Easter 3: Too Good to be True

Luke 24:36b-48
Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” 37They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. 38He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? 39Look 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.” 40And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. 41While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” 42They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43and he took it and ate in their presence. 44Then 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.” 45Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, 47and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48You are witnesses of these things.


I’ve tried to be careful not to talk about my daughter, Joy, too much in my sermons since I’ve been back at work. I mean, there is more to my life than being her mommy, although at 4 am it doesn’t always feel that way. But loving her, getting to know her, and looking after her are all taking up a lot of our time as her parents these days—time we never knew we had! She is at the same time the most delightful and most exhausting thing we’ve ever had in our lives. She woos us with her smiles and coos, and she wears us out getting up and down at night, although thankfully far less often than she did a couple of months ago.

But since I’m on the subject, I’d like to share with you some of her qualities which delight me the most: she’s really cute. Her smile lights up a room, and I love the fact that I get one from her just about every time she notices that I have come into the room. She’s playful—she likes to tease with you and play the “Where’s Joy’s nose?” game with her daddy over and over again. She likes church—or at least, she cooperates well so far, even if she does sleep through my sermons. What else is new, right? She likes meeting people. Unless she skipped a nap or bottle, she is as happy as can be to make a new friend. Even though we are her parents, we think she is just about the most perfect baby that ever lived. Some days, the fact that she is mine and I am hers seems almost too good to be true.

What are your experiences of those things in life that are too good to be true?

Sometimes I look at my spouse and think that I can’t believe someone as good and smart as he is has taken me on for life. I am thankful every day for the family in which I was raised—a family with parents who are still married to each other and who made it often on less than a shoestring but who was always able to feed, clothe, and creatively entertain us and who loved us more than anything else. My appointment to be your pastor—what a gift in my life of ministry! Many of my peers ran me down at the annual conference session a couple of years ago—the year I moved here—and wanted to know how I got this appointment. There are many things in my life, both that I am aware of and that I take for granted, that I could put into the category “too good to be true.”

How about you?

You’ve got to feel for these disciples. Doug did a great job of setting the scene for us last week of their gathering. Of course they were afraid. They were human beings, and they had been seeing some crazy stuff happening in those last few days. They had seen Jesus arrested, tried, and killed. They had seen the group fall apart, the others shy away from Jesus’ death. They had received the strange and wonderful news of Jesus’ resurrection from the women who saw the empty tomb. They get that there is a reason for them to stay huddled together, but they don’t know what the reason is. And then he suddenly appears to them, and they wonder if they are seeing a ghost.

It’s a valid question. How could he really be there? Where had he been in the mean time between the cross and now? And what was going to happen next? This passage follows directly after the story of Jesus revealing himself to the two on the walk to Emmaus. They spend quite a while with him without realizing who he is until he is made known to them in the breaking of the bread. All over the place people are discovering that Jesus is not dead after all. He has moved beyond death, and he is flesh again. It is the sharing of meals that proves that he is fully human again and living with them in all the presence he did before. It’s almost as if nothing ever happened and yet it is even better than that. Nothing could ever happen now to break the love of God that is available for all people and that Jesus has clearly demonstrated in a very real and physical way in his death on the cross and resurrection from the grave.

Too good to be true?

One, when I was in seminary, I was preparing a lesson plan for a Sunday school class at the church where I was on staff. I was teaching on early Christian heresies—one in particular that taught that Jesus was not really human but actually was something like a hologram: some sort of 3-dimensional light representation of a human body but consisting of no actual flesh and bone. I was trying to make it easy to grasp but having a difficult time, so I asked my roommate to listen to the presentation and tell me if she could understand it based on what I said. She is Jewish, and that is why I thought it was worth trying on her; she would have an actual objective perspective on the whole thing. When I finished the lesson with her I said, “Isn’t that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard of?” Her response to me was, “Susan, you’re whole religion is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. Someone came back from the dead? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Just so you know, we share a healthy respect for each other’s religious background, beliefs, and practices. But I thought she had a point. It almost sounds just too good to be true.

If you look back at verse 11 in this same chapter, just after the women have discovered that the tomb is empty and they have gone to tell the disciples, the disciples actually don’t believe what they hear. They can’t. It is too fantastic, too “out there”, not possible. Luke wants us to understand, though, that this Jesus who is reunited with the disciples is actual flesh and blood, the way a physician might ask for proof, himself. Let’s prove that he can actually perform regular human-body functions, like eating. So, Jesus asks for food, and he eats. And they all witness it. Wow—he really is there.

Wait a minute: wow! He REALLY is there! He’s back. This is great. We can get back on the healing and teaching circuit. We can get back to work. Our lives will have purpose again. We’re so glad he has rescued us from the depths of failure and despair. Thank God he is back, literally. But, he died. How is this possible? It all seems too good to be true!

It’s ridiculous that someone would come back to life from the dead. It doesn’t make sense that he would die and then have life all over again. That’s not the way things work. And how could all that mourning we’ve been doing for the last several days be all for naught? What comes next for us: will it be exactly like it was before, back when life was full and good and right?

I suspect something about the grief they had experienced made them skeptical. We know how that feels, don’t we? I have grieved with friends over lost pregnancies and lost children. How could I receive such a beautiful child to have for my own? I have seen friends and family members agonize over their search for partners with whom to share their lives. How could I be lucky enough to have found my life’s partner and for him to return my affection and commitment? Surely there are things that seem too good to be true in life that really are. It’s like my favorite old poet, Kilian McDonnell, says in his poem about Abraham and Sara: “…I pasture my flock in the valley/ where Persian Reeds and Lemon Grass/ grow lush and tall, waiting/ for [Yahweh’s] other shoe to fall.” Surely something is going to go wrong, right?

We have learned that lesson in a most painful way in the last year. Our national economy has been jeopardized by the subprime mortgage deals and the subsequent collapse of some of our biggest financial institutions. In those cases, what seemed too good to be true really was. And now we are all literally paying the price for some bad decision-making, the blame for which does not discriminate. And now we wait impatiently to see just how bad it will get before it gets better.

That’s just it. With God’s love for us, there is no other shoe dangling in the proverbial air, waiting to fall right between our eyes and knock us off our foundation. There is no catch or string attached to the resurrection, and we have no control over whether or not the resurrection is real or not or whether or not it saves us. It just is. It just does. God’s love for us as demonstrated in Christ is just that real, that good, too good to be true.

So what does that mean in your life?

Like the disciples in the room with him that day, we are called to be witnesses. While we are not the ones who have eyewitness testimony to share about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, we are ones who have witness to share about how our hearts have been warmed and changed by his presence in our lives. And the only way that is even possible for us is that the message of the gospels is true: by taking on human form, God made God’s self become like us so that we could know God, love God, and learn to live the kind of life God intended for us by God showing us that face-to-face. That incarnation came to an end at our hand, but we could not ultimately erase it from time and truth. Instead, the living God is alive eternally in Christ and in us through the Holy Spirit. We now bear witness to the Spirit of God in action in our lives. We tell the stories of how God has changed our lives, how prayer has saved us, how our relationships with other members of the body of Christ have helped us when there seemed no other way we could survive.

Ours is the story to tell: our story of how God is alive in our world and in our lives. While in our joy, there will be disbelief in us, too. But that’s all part of telling the story, of being a witness. It’s not always easy, it doesn’t always make sense, and we certainly do not deserve it, but even when we have turned away and our love has failed, God’s love remains steadfast. It lives. It is eternal. Death cannot change it, bankrupt it, or drop another shoe on it.

Now that is good news. Thanks be to God!