3rd Sunday of Easter
Texts: Luke 24:13-35;
Acts 2:14a, 36-41; 1 Pet 1:17-23
THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE VICTIM
This morning we begin an important Bible study on how we ELCA Lutherans interpret the Bible. I’ll give you a sneak peek and let you know that we do so according to Jesus. We begin our interpretation of the whole Bible with trust in Jesus as the highest and most true Word from God. Jesus is the Word of God in its most true form, that of a person. As John chapter 1 proclaims, Jesus is the Word of God made flesh, who dwelled among us full of grace and truth.
This morning’s Gospel gives us another hugely important glimpse of this approach to interpreting the Bible in verse 27: “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” Wow! Don’t you wish you could be a fly on the shoulder of one of those two disciples! This is exactly what we’re talking about! Namely, how to interpret the whole Bible according to Jesus. Too bad we couldn’t have been there. Or why couldn’t Luke have extended his Gospel a few chapters and recorded for us that whole Bible Study? It would have saved us so much trouble and controversy throughout our Christian history! It would save us a lot of trouble and pain here at Bethlehem, as how we interpret the Bible threatens to divide us.
Well, I’d like to take a few minutes this morning to give you my idea of what that Bible study on the road to Emmaus was about. You can give me your feedback in our Bible study later. I believe that Luke does give us more than a hint of what that Bible study was about in the words that Jesus speaks right before telling us how Jesus interpreted all the scriptures according to himself. We began reading verse 27. Let’s also read again what Jesus himself says, in verses 25-26:
“Oh, how foolish you are,” Jesus says, “and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”
Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory? The conversation up to that point had centered on the deep disappointment of those two disciples that the one they hoped to be the Messiah had been crucified. This simply did not compute with their hopes for the Messiah. So what Jesus is doing here is severely adjusting their hopes for the Messiah to not just include suffering at the hands of a violent, oppressive empire. No, “suffering these things” is the precise clue we need to understand who the Messiah is, in the first place.
Let’s consider an age-old adage, thought throughout human history to be obviously true. That old adage is simply, “History is written by the victors.” We know that one, right? We could extend that to say, “History is made by the victors, those who are able to inflict suffering on the losers.” The losers don’t get to write history, because many of them are dead. And the rest are silenced in their suffering of imperial oppression — until the next empire comes along, of course, and makes those who had inflicted suffering to suffer themselves. Human history is one long tale of one group inflicting suffering on another group, until another group comes along and turns the table on them. In any case, the history of that time gets to be written by the victors, by those who inflict the suffering, and never by the suffering losers, who are either dead or silenced by continued oppression. Most often, empires are toppled by other neighboring empires. But every so often, an empire is toppled from within by those who are oppressed, who get to turn the tables on their oppressors and thus take their turn at writing history.
What does Jesus mean when he says that we need to understand from the perspective of a Messiah who necessarily suffers these things, namely, the things of imperial oppression? I think he means this: that the resurrection of a victim of imperial oppression makes it possible for the first time in history for history itself to be more truly written by the loser. The two disciples had hoped for a Messiah who would turn the tables on their Roman oppressors and enable them to write history from their perspective as the new victors. Instead, what they got was a Messiah who suffered the imperial oppression but then was raised by God to enable, among other things, history to be written more truly from the perspective of the losers, from the perspective of the oppressed.
Why? Because when history is written from the perspective of the victors, humanity remains trapped in Us-vs-Them thinking. History is always about winners and losers and gets to be written by the winners. But what if that cycle is broken by God intervening to raise from the dead one of history’s losers to be able to begin to write history from the perspective of the losers? What would that be like? It would be like the New Testament, the Christian scriptures, which offer an interpretation of the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures, from the perspective of a Messiah who has suffered these things, who has precisely suffered the ignominious execution of one of history’s most brutal empires, and then, thanks to God’s resurrecting power of life, is able to tell the tale.
It would first and foremost mean a complete reversal of who god is. The gods of human history are always on the side of the victors. The God of the Messiah who has suffered these things would obviously be the God of the losers, the victims of imperial oppression. Not because this God plays sides, but precisely because this God wants us to STOP PLAYING SIDES! This God wants to instead write a history in which everyone are winners because we are one human family working together to help all life to flourish. In order to bring this about, God — within the games of our perpetual Us-vs-Them thinking, which keeps us trapped in win-lose scenarios — the true Creator God of all peoples and places must take the side of the loser to blow that all apart. In order for that God to heal us from our Us-vs-Them thinking, that God must constantly be found counted among the “Them.”
When Jesus interprets to the two Emmaus disciples all the scriptures according to himself, he is helping them to understand their entire long history as the covenant people to be a history written by the losers. The Jewish empire of King David and King Solomon is not the pinnacle of their history. It’s what leads them back into the Us-vs-Them thinking that gets them defeated once again by other empires. They began as an enslaved people brought out of the Egyptian empire by a God who sides with the victims. They rose to brief preeminence under David and Solomon, the victors who got to write history in the usual human fashion, but then they descended into the suffering of eight hundred years of more oppression by empire after empire. For the true God of the victims to begin to unravel this way of writing history according to only the victors, in favor of a new win-win way of writing history that includes the losers ultimately united with their oppressors, then it was necessary for the Messiah of that true God to suffer these things. It was necessary for the Messiah of that true God to suffer the horrible execution at the imperial oppressors.
How do we then go back to truthfully and faithfully interpret the Bible? By going back through those scriptures to find the true God who takes the side of the victims in order to get us to stop playing sides altogether. We must constantly and consistently find the God who is working to heal our Us-vs-Them thinking so that we might all finally become one Us, one human family. Then, and only then, can we finally take our place as the Creator’s children who are called to help care for the Creation . . . just as the Creator God had intended from the beginning. One human family united in its care for the home God made for us.
Yesterday was Earth Day. I’d like to end this sermon by including our earth home in this one, new united “Us” that God is healing together through the Messiah who suffers from the oppression of Us-vs-Them thinking. Our earth home has been one of the Them that suffered terribly. And now climate change is making that earth home uninhabitable in more and more places, increasingly creating the need for peoples to migrate to the fewer habitable places. If we remain locked in our Us-vs-Them thinking, this migration will prove to be a disaster upon disaster. Those who live in the still-inhabitable places will be an Us feeling the need to protect themselves from Them.
Enter the indigenous peoples into this conversation. After five hundred years of being oppressed by white culture, who do you think is closer to the truth of the Messiah who suffers imperial oppression? I believe this is another instance of what we talked about two weeks ago on Easter: the joy of being wrong. In caring for our earth home, I think we need to once again admit how deeply wrong we’ve been, just at the moment at which we also know how graciously forgiven we are. So that we can now also experience the joy of being set right. The joy of participating in God’s project of New Creation that highlights a flourishing of all that leads to life.
In Racine, one of the first things I became involved in, when we moved back there three years ago was Greening Greater Racine. It actually was picking back up on something I had become involved with shortly before we moved from Racine to Kalamazoo in 2006. David Rhoads, a New Testament scholar at the Lutheran Seminary in Chicago, lived in Racine and commuted. He’s quite a while ago retired and taken up his biggest passion: getting churches to join the fight for Environmental Justice towards our earth home. Greening Greater Racine had begun just with Lutheran churches back in the early 2000’s. As David recruited me to get involved with GGR two years ago — now in his 80’s and slowly down physically — he was finally planning to pull back and hoping to rely on new leaders to keep GGR going. One of those newer leaders is Dave Backmann, who’s a member at Lutheran Church of the Resurrection, where I will be moving to next month as Bridge Pastor. Dave Backmann is part of the reason behind that move. But to bring this to a close, GGR is in the process of merging in with another group in Racine, the Environmental Justice Task Force of the Racine Interfaith Coalition. In short, working for just treatment of our earth home is one of the things we’re called to when we learn to read scripture from the perceptive of the victim. Let’s be honest: our indigenous neighbors are further ahead on this than we are, and their perspective from the place of being our victims helps explain why.
As our nation faces many crises, so many of them revolving around climate crisis, how urgent is it to finally recognize Jesus walking beside us, teaching us to understand the scriptures in light of our victims? Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethlehem Lutheran Church,
Muskego, WI, April 23, 2023
