Inflammatory

Luke 24:13-35

April 6, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

He called them “foolish” and “slow.” Everybody reads this passage and gets all warm and fuzzy about Cleopas and his companion recognizing Jesus as he broke the bread and dashing back into the room of confused disciples and sharing the great good news that they had been with the risen Jesus, and everyone is all happy, happy.

So we forget how this little story starts. Cleopas thought this stranger was a bit slow for not being up on current events in the big city, so Cleopas took it on himself to deliver the headlines of the weekend events about Jesus. The stranger does not respond with amazement or gratitude or sadness, but instead insults his traveling companions. “How foolish can you be!? How can you be so slow to understand what’s going on here?” And before they can close their mouths, agape with surprise at the rudeness of this stranger, he takes them on a journey through the Bible. How long does it take to walk seven miles in the wilderness outside of Jerusalem? That’s how long the stranger made it clear to them that they had totally missed the point of everything. I can imagine at first they were angry at his words about them, so they may not have been able to hear what he said. But as he talked on, words began to get through, and their burning irritation with this stranger became a burning desire to hear more. He talked till it was almost dark, until he lifted the bread, and they finally got it. You can almost see them hit themselves on their heads saying, “We should have known all this; and we should have seen that it was Jesus telling us about it!”

Their hearts, they said, “burned.” Was it from joy and passion and excitement? Perhaps. But I think it also might have been that kind of burning you get, that can turn your cheeks red, when you realize that you have had a moment, too, of being foolish or slow.

After all, being called a fool and slow could be inflammatory, something that causes burning, could it not?

I am sure Jesus was not singling out Cleopas and his companion as being the most foolish and slow of all his followers. During his ministry he had certainly had occasion to call even the 12 in the inner circle foolish and slow on more than one occasion. I’m sure Cleopas was as intelligent as the next guy, but on the subject of Jesus, Cleopas had been blinded by his own experience of what it means for someone to be dead. It didn’t occur to him to consider there might be a different experience or understanding, not only of death, but of the Bible, which he also thought he knew. Sometimes we get so caught up in how nice and kind Jesus was that we forget the inflammatory side of Jesus, the part that set fires that people did not always welcome. Sometimes the truth hurts, and Jesus had a habit of forcing people to look at the truth of their lives, especially when it was not always pretty.

To quote Dolly Parton referring to Simon Cowell, the toughest of the judges on American Idol, “He tells the truth; someone’s got to do it.”

She may be right, but most of us would not welcome being judged by Simon, or by Jesus for that matter. Few of us would welcome being called foolish or slow, especially by one we thought was a stranger (remember, they did not yet know it was Jesus when he called them that). Inflammatory comments like that, even if they are true, especially if they are true, tend to irritate us. They irritate us even more if they make us question whether our experience of what is true might not be the only point of view out there!

That’s one of the things that happened to many people as they began to hear the sound bites of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons over the past few weeks. Lots of folk were irritated at what seemed to them not only inflammatory speech, but speech that insulted either them or the nation they love. The perspective and the experience from which he preached, while familiar to all too many Americans, was unfamiliar to many others, and so they rejected the judgment they perceived him casting on them and this country. Although his exact words were often distorted and taken out of context (he did not, for example, ever say that America “deserved” the destruction on 9/11, but he did say it was an inevitable result of our foreign policy over many years. Big difference there), nevertheless he spoke in ways that challenged many of our self-perceptions.

Jesus spent seven miles asking Cleopas and his companion to look again at everything they thought they knew very well. They’d been hearing the stories of Moses and the prophets interpreted to them since they were small children. But now he wanted them to look again and hear the old stories with a new point of view. When he sat at table with them, he did the same thing that either of them would have done a thousand times, breaking the bread and giving thanks to God for it, but before he died, Jesus had asked them to look at bread differently, and when they did, they saw what they did not believe possible before: Jesus, alive.

When I was in theological seminary, my Old Testament professor was the great Bernhard Anderson. He was great because he was an amazing scholar, but also because anyone who spent any time with him could tell he was a man of deep faith and commitment to the mission of Christ, a true man of the church in many ways. The year after I left seminary, Dr. Anderson retired early from teaching, and one of the things that sent him into early retirement was a weariness with dealing with students who did not want any part of their carefully constructed faith challenged. They already knew the truth, and they did not want him asking them to consider other points of view. The more fundamentalist students believed Moses had written the first five books of the Bible, and so when Dr. Anderson taught the prevailing scholarly theory that there were at least four different storytelling traditions represented in those five books, those students thought these ideas were dangerous and inflammatory. They not only attacked his theological orthodoxy, but claimed he could not be a faithful Christian and hold these points of view. Instead of listening carefully and trying to discern what truth might be challenging them, they simply rejected Dr. Anderson as wrong and heretical and dangerous.

That is a temptation all of us face when confronted with the implication that we might be foolish, slow, or just plain wrong about something, or that there might be a valid point of view different from ours that we need to hear and understand. It’s easy to caricature those fundamentalist students, but all of us have parts of our lives that we are sure we know and understand completely and are certain of the truth. I think we all need to be challenged in every part of our lives from time to time, to test those carefully constructed belief systems about our faith, our understanding of history, or our self-perception. Whether it is an inflammatory preacher or a beloved mentor or counselor or family member or friend, or even a stranger who brings us up short and challenges what we might even say “everyone” knows, and asks us to listen and question, we need to pay attention. Sometimes we will emerge clearer that what we believed is, indeed, so. Sometimes we will see that there are other points of view to which we need to attend. Sometimes we will see that we have indeed been foolish and slow on some matters, as many of us who are white Americans (and I include myself) have been on issues involving racism, and our hearts will burn with shame or anger.

So here is bread, ready to be taken, blessed, broken and shared, just like in Emmaus. This bread can help us turn that burning of fear or shame or anger into a fire to discern the truth, and, above all, a fire to understand more deeply who God is, who we are, and how God wants us to live. Take the chance; walk a ways with Jesus, sit and eat and drink and may all our eyes be opened. Amen.