Strangers on the Road

The Twilight Zone encounter on the Road to Emmaus is one of three appearances of the resurrected Jesus in Luke’s gospel. 

Two travelers are walking together when a mysterious stranger appears.

Only one of the walkers - Cleopas - is named. The other walker is the second mystery in the story. Some scholars think  Luke either had a lousy copy editor or that the unnamed person was a woman and, by first century standards, not worth identifying.

What we do know is that both travelers had known Jesus for years and knew what he looked like. But when a stranger approached them they had no clue who he was.

That’s understandable. For one thing, Jesus probably looked a lot better than he did the last time they saw him, when he was scourged raw, his face twisted in the agony of crucifixion. The stranger may also have been wearing a keffiyeh, the traditional Arab covering that would hide his face. Many artists and cartoonists have drawn a keffiyeh into the picture when they portray this scene on the road to Emmaus.

But I think the traumatic events of the past several days also played a role. Death is disorienting. When I was 15, my mother’s 32-year-old brother, my Uncle Maurice, died after a painful bout with cancer. At his funeral, I noticed my mother and other family members watched me intently as I approached the open casket to pay my respects. I learned later that everyone thought Uncle Maurice in the casket looked exactly like me – straight brown hair, high forehead, black horn rimmed glasses, pursed lips, a proper double chin. They thought I was going to see myself in the box and freak. But under circumstances like these, people may not see what others expect them to see. I looked at my uncle sadly and thought, “He was a good looking guy.”

We can only speculate why the two travelers – Cleopas and what’s-her-name - didn’t recognize Jesus. Not only did they not recognize him, they actually seemed to feel superior to this obtuse stranger.

“What’s up?” Jesus asked, all friendly-like, and they snap at him. “You don’t know, man? Or, as the New Revised Standard bible puts it, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?”

And Jesus – who could resist many temptations but not the urge to bait his friends – said, “What things?” So Cleopas and what’s-her-name immediately begin to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection, which is ironic when you think about it, because their first efforts at evangelical witness were to grab Jesus by the robe and tell him about Jesus.

At the end of the story, Luke reports that “their eyes were opened” and they recognized Jesus. As soon as they did, Jesus, apparently still playing them, abruptly disappeared.

As our friends on the Emmaus road demonstrated, it’s not easy to recognize Jesus in our midst at any time in history, whether we know what he looks like or not. But one thing is sure: if we’re going to pick out Jesus in a crowd, we'll have to ditch the blonde image of Sallman’s Head of Christ, and we’ll have to ditch our own presuppositions, the “my Jesus” that limits him to our personal biases and makes him hard to spot.

A pastor friend of mine once told the story of having a late-night visitor at the Manse. The visitor was a homeless woman who obviously hadn’t bathed in weeks. “Please, Reverend,” she said. “I hate to bother you but I’m living in my car and I haven’t eaten in days. I’m not a druggy, Reverend. I need food.”

Pastors hear stories like this all the time. But it was late at night and my friend was tired, so he went to a box in his office where he kept The Deacon’s Fund, ready cash for emergencies. The only cash in the box was a $50 bill – far too much for a meal. But he sighed, and handed it to the woman.

The woman gasped at his unanticipated generosity and grabbed my friend's hands.

“The hands of Jesus,” she said. “The hands of Jesus.”

Embarrassed, my friend freed his hands and sent the woman on her way. But as he lay awake in bed, he had a sudden thought. “Was she talking about my hands?” he wondered. “Or were my hands grasped by a stranger I didn’t recognize as Jesus?”

In that same church there was a regular worshipper named Dick Jalopy. He started drinking as a teenager and in high school his friends called him Sloppy Jalopy. By the time I knew him, Dick was a recovering addict and more than a little eccentric. He believed too much of the national budget was being spent on the Vietnam War and too little on services to the poor, and he carried his protest to political meetings dressed in a false white beard, red cap, red jacket, Bermuda shorts and decaying high tops. He called himself “Santa Cause.” And even without the costume, he looked creepy with his pock-marked skin, long snarly hair and bandy legs. He also smoked constantly, explaining with a cough, “A lot of addicts beat the drugs but never the cancer sticks.”

I used to watch Dick come into church on Sunday mornings. He had his preferred pew (as most Baptists do) and members of the congregation tried to sit far away from him. But he was tolerated because that’s what Baptist do, or try to do. I don’t think he ever joined the church but he never missed a Sunday.

One Sunday during the organ prelude, I stared at the back of Dick’s head. What’s up with you, Dick? I mused to myself. Sure, you love God and you love people and your faith keeps you clean. But you’re strange, man, smelly, and you make people uncomfortable. And no one knows where you live.

Suddenly the organ swelled with the strains of, “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” and in the process of standing I was so surprised I lost my balance.

My God, Dick, I thought. Are you Jesus, man?

Sloppy Jalopy? Jesus?

It’s the kind of thought one has when one misses the morning coffee, and I quickly dismissed it. But for years, every time I saw Dick, I’d think: that’s exactly what Jesus might look like to us. Strange. Eccentric. And he would make us uncomfortable.

Okay, probably Dick Jalopy was not Jesus. But that’s also true of the Jesi we carry in our hearts, white and blonde and holy like Sallman’s head, or glowing and red-bearded like the Holman Hunt figure standing at our door and knocking.

These images don’t make us think of the Jesus who violated religious traditions by healing the sick on the Sabbath, or by declaring to his followers that none of this is about you, but about the poor, the imprisoned, the disabled, the oppressed and those drowning in economic injustice.

No wonder Cleopas and what’s-her-name didn’t quite grasp who Jesus was when they fixed their gaze upon him.

“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets declared,” Jesus told the couple, and they still didn’t recognize him. “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”

In a strange way, Jesus was more Santa Cause than Sallman’s head. His defiance of tradition and convention made people uncomfortable, and they turned away from him.

That’s why the Emmaus Road story can be disturbing. If I’m honest, I’ve got to wonder. Would I recognize Jesus if he joined me on a stroll through Times Square? Or would I dismiss him as a strange and eccentric figure who failed to meet my expectations. Would my heart burn within me as he talked? Or would my mind wander because he was saying things I didn’t understand?

And when this stranger went on his way, would I go with him to the judgment?

Or would I put him out of my mind as soon as possible, thinking to myself:

That was a weird dude.

And walk on alone.

Magdalene Knew

Some say Dan Brown was on to something.

In his controversial 2003 novel The DaVinci Code, Brown builds a mystery thriller around the myth that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and their descendants now live quietly in modern France. 

Thousands of angry Christians condemned Brown for his heretical idea, but – as he is the first to admit – the idea had been around for years. 

Some readers of The DaVinci Code were reminded of a 1982 volume called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, which claimed the messianic descendants are protected by a secret society called the Priori of Sion. 

The book is unconvincing and unintentionally amusing when it offers photos of the alleged grandkids of Jesus: pear-shaped, balding, middle-aged hommes with bulbous noses and rheumy eyes. 

Writer Anthony Burgess said the book’s far-fetched claims would make a great novel but he never got around to writing it. Dan Brown did.

To be sure, The DaVinci Code is a page-turner. But apart from the fictional notion of a holy blood line, the novel’s main contribution has been to revive interest in a long misunderstood biblical figure: Mary Magdalene.

Mary has been the target of so much derision, in fact, that one of Brown’s claims rings true. It seems plausible that the patriarchs of the church were so disturbed by the special presence of this mere woman in Jesus’ life that they went out of their way to misrepresent and dismiss her.

The most common calumny about Magdalene, of course, is that she was a hooker.

In Jesus Christ Superstar, the 1971 rock opera by Sir Anthony Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, Mary’s bawdy background torments her as she struggles with her love for Jesus. “I don’t know how to love him,” she sings.

I don't see why he moves me. 
He's a man. He's just a man. 
And I've had so many men before, 
In very many ways, 
He's just one more.

Mary’s profession is even more explicit in the 1988 film, The Last Temptation of Christ, based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel of the same title. Portrayed by Barbara Hershey, Mary is actually shown turning tricks seriatim as sweaty customers line up at her door.

In the film and novel, Jesus is tempted on the cross by his love for Mary and his desire to break free from messiahship to start an ordinary family.

“Barbara Hershey is so beautiful,” a Baptist minister whispered to me after he saw the movie, “I’d have been tempted, too.”

And for the record, there is nothing heretical about Kazantzakis’ story. Jesus was indeed led into temptation, as the author of Hebrews makes clear:
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested, as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 5:15)

It’s logical to assume that being tested in every respect includes sexual tension, and most extra-biblical traditions about Mary Magdalene suggest she was uncommonly beautiful.

But she was no whore.

Magdalene is mentioned in the gospels more than a dozen times, and it is never stated or insinuated that she was a prostitute.

The notion that she was a sex professional originated with Pope Gregory I in 590 C.E.

Gregory, dubbed “the Great” and canonized a saint by popular demand as soon as he died in 604, was a monastic mystic. He devised an enduring style of Christian worship that included the harmonious chants that bear his name. He is the patron saint of musicians, and was a respected  evangelist and church administrator. John Calvin, the 16th century reformer not known for his public relations sensitivity, called Gregory “the last good pope.”

Gregory was also a prolific writer whose cataracts of words were sometimes preceded by trickles of thought. In one of his homilies, he confused Mary Magdalene with the prostitute who anointed Jesus’ feet with oil in Luke 7:36-50, and also with Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who performed a similar act in John 12:1-8.

Susan Haskins, writing in Mary Magdalen: The Essential History, quotes the pope’s dubious exegesis:

“She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? ... It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts.” (Homily XXXIII).

What was clear to the brothers had no basis in logic, but the confused words of popes are rarely forgotten. The church maintained for 15 centuries that the prostitute who went to Jesus, Mary of Bethany, and Mary Magdalene were the same person. In 1969, Pope Paul VI – usually reluctant to question the infallibility of his predecessors – corrected the error. Still, millions still embrace the notion that Mary Magdalene was a reformed hooker.

And if she was not, what was she?

No one knows the nature of the seven demons Jesus cast out of Mary, and they could mean almost anything. One theory is that demons represent an illness or menstrual tortures that Jesus cured.

Whatever they were, the point is that they were cast out, and Mary was sufficiently relieved by their absence that she became a faithful follower of Jesus.

She became, in fact, one of his leading followers. And in the most important events in Jesus’ ministry, she was the bravest, truest, and closest disciple Jesus had.

She was present at his crucifixion and refused to move from his side when all but one of the male disciples escaped into hiding from the Roman authorities.

She was present at his burial.

She was the first to discover early Sunday morning that his body was missing from the tomb.

She was the one to whom Jesus chose to appear before he announced his resurrection to the world.

She was the harbinger who sought out the male disciples in their hiding place to tell them the Lord had risen.

She was, as Augustine famously said, the Apostle to the Apostles, the first to whom the good news had been given and the first herald who shamed the boys out of their seclusion.

In patriarchal fashion, the boys promptly took charge of the gospel and Mary Magdalene faded from church history.

In fact, the church treated Mary badly. She was the one to whom the risen Lord first appeared while Peter and the boys were still trembling in isolation. When Mary came to Peter with the good news, he should have knelt and kissed her ring before be followed her to the tomb. And apostolic succession over the next 2000 years would have been very different.

But the boys did not give Magdalene the respect she was due, and we are left to wonder what happened to Mary, the first Apostle.

Did she marry Jesus?

No. That is certainly not the secret the old boys tried to cover up by dismissing Mary as a cypher and a whore. The secret they wished to cover up is that a Jesus had given a woman a vitally important role.

Did she love Jesus?

Of course she did. Her behavior during Jesus’ last hours was a testimony of love and caring that surpassed anything the male disciples did.

Did she love Jesus in a romantic sense? Did she want to marry him?

Perhaps. If so, her encounter with the risen Jesus at the tomb must have elicited both profound and conflicted emotions: incredible joy that the man she loved was alive, and unspeakable sadness that he would never be available to her in ways a woman might desire:

Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord;” and she told them that he had said these things to her. John 20:15-18
Those would have been difficult words to hear by one who yearned to embrace a loved one thought to be lost forever: “Do not hold on to me.”

But Jesus was alive, and now his circle had expanded beyond a few earthly apostles to the whole world.

The Lord had risen and death had been defeated and salvation was available to everyone who believed.

Mary would have known as soon as Jesus spoke her name that she was uniquely special to him and he wanted her to be the first to hear it.

She was the first evangelist of the good news.

She was the Apostle to the Apostles.

And despite the fact that salient details of her life were ignored by her contemporaries and distorted by early bishops, Jesus made sure the story of his resurrection could never be told without mentioning her name.

Hers was the first name to pass his lips as he stood in the garden outside the empty tomb.

And she was the first to utter the phrase Christians use to greet each other every Easter Morning:

“The Lord has risen.”

The Lord has risen indeed. 

That's the good news the gospel proclaims. And we can never forget the woman who proclaimed it first.

Hail, Mary.

Contemplating Resurrection

The Lord has risen!

But what does that mean exactly?

The Gospels offer few clues to the riddles clinging to the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection.

In Luke 24:36b-48, the resurrected Jesus startles the disciples by an abrupt appearance, walking ghost-like through a solid wall. But Jesus insists he is no ghost, and he demonstrates the solidity of his flesh by eating fish. How does he do it? What is  going on?

Even for lifelong mystics and dedicated theologians, the resurrection of a dead Jesus is hard to accept. I have known Christian educators who confessed their doubts.

“The resurrection is just not essential to my faith,” whispered one such educator as we sat drinking beer in a darkened pub.

My drinking companion was several years older than me and seminary educated, which I am not. Otherwise I might have quoted Paul’s admonishment: “If Christ was not raised, your faith has nothing to it and you are still in your old state of sin.” (I Corinthians 15:17, REB). 

But I kept my mouth shut and my learned friend and I sipped our beers in silence. Recently he passed to the other side where eternal truths were surely revealed to him. For me, awkward questions persist. If Christ was not raised, what did happen that got everyone so excited that long-ago Passover week in Jerusalem?

Each year my Lenten devotions include readings from Jesus: A Pilgrimage by the Rev. James Martin, S.J. 

I was “gob-smacked” (to use Martin’s phrase) by his reference to a claim by New Testament scholar and archaeologist Jerome Murphy-O’Connor about whether the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the actual burial place of Jesus:

The most important argument for the authenticity of the site is the consistent and uncontested tradition of the Jerusalem community, which held liturgical celebrations at the site until AD 66.

Martin speculates that these celebrations had been taking place since about AD 45, less than 15 years after Jesus’ crucifixion. Many of the celebrants witnessed that event and were so profoundly affected by subsequent events that they returned to the site for years to express their awe. What moved them so? Was it a contagion of hope? Mass hysteria? I prefer to believe they actually caught glimpses of a resurrected Jesus. But what exactly did they see?

Even the biblical accounts leave open questions. Immediately after his resurrection, Jesus’ closest friends didn’t recognize him. Mary Magdalene, the first to arrive at his empty tomb, didn’t realize Jesus was the man talking to her until he called her name.

In Luke 24, the resurrected Jesus joins two of his disciples on a walk to Emmaus, but Luke reports “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” (v.16). Mark reports, a bit mysteriously, that Jesus appeared to them “in another form” (Mark 16:12) which, as author Garry Wills writes in What Jesus Meant, is “hard to interpret.”

“Jesus appeared in numinous form (Wills writes) … his body was not the earthly body any more, but one both outside time and space and affecting time and space.” 

The resurrected body of Christ could pass through walls and, ultimately, ascend into heaven, but Jesus could also allow Thomas to touch his wounds of crucifixion. Even more amazing, Jesus could eat with his companions.

From our 21st century vantage point, where digital media create virtual realities on plasma screens, the sensationalism of the resurrection begins to dim. Jesus’ strange post-death appearances, which galvanized his contemporaries into the fiery evangelical movement that transformed the world, no longer excite many modern minds. The figure in the Easter stories makes the media jaundiced think of a benign zombie or, perhaps, an exhilarating Elvis sighting.

Looking back on my unfinished conversation with my Christian educator friend, I wonder if his problem with the resurrection was that he knew beyond doubt that a dead body could spring back to life in the same form as when life dwelled in it. 

Most clergy see dead bodies all too often and have observed they are cast-off, useless shells of the creature that once occupied them. Whether an individual dies in bed or in a violent accident, it is obvious to witnesses that something essential has departed from the body. A young cop viewing a murder victim for the first time never forgets how similar the inert remains look to that of a dead raccoon decaying on a country road. Dead is dead. Funeral directors whose business it is to make the deceased look lifelike know they must act quickly because death is immediately and totally disfiguring. The millions of microbiota that dwell symbiotically within become ravenous foragers of decaying flesh.

The most convincing argument against the resurrection of Jesus is every dead body you see – especially the ones that have lain three days without benefit of the mortuary arts.  

Even so, something extraordinary happened that Passover long ago that kept Jesus’ contemporaries returning worshipfully to the site of his crucifixion and inspired his disciples to risk their lives to keep his story alive.

Whatever happened, Professor Wills’ offers a helpful clue. Jesus’ resurrected body was not precisely the same earthly corpus that was killed on the cross, but a numinous body both outside time and space and affecting time and space.

How closely did that numinous body resemble the body of Jesus his disciples knew and loved? That’s hard to tell. Resurrected Jesus was often not recognized until he did something to call attention to himself. Only on rare occasions could the disciples actually touch him, and Jesus – when he chose to affect time and space – could eat food and – when he chose to be outside time and space – could disappear in front of their eyes.

What is that to us?

According to Paul, the numinous body of Jesus gives us a glimpse of our own numinous bodies when he shed our earthly shells.
“So it is with the resurrection of the dead; what is sown as a perishable thing is raised imperishable. Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory; sown in weakness, it is raised in power; sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.” (I Corinthians 15:42-44, REB)

What will our numinous bodies be like?

We hope, of course, that our resurrected bodies will be young, attractive, and – God willing – sexier versions of the husk we carried through life.

But more than that, I think.

Our daughter Katie had a dear friend who, like her, was developmentally disabled on the autism spectrum. Joseph was a charming young man who, despite his limitations, was a loving and delightful presence in all our lives. He was a caring and giving person and I have no doubt he walked this earth exactly as God intended him to be.

When Joseph fell ill with leukemia, neither he nor Katie were fully able to understand what was happening. We loved him and when he died, we mourned him deeply.  

Not long after his death, I dreamed I was sitting at a table with a young man I slowly recognized as Joseph. He was relaxed and his eyes twinkled and we engaged in light conversation. It was only after I woke up that I realized Joseph and I were conversing at a level he could not have attained when he was alive, a conversation filled with humor and subtle nuance. He demonstrated insights and understandings that would have been beyond him.

I like to believe I was receiving an important message in that dream. I was introduced to Joseph as he will appear at his resurrection.

I certainly do not suggest that Joseph was incomplete when he lived among us, but there were many things his disability prevented him from understanding. But so it is with all of us: while we live on this earthly plain, there are many mysteries we will never comprehend. 

But the promise of Jesus is that God will restore us to a higher level of understanding when our own numinous live outside time and space but continue to experience the affects of time and space. 

Exactly how that will happen, as Professor Wills acknowledges, is “hard to interpret.” 

But for those who view death as an inevitable result of the time and space in which we are imprisoned, it’s good to be reminded that God transcends our earthly limitations. 

And we cling to this hope: that what has been sown in us in weakness will be raised in power.