• Acts of the Apostles 2: 14a, 36-41

In his Acts of the Apostles, the writer of the Gospel of Luke implies that Peter is addressing some of the same people who were in the mob who called for the execution of Jesus.  Hearing Peter’s testimony, they implore him: “What shall we do?”  Do three things, he tells them: repent, be baptized and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  This is his basic, three-step initiation  into this dynamic, new community/movement of God at work in the world through the Risen Christ.

• Psalm 116: 1-3, 10-17

The psalmist recalls a time of profound personal crisis that even led him to despair about the whole of humankind.  But, he kept his trust in God and now he cannot think of enough ways to praise God.

• I Peter 1: 17-23

The writer of this letter attributed to Peter embeds the details of the life of Jesus of Nazareth into God’s cosmic plan for humanity.  His death was necessary.  His being raised from the dead is the convincing evidence of God at work, he declares.

• Luke 24: 13-35

This story of the Risen Christ in Luke is unique to his narrative and the longest post-resurrection event in all four gospels.  It is also a gem of story-telling.  Luke begins by telling his reader about “two disciples,” whom he does not identify right away, who are taking the long, sad journey out of Jerusalem after the tragic events of Thursday and Friday.  They had heard the reports of Mary Magdalene and the other women about an empty tomb that morning, but Luke emphasizes that they “refused to believe.”   Luke lets his reader in on the identity of the “stranger” who joins them as they travel, which makes the fact that they did not recognize the stranger as Jesus, because “their eyes were kept from recognizing him,” even more pointed.  Now we are told the identity of one of the two, Cleopas, who had been present and heard for himself the report of Mary Magdalene and the other women that morning.  Cleopas is stunned that the “stranger” seems oblivious to all that had happened in Jerusalem in recent days.  The stranger’s question– “What things?”– puts  the two informed but still unbelieving followers in the position of explaining to Jesus all that had happened to him!  Cleopas lauds Jesus as a “prophetic man mighty in deed and word before God and all the people,” but expresses deep disillusionment that Jesus had not fulfilled in the ways they expected that he would “redeem” his people, (as Luke had so eloquently described that Zechariah, the father of John the Baptizer, had prophesied, [1: 68].)  They also tell the “stranger” about the reports of the empty tomb.  The “stranger” now declares:  “Oh how foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets had declared.”   The “stranger” identifies the heart of the paradox they are slow to grasp: “was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into glory?”  The “stranger” continues: walking with them and interpreting the scriptures to them, but they still do not recognize him.  They invite him to come to supper with them.  It was at table, “when he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them,”  (Luke is copying the exact same words Jesus used at the Last supper, [22:19]), that they finally recognize him, and Jesus immediately vanishes.  They remark among themselves how their hearts were “warmed” as he “opened the scriptures….”   They soon returned to Jerusalem, now as witnesses themselves: “The Lord has risen indeed…”  They can now tell of their own experience with the Risen Christ, whom they finally recognized in the interpretation of scripture and “the breaking of the bread.”  (Also see the commentary fo Easter Evening, Year A.)

Fleeing  Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, Erich Auerbach found refuge during the war.  While in safety, he wrote his seminal exploration of the Western imagination, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.  He makes some very important observations about the impact of Christianity.  In one place, he offers a keen observation about the “Acts of the Apostles,” from which we will read throughout Eastertide.  Auerbach writes:

“But Peter and the other characters in the New Testament are caught in a universal movement of the depths which at first remains almost entirely below the surface and only very gradually– the Acts of the Apostles show the beginning of this development– emerges into the foreground of history, but which even now, from the beginning, lays claim to being limitless and the direct concern of everybody, and which absorbs all merely personal conflicts into itself.  What we see here is a world which on the one hand is entirely real, average, identifiable as to place, time, and circumstance, but which on the other hand is shaken in its very foundations, is transforming and renewing itself before our eyes.”  “They reveal their identity as a movement, a historically active dynamism, through the fact that time and time again the impact of Jesus’ teachings, personality, and fate upon this and that individual is described.”  (p 43)

Stories about how individuals are changed within the gospel narratives themselves become the story of the emergence of the post-resurrection movement– the church.  It is how one responds to the announcement of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus that can make all the difference in the world individually and in history.

Nicholas Lash in his  Theology on the Way to Emmaus discusses how one makes the personal transformation from a ‘listener’ to a ‘teller’ of her own story.  Lash writes:

“…[T]he language in which disciples tried, after his death, to say what they had come to ‘see’ is also evidence of resurrection…  It constitutes an invitation to us to see what they saw; an invitation to construe Jesus’ history (and hence our own and that of every human being) as a story the sense of  whose ending is given by the incomparable power of God’s transforming grace.”  (p.181)

Earlier Lash wrote:  “…[T]he Christian is a teller of a tale, the narrator of a story, as a story in which he acknowledges himself to be a participant.” (p. 102)

Luke tells an amazing story about two followers who “refused to  believe” until they participated in the communal activity of interpreting the scriptures and “breaking the bread” made them tellers of their own stories.  It is only when the individual appropriates the “historically active dynamism” of the story of Jesus as her own story, as a “participant” in that story, that it matters to her personally and can matter to any who hear her story.  The Christian story is latent until someone tells it as her own story, too, of “the incomparable power of God’s transforming grace,” to use Auerbach’s phrasing.  That is just the way it happens, Luke makes clear.  Until that happens, it is just information, common knowledge, rumor, speculation, possibility.