April 15, 2007 Sermon

The Necessity of Suffering
Luke 24:13-27

Luke tells us more about what Jesus did after his resurrection than any of the other Gospel writers. Today we start working through Luke’s telling of what Jesus did Easter evening, when he walked from Jerusalem to Emmaus, a village on its outskirts. Along the way he had a revealing conversation with a couple of his followers. These men did not know him. Luke writes, “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” They did not yet believe in his resurrection. We know this because when Jesus joined them and asked what they had been talking about, “they stood still, looking sad.” The one named Cleopas asked whether Jesus was the only one in Jerusalem who did not know that had happened there recently.

Jesus kept his identity hidden a bit longer. “What things (happened)?” he asked the men. Being Jews, they began their answer by calling Jesus a prophet, “a man mighty in word and deed before God and all the people.” They had seen Jesus as the inheritor of the great prophetic tradition, a gutsy, powerful voice for God like Jeremiah, a worker of miracles like Elijah. They had seen him, in other words, as the Messiah God had long promised through the prophets.

The Jews longed for their Messiah. They read their scriptures; they believed that in the past God had often delivered them from foreign oppressors. They knew their prophets had predicted God would send yet another powerful voice, the Messiah. They hoped he would be like Moses or David, men who had led the Jews to overthrow other nations and to take possession of everything God had promised them: land, children, wealth. When Jesus appeared he did not quite fit this profile. He performed miracles and spoke powerfully. He was mighty in word and deed. But he had the disconcerting habit of contradicting everybody—even his own followers. Then he got killed.

In fact, Jesus’ own people made sure he got killed. Cleopas and the other man walking with Jesus along the road to Emmaus brought this up: “Our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him.” The Jewish leaders had used the Romans to execute Jesus on a cross, which their own scriptures called accursed. They humiliated him physically and spiritually. No wonder his followers had lost all hope. I imagine these two men walking beside Jesus with slumped shoulders, casting furtive glances at him to see whether he might be a spy for the wrong side, taking care not to speak too loudly as they pass through the neighborhoods lest somebody report their allegiance to the man who had hung on the cross.

But the two men also had what Cleopas characterized as astonishing news. Some women had gone to Jesus’ grave that very morning. They found an empty tomb, and “a vision of angels” who reported he had come back to life. These women had hurried back to the rest of his closest followers, huddled someplace in Jerusalem, miserable and terrified, and related their story. “Some of those who were with us,” Cleopas said, “went to the tomb and found it as the women had said.” Nobody could believe it; it was too good to be true. As he had said a minute earlier, “We had hoped (Jesus) was the one to redeem Israel.” They had begun to believe he might be the Messiah, after all, that despite his strange behavior he might actually save the people of God.

Jesus had held his peace, but could stay silent no longer. “Oh how foolish you are!” he exclaimed, “and how slow to believe all the prophets have declared.” I hear exasperation in these words. I hear the frustration of a man who cannot seem to communicate critical things to people who resist understanding. “Was it not necessary,” he continued, “that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then, Luke tells us, Jesus used “Moses and the prophets” to explain himself to his walking companions on the road to Emmaus. This means he used the Old Testament, the Jewish scripture, to show how he all that he had said and done had been predicted by God centuries before.

These two men walking with Jesus still did not recognize him. But they must have been starting to wonder just who the heck he was. We will examine the rest of this story in the weeks to come. We will learn how they finally did know him. But first we must go back and dig into a point I passed over before. Jesus showed the men how the Messiah had to suffer. The problem of suffering can stop our faith in its tracks. How can a God of love permit suffering? And how can such a God send His own Son, send Himself, as it were, into creation specifically to suffer?

Jesus suffered to relieve our suffering. Jesus accepted the agony and humiliation of the cross in order to spare us from having to spend eternity ripped apart from the peace of Christ. But why did all this suffering have to happen in the first place? And how can God just watch it happen?

The answer is that God chose to create a world in which we have the freedom to walk with God—or not. God chose to create not robots who mechanically obey every order they receive, but free agents with minds and wills of their own who do as they please. God wants our decision to come along with Jesus, not our automatic compliance. But with the introduction of freedom into creation, God also introduced the possibility—nay, the likelihood—that we would often choose disobedience. Our disobedience to the will of God generates suffering. Our behavior has consequences. Our sin causes suffering.

But how hard it must be for God to watch us choose not to follow The Way! Any parent knows the pain of watching children make unwise choices, choices that lead to suffering. Over the years I have watched several young people make such decisions. A boy considered turning down a full scholarship to swim on the team at a major university because his girlfriend wanted to get married. When he hesitated she claimed to be pregnant. He married her and they moved to the big city. Suddenly she was not pregnant. Within a couple of years she left him for another guy.

A girl was offered a runway modeling contract, but told she had to lose twenty-five of her 130 pounds. She lost the weight in less than two months—by what dangerously unhealthy methods I do not know—and took the job in a city far away. A few months later she landed in the hospital with a combination of psychiatric and drug abuse problems. Her mother, wallowing in guilt over having relentlessly pushed her daughter down that path for a decade (the girl was eighteen), contemplated suicide.

These true stories touch only the tip of the iceberg. Over the years I have watched any number of young people give up on school when it got too hard for their taste. I have watched young people turn on their friends and become isolated socially. We have watched football players and singers, leaders at the school across the road, get caught up in drinking. It happens all the time. And we act toward God exactly as these young people act toward their parents, churches, schools and all the other institutions and people who long to help them succeed.

Jesus had to suffer on the cross because we sin. We abuse the freedom God gives us. We behave in ways that have fatal consequences. God, being a loving parent, watched humanity try to flush itself down the toilet for as long as He could, and then took decisive action. God sent Jesus, God the Son, to suffer in our place. God chose to suffer in order to stand beside us in our suffering and to deliver us from it.

We can choose to walk with Jesus. We can also choose to leave the Way. Each decision we make has consequences. Praise God that in Christ we can have forgiveness even for our most bullheaded, persistent sins! And praise God that in Christ we have the hope of redemption, of being saved from the suffering. Jesus suffered not so that we would not have to suffer. We suffer. But that is not the end of the story. In the next two weeks we will read through to the end of the Emmaus story. Meanwhile, pray for the faith that keeps you walking with Jesus.