Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter April 23, 2023
Acts 2:14a, 36-41+Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17+(1 Peter 1:17-23)+Luke 24:13-35
Recently I was scrolling through the hundreds of channels available on our TV – a rare moment of relaxation in my post-Easter exhaustion – when I stumbled across the classic 1950 Akira Kurosawa film, Rashomon. It is the film that put Japanese filmmaking on the map, in the West, at least, and led to the naming of the storytelling method known as the Rashomon Effect that highlights the unreliability of eyewitnesses. The plot is long and complicated but centers on the murder of a samurai in a forest and the self-justifying accounts of those who witnessed it – a bandit, a wife, a woodcutter, a samurai. Everyone had a piece of the puzzle, a glimpse of the whole picture, like the blindfolded ones trying to describe an elephant by touching just one part of its body.
We are now at the 3rd Sunday of Easter and have heard a few stories about the resurrection already. In my Easter sermon, I joked that they might at least have gotten their stories straight given that this was such a cataclysmic event, but resurrection, it seems, is just too much, to awesome, for one person to describe, and it actually takes all of those stories woven together to get a more complete picture.
We know that a couple of women or more or just Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw and heard something. John tells us that Peter and John saw the empty tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene saw the risen Jesus but mistook him for the gardener, and he appeared to the disciples two times, a week apart, at least according to John.
This morning, we hear some of Luke’s account, and we are still on Easter Day. In Luke’s story, several women – we don’t know the number – went to the tomb where they discovered it open, and upon entering, two men in dazzling white said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen” (24.5). They ran to tell the disciples who did not believe them, but Peter went to look, just in case, and saw the empty tomb, just as the women had said.
The Emmaus story that we heard this morning is later the same day, still Easter. It’s a familiar narrative, the two walking along a dusty road, dejected and sorrowing and confused at the events of the past few days, when Jesus appears and walks along with them, unrecognized, but explaining the events of the Passion as a fulfillment of scripture. When they arrive home, they invite this stranger to stay, and then a most curious thing happens. The guest becomes the host of the meal, and as soon as these two recognize him, he is gone.
These days, some two thousand years later, we are accustomed to the phrase “breaking bread” because it is part of our Christian faith and practice. We know the bread that we break to be the body of Christ, so when we hear that, we all understand the reference. This was not the case at the time of Jesus. Andrew McGowan, theologian and Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale claims
While to “break bread” was not a concept difficult for the ancients to grasp, that does not mean that Luke was making use of an existing common expression. The emphasis placed on the language of “breaking bread” belongs specifically to Luke’s presentation of the Jesus tradition, and to a distinctive way of speaking about Christian practice that emerged soon after. For in Acts (meaning Acts of the Apostles, also believed to have been written by Luke), “the breaking of the bread” is used in a clearly technical way—remember there is no clear precedent for this, despite its familiarity to our own ears—when the life of the early community is described (2:42, 46; cf. 20:7) as centered on this act, echoing the report of the two disciples concerning the risen Jesus.[1]
In other words, Jesus was doing a new thing here, and it came to represent not just the sharing of a meal at the Last Supper, but in how we know and recognize the risen Christ in our midst in the breaking of the bread.
At that table in Emmaus, Luke tells us that “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them” (24:30), and those listening to that would have recalled the same formula used earlier in Luke, “And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples…” (Luke 9:16) in the feeding of the 5,000 and, “Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them… " (Luke 22:19) at the last supper. By the time we get to the 2nd chapter of Acts where it says, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (2:42), it is already constitutive of the Christian life to gather for worship, for learning, and to share in the broken body of Christ.
It was in that broken bread that Cleopas and his companion recognized the risen Lord. And they remembered how their hearts burned within them as he spoke. It is that same resurrected Christ who invites you here to receive that broken body given for each one of you, and then sends you into the world to go and tell.
That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!’ Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread (24:33-35)
And there it is: we know Jesus in the breaking of bread, we go and tell and share our story. None of this is a solo adventure. We are a community that gathers for teaching and fellowship and prayer and bread. The Lord has risen indeed!
The Rashomon Effect