Shane Hughes 4-26-26

Thank you, Sam. This is one of my favorite chapters in all of the New Testament. Luke 24. If you want to have your Bible, you can turn it there. There's something very interesting happening at the tables.

In particular in Luke 24. It's something that will quietly rearrange the furniture of your mind, of everything you thought you knew and about who is hosting whom. It starts on a road. It's the road to Emmaus. And on this road, Jesus comes alongside two grieving people as a stranger.

And this is the first thing I want you to notice and kind of hang on to for the next few minutes, that the risen Christ first appearance in Luke is not in glory. It's not in light, it's not with angels.

He appears as someone you might not as someone you might not stop for. Jesus appears as someone you might walk past. But this stranger falls in line and step beside them. And Luke says quietly, almost as an aside, their eyes were held. And I want you to think about this for a minute, because for the past three years, Jesus disciples, probably including Cleopas and this other person.

Now, Luke never names who this other person is, but Luke does thorough research. I think Luke knows exactly the name of this other person, but he leaves it blank. And theologians and scholars throughout history have wondered if that name is left blank so that we could put our names in there, that we are also in this story. But for three years, Jesus has led them. And in your imagination and my imagination, I think it's like a horizon scene.

And you see Jesus and the disciples are following Jesus. You know it's Jesus because he's wearing the white robe with the blue slash. That's how you know he is. But these men have followed Jesus for years. They know his gate, but these two can't see it's being held from them.

And it's not that they failed to look. It's not like Jesus was disguised, wearing some sort of fake mustache or something. There's. There's something about this.

Their eyes were held by something outside themselves, by something that decided, for reasons of its own, that they were not ready to see what was right in front of them. And I find that a little unsettling, but also deeply comforting. Because what that means is on the days when I cannot see God, when the road is long and the news is bad and the one that I thought would save everything is gone in that moment. It may be that God is not absent. It may simply mean that my eyes are held.

There's something still unfolding that I don't have the categories for yet. And so I can't understand it. I don't even see it. And so in this moment when Jesus had been the rabbi leading the disciples, Jesus is the stranger. And he plays the part completely.

He asks questions as if he doesn't know the answers. He listens to this whole long, sad story as though he's hearing it for the first time. And he lets himself be instructed about himself by people that don't know they are talking to him. And there's kind of a divine humility here that I. I really appreciate.

The one that is the answer to the question, to every question they're asking is content for a while to simply walk beside them and let them talk. And they tell the stranger everything. They tell him about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet of mighty deed and word. They tell him how the chief priests handed him over to be crucified. And then they say the sentence that has been breaking the hearts of believers for centuries.

Because we all hold it close. We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. We had hoped. It's not just past tense. It means that something that happened in the past has died.

Hope for these two is over. And I think that's got to be the loneliest grammar in human language. We had hoped.

We had hoped the diagnosis would be different. We'd hoped the marriage would hold. We hoped the church would be what we needed it to be. We had hoped that God was doing something with all of this past tense.

And the stranger, it's Jesus. Although they can't see it, doesn't rush past this. He doesn't say, well, actually, good news. He sits with the past tense. He walks with it for a while.

And then he starts to talk about Moses, about the prophets, about that long, strange story of God who keeps working through loss and suffering and death rather than around them. Was it not necessary, he asks, that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into glory? And that word necessary shows up all over Luke. It's not that the cross was some sort of inevitability of a cold, mechanistic sense, but that the cross was fitting, that the story that God is telling is one in which death is not the end, but rather death is the door. The glory in this story does not come instead of suffering, it comes through it.

But then there's something that shifts the strange. The rabbi, who is acting as a stranger, they reach Emmaus, and he moves to go on further. But they will not let him stay with us, they insist. And so the stranger becomes a guest, and he comes into their house and he sits at their table. And he is, by every social convention in the 1st century in Jewish hospitality.

He is the one that is being welcomed. They are the host, and he is dependent on the invitation. And then, in this most breathtaking reversals in all of scripture, and Luke loves that story of reversal and change of fortune, Jesus takes the bread and he breaks it. Not them, it's Jesus. The guest reaches across the table and takes the bread that belongs to the household, and he blesses it, and he breaks it, and he gives it to them.

And the guest becomes the host at someone else's table. And in that moment, their eyes are opened. And I think I've preached about this reversal at least five times in the last seven years here at Highland, about how that moment of recognition is also the moment of role reversal. And they don't see him until he is feeding them. And the stranger that they invited for supper turns out to be the one who all along was preparing a table for them.

And there's a theology here of Eucharist, of the Lord's Supper buried in this moment that the church has been unpacking and discovering for the last 2000 years. And I don't think we're finished yet. The table we set turns out to be his table. The bread we bring turns out to be his gift. The hospitality we offer to the stranger turns out to be the hospitality we receive.

And only we find that out when we look up and we notice that somehow, somewhere in the middle of the meal, the host and the guest have switched places. And then he vanishes. And so those two, they run back. Jerusalem. And in there, where our text begins today, in a locked room, it happens again.

But it's different this time. It's more abrupt, it's more unsettling. Because in Emmaus, there was a road and a conversation and this slow warming in their hearts before the table. But in Jerusalem, there is just presence. It's sudden and it's unexplained.

He stood among them, the text says. There's no door opening. There's no footsteps in the hall. Just risen. Christ standing in the middle of the room as though he had been there all along and they only just noticed.

But Jesus is not the stranger this time. They know his face and his voice and his wounds. He is not a guest because nobody invited him. Nobody could have, because the door was locked. He is simply and completely the host, standing in their space as though it is his space, which of course it is, because all Spaces are his.

And he says, peace. Peace be with you. Which is what a host might say to guests who are frightened. It's what you say when you want someone to know that they are in a safe space where they have found themselves. And then there's this detail which absolutely surprised me this week.

It kind of blew my mind. And I stayed with it for a while. He asks for something to eat. The host asks to be fed. The one who had just walked through a locked door, who has stood in the middle of the room and dispensed peace like it was his to give, which it is the same one who says quietly, hey, do you all have anything to eat?

And then imagine with me for this moment, this is in my head, how it looks. There is a circle of disciples, and they're standing right here, right in front of Jesus. They're all looking at him, they're all staring at him. And he says, y' all have something to eat. And quietly, someone somehow produces some fish and hands it to him.

And then they just watch him eat good fish. Y' all. Like, how strange is this moment that's happening? Why does he do that? I mean, the kind of.

The theological answer is that he's proving that he has a body. He's proving that he's not a ghost, because ghosts don't eat. That the resurrection is physical and real and tangible here. And that's true. That's all true.

But I also think there's something else happening, and I think it's about those tables that the rabbi has become a stranger and the guest has become a host, and now the host has become a guest. I think that Christ is doing here what Christ has always done, which is to insist on mutuality, on this genuine human encounter which requires both people to need something. A relationship with only one person gives and the other person only receives. The. That's not a relationship.

That's charity. And if you look throughout Scripture, if you look throughout the Gospels, Jesus is not interested in charity. Jesus is interested in mutuality. He's always been interested in table fellowship. In that risky, mutual.

Nobody walks away unchanged kind of sharing that happens when people break bread together and both go home fed. And so he asks for fish, and they give it to him, and he eats it in front of them. And in this very strange, ordinary, completely unprecedented moment, the Lord of the Universe eating broiled fish in a locked room with 11 terrified people. Something in that moment, it settles. Somehow eating that fish changes the temperature of the room, because you can't be quite afraid of Someone who is eating your food, and you.

You cannot maintain quite the same reverent distance from someone that chews.

And then Luke gives us this sentence. And this is the second thing that stopped me this week as I was plunging through this text. And I think it's. It's quietly another devastating line in this resurrection narrative. We had hoped, Luke says, while all of this was happening, Jesus stood there alive in front of him.

And they still disbelieved for joy, which is odd, not what you'd expect, not for joy. I mean, you can imagine they still disbelieved for hardness of heart, or they still disbelieved for stubbornness. But the text says they disbelieved for. For joy. And this idiom, it shows up in one other place in Luke.

It's in the Garden of Gethsemane. And the disciples know. They realize what's going to happen. Crucifixion is on the horizon, and they go with Jesus to pray. And they slept before their grief, because they were so sad about the future.

They fell asleep. And I've done that before, been so tired, been so emotionally just wrecked that the best thing for me to do in my life was just to go to bed. And then you wake up, and for, like, three seconds, you don't remember the circumstance, and you have that moment of peace, and then the world comes crashing again. They slept for their grief, but in this case, they disbelieved, they doubted from their joy.

This is where I think that this is what I think Luke was trying to say. I think that Luke was trying to say the joy was so large that it had nowhere to go. There was no place that the joy could fit. The good news is so good that part of you knows that how the world works, right? Part of you knows and has learned the hard way not to trust in things that seem too good.

Part of the disciples could not simply let this land. And I've been thinking about this all week. I've been thinking about all the different ways that we protect ourselves from hope, all the careful distances we keep between ourselves and the things that we want the most. Because if you don't want it, you can't be that devastated when it doesn't come. And these disciples, who've wanted a resurrected Lord more than anything, who had given up everything for this man and this movement and this dream, these disciples stood in the presence of everything they had hoped for and could not open their hands wide enough to receive it.

They disbelieved for joy because it was too good because they were too human, because love makes us fragile in exactly this way.

And Jesus, who's risen, glorified already beyond the power of death. Jesus stays in this room. He doesn't condemn them. He opens the Scriptures and he opens their minds. And he works patiently and tenderly.

And they're stunned, joy struck, half believing hearts until they can hold what they're seeing. And I think this is a piece of. Of the resurrection. We're in this season now called Eastertide, and it stretches into Pentecost. It's kind of the afterglow of the resurrection.

We celebrate the empty tomb. But there's more to resurrection than just the empty tomb. It's not just the event, it's also the aftermath. It's the long, patient, fish eating scripture opening work of helping frightened human beings learn to trust what is in fact too good to be true and yet still is true anyway. And he tells them in this moment, they are witnesses.

The word that Luke used there becomes martyr. And they will be, but not yet. First they must wait and they must receive what is coming, the power from on high, the promised Spirit. It's a thing that will take this overwhelming joy and give it a voice and give it legs and give it somewhere to go other than stunned silence in a locked room. But the Spirit cannot be separated from this moment.

It can't be separated from the burning hearts and the broken bread, the eaten fish, the open minds. The Spirit, when it comes at Pentecost, will not be something new. It will be this. All of this finally finding its full expression in the world.

And so the question that this text leaves me is. Is not theological exactly. It's more personal than that.

Where have your eyes been held?

Where's the moment in your life where you didn't see what was coming and it seemed like all was lost? Where have you been? Walking away from Jerusalem in the wrong direction. Somewhere on the road without knowing it, someone fell and stepped beside you. They looked like a stranger, but they were not.

When did your heart burn and you only noticed it later? And this last one, I think, is the most critical. What would it mean? What would it take for you to stop protecting yourself from the hope that seems too large to be safe, too good to be trusted?

Because maybe you came here today and you're not sure you believe. Maybe hope feels too big and you're afraid of it. Maybe you've been disappointed by God or by the Church, or by your own failure to become the person you thought faith would make you. Maybe the gospel Sounds so good that something in you keeps waiting for the catch.

They didn't disbelieve for their joy. It's not because they didn't want to. It's not because the evidence wasn't right in front of them. They couldn't believe it because they wanted it too much. The Greek is fantastic.

Here it's precise. Luke says they disbelieved because of the joy. This joy was so large, they broke their ability to hold it. The good news was so good, it short circuited everything. And they just stood there, stunned, shaking, tears probably coming down their faces, disbelieving, not out of hardness, but out of hope that was almost too fragile to trust.

It was too good to be true. And I think you might have lived there.

And this is what I want you to hear this morning. If you've ever had that moment where the gospel seems too good to be true, where God's love seems too vast to be sincere, that's not unbelief, that's not disbelief, not really. What that is, is love that doesn't yet know it's safe to open its hands.

So here's what I notice when I take it all together.

In Luke 24, Jesus is the stranger on the road. He's the guest at the table in Emmaus, and he's the host who takes the bread and feed them. Jesus is the sudden presence in a locked room. And Jesus is the one that asks to be fed. And the thing you have to realize about Jesus is he's not going to stay in one place at the table.

He will not hold one roll. If you blink your eyes, he has switched seats and he's standing somewhere else. He keeps moving from stranger to guest to host to guest again. And he is, though he's trying to show you that these stunned and grieving people that are with him, they, these categories do not hold the way that they used to. That the question of who is serving whom and who is feeding whom and who is welcoming whom.

All of those are more fluid than we ever thought. The reality is they're more mutual and they're more surprising.

And I wonder. I wonder if that's the point.

And I wonder if you're holding these things. I wonder if you know that this is the place where you belong. I wonder if you know that this is the table. This is the space where you are going to encounter Jesus if you wait around long enough.

And I want you to know that if you're holding those feelings, you are not alone in this space. I am right There with you, right? And in first service, I kind of sit over there. In second service, I kind of sit over here. And if you want to believe, but you've been hurt so many times that you're afraid to, I want you to know that you can sit in this room with me.

Come and find me, because you're exactly where you need to be. And if you can't find me, I guarantee you that just about every other person, you can sit by them, too. You've prayed for the same thing for 20 years, and the answer never came. And somewhere along the way, hope started to feel more dangerous than holding despair. If that's where you're at, you can sit in this room with me.

You're exactly where you need to be. You walked into this room today and you're, like, half convinced that God is real and half convinced that you're fooling yourself. And you're not sure which option you're rooting for right now. If that's where you're at, you can sit in this room with me. Because this is exactly where you need to be.

And if you can't sit next to me because you can't find me, you can find someone else to sit next to.

You've heard the gospel a hundred times, maybe even a thousand times. And every time something in you wants it, your heart is burning. God, you want it, but you can't quite let yourself land on it. Because what if it isn't true? What if you fall and there's nothing there?

If that's where you're at, I want you to know that you can sit in this room with me. Because these kind of tables where Jesus is host and guest and stranger, and Rabbi, he's also Lord. And in this space, you are exactly where you need to be. Let's pray.

God of the universe, who makes everything good and new, who hosts every table that's ever been created. Father, we invite you into this space and into our hearts, into our lives, that we might live as witnesses. Speak your truth boldly to those around us, not only through our words, but also through the way that we care for, for one another. We care for our city the way we care for our world. May you fill this church with your presence, through your spirit, and may we speak mightily in your name.