"Eating with Jesus"

One of the nightly rituals in our house in recent months has been reading the Harry Potter series aloud. We have finally worked our way to book seven, the last in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

According to wizarding lore, the deathly hallows are objects that give one protection from or power over death.

One of the hallows is the Resurrection Stone, not to be confused with the Sorcerer’s Stone from the first book in the series.

The Sorcerer’s Stone gives its owner immortality. The Resurrection Stone’s power goes beyond that; it brings people back from the dead.

Legend says that the wizard who had the Resurrection Stone could not wait to use it. He hurried home, took out the stone, and turned it three times in his hand.

“To his amazement and his delight, the figure of the girl he had once hoped to marry, before her un timely death, appeared at once before him.”

But the wizard’s amazement and delight at seeing his fiancée again were short lived. “She was sad and cold, separated from him by a veil. Though she had returned to the mortal world, she did not truly belong there and suffered.

“Finally the man, driven mad with hopeless longing, killed himself so as truly to join her.”

The Resurrection Stone led not to life, but to death.

The allure of the Resurrection Stone is something we all can understand. Who has not longed to call someone back from death -- a spouse or parent or child or friend? To see them, touch them, talk to them?

But even in the world of Harry Potter – full of ghosts, whimsical creatures, and magic, death is final. As Harry’s friend Hermione reminds him, wizards can do magic, but they are still human, and humans die. No magic can change that grim truth.

Jesus’ disciples, like all humans, are fully aware of that grim truth, which is why they are confused and terrified at the things they have heard on this Sunday evening after the death of their beloved friend and teacher Jesus.

First, they have heard from the women early that morning that Jesus’ tomb was empty and that angels told them that Jesus was no longer dead, but had risen.

But, as scripture says, “these words seemed to the disciples an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”

But then that evening two more of Jesus’ followers, Cleopas and his companion, arrive to tell them that they have seen Jesus, that he walked and ate with them on the road to Emmaus.

Then, in the middle of the story, Jesus himself appears among the gathered disciples, and says, “Peace be with you.”

Far from being joyful at this unexpected appearance from one they thought dead, the disciples are terrified, thinking that they are seeing a ghost.

“I’m not a ghost,” Jesus reassures them, inviting them to touch his hands and feet, to feel him, to see that he is alive, that he is real. “A ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have,” he tells them.

With this assurance, the disciples’ fear turns to joy and wonderment.

And then comes my favorite part of the story.

In the midst of the joy, the wonderment, the amazement; in the midst of the most magnificent event that any human could possibly imagine, Jesus, back from the dead, looks at his friends and asks – “Do you have anything here to eat?”

The Bible does not offer explanations of the resurrection. We don’t know how it happened. We don’t know exactly what form Jesus takes in this new life. People who knew him in his earthly existence fail to recognize him after the resurrection.

He has a now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t kind of quality – disappearing at the moment Cleopas recognizes him on that road to Emmaus, suddenly appearing inside locked rooms and then just as suddenly vanishing.

Obviously there is a difference between this post-resurrection Jesus and the Jesus who lived before the crucifixion.

But just as obviously, this is no ghost, no apparition, no hallucination. This is not the result of magic, like the Resurrection Stone in Harry Potter. No veil separates this risen Jesus from his friends, this Jesus is not sad and cold, yearning to go back among the dead.

They can touch him, feel him, laugh in joy with him, and they can eat with him.

Something is different, to be sure, even mysterious, but this Jesus is most definitely alive.

And it seems significant that of all the things Jesus could have said and done in that room with his first terrified, then joyful friends, he first asks them for food.

In her book Take This Bread, writer Sara Miles says that she believes that the reason Jesus rose from the dead was to eat with his friends.

Indeed, just as food, feeding people and eating with them, was an important part of Jesus’ life before the crucifixion, it also plays a prominent role in his post-resurrection appearances.

He is recognized on the road to Emmaus as he breaks bread with Cleopas. He shows up on the beach one morning to cook breakfast for the disciples who have been out fishing all night.

“All of this points to a force stronger than the anxious formulas of religion,” Miles says, “a radically inclusive love that accompanied people in the most ordinary of actions – eating, drinking, walking – and stayed with them, through fear, even past death.”

“It seems pretty clear,” Miles adds. “If I want to see God, I can feed people.”

It was in being fed herself that Miles first saw God.

She calls herself an unlikely convert to Christianity – “a blue-state, secular intellectual, a lesbian, a left-wing journalist with a habit of skepticism, raised an atheist.”

And then one Sunday when she was 46, on her morning walk in San Francisco, she surprised herself by walking into an Episcopal church, where she ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine, and changed her life.

That feeding, that communion, awoke in her a hunger beyond food, a hunger for God.

And because she first found God in being fed, she turned to feeding others – eventually opening a food pantry in the church itself, stacking the altar high with fruits and vegetables and canned goods and staples, drawing in all sorts and conditions of humanity, all parts of Christ’s body to God’s table.

But first, Miles, the life-long atheist, kept coming back to church again and again because she wanted more of that bread and wine.

“All that grounded me were those pieces of bread,” she writes. “I was feeling my way toward a theology, beginning with what I had taken in my mouth and working out from there.

“I couldn’t start by conceptualizing God as an abstract ‘Trinity’ or trying to ‘prove’ a divine existence philosophically. It was the materiality of Christianity that fascinated me, the compelling story of incarnation in its grungiest details, the promise that words and flesh were deeply, deeply connected.”

Some times Christianity, especially when we are talking about mysterious, unexplainable things like the resurrection, can be too spiritual, too ethereal, too vague.

That’s why Jesus starts with food. And then he moves to the words, explaining the scripture. And then he sends the disciples out into the world to witness to the things he has told them

Amen

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Readings

Micah 4:1-5

In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills. Peoples shall stream to it, and many nations shall come and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever.

Acts 3:12-19

When Peter saw the wonder and amazement caused by his healing of the lame man, he addressed the people, “You Israelites, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we had made him walk? The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate, though he had decided to release him. But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses. And by faith in his name, his name itself has made this man strong, whom you see and know; and the faith that is through Jesus has given him this perfect health in the presence of all of you. “And now, friends, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer. Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out.”

Luke 24:36b-48

While the disciples were telling how they had seen Jesus risen from the dead, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

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