closed their eyes.

The Reverend Frederick Buechner has written,

“how extraordinary to have eyes like that –

eyes that look out at this world we live in

…and see everything but what matters most.”

(The Secret in the Dark, 254)

We close our eyes;

We close our minds;

we don’t see what we don’t want to see;

we see only what we want to see.

James, the brother of our Lord, confronts us,

holds a mirror in front of us

with an indictment from his letter,

“if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes

comes into your assembly,

and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in,

and if you take notice of the one

wearing the fine clothes

and say, ‘Have a seat here, please’,

while to the one who is poor you say,

‘Stand there’, or, ‘Sit at my feet’,^*

have you not made distinctions among yourselves,

and become judges …?

(James 2:2)

We look at the rich person

and see something more in him or in her

than we do in the poor person.

We don’t see the child of God in the poor person;

We don’t see the reflection of Christ in the poor person.

Our eyes are closed,

our minds are closed,

our hearts are closed.

We are like the rich man Luke tells us about

earlier in his gospel,

who every day walked right by the poor beggar,

the beggar at the rich man’s gate,

the beggar who wanted nothing more than to

“satisfy his hunger with what

fell from the rich man’s table.”

(Luke 16:21)

The rich man walked by, not even seeing the poor man,

because he didn’t want to see him.

Our Wednesday Bible Study group

learned what can happen when we close our eyes

when we visited the Holocaust Museum two weeks ago,

when we saw with our eyes

how the German people closed their eyes

to the brutality, the savagery,

the racism, the bigotry,

the hatred that infected their country,

that closed their eyes, their ears,

their minds, their hearts.

Just in the past two weeks

we’ve had our eyes opened wide

to racism and bigotry

that is still so prevalent in our country,

prevalent because we’ve closed our eyes, our minds

and our hearts to the stain of racism,

the shame of bigotry,

closed our eyes and minds to what we know:

that we’ve all been created equally in the image of God.

It was at the table that the men’s eyes were opened.

As the two travelers and our risen Lord

stopped at day’s end,

stopped to rest and eat,

Luke tells us that our Lord

“took bread, blessed and broke it,

and gave it to them.

Then their eyes were opened

and they recognized him.”

(Luke 24:30-31)

Two men and a stranger to whom they showed hospitality,

a stranger they welcomed,

the three of them at the table,

sharing a meal.

There the men’s eyes were opened.

Our Lord will open our eyes,

yours and mine,

here at this Table.

Here at this Table our Lord will feed us

with the bread of life and give us drink

from the cup of salvation.

Here at this Table, our risen Lord,

our living Lord,

will open our eyes,

open our minds,

open our hearts,

so we will learn to see the world through his eyes,

so we will learn to see what matters most.

                                            

So come, come to the Table;

Come and see.

Come, that your eyes might be opened.

AMEN