Real Presence

Real Presence--May 7, 2019

"As they came near the village toward which they were going, [the risen Jesus] walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, 'Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.' So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and give it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, 'Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?' That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, 'The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!' Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread." [Luke 24:28-35]

Maybe it's not enough for us just to say that Jesus is risen--maybe we need to add to that confession that he keeps showing up.

There is a long-standing tradition in church circles that in these days of Easter, we exchange a greeting that is borrowed from the end of this story.  It's a sort of call-and-response that starts with, "Christ is risen!" to which the reply answers, "He is risen indeed!" But maybe we should be clear about what it means to say that Jesus is risen, because it would be easy to treat those words as just a statement that Jesus is gone, and up in some distant heaven somewhere.  We need to be clear, like the two disciples from the Emmaus road story, that not only is Jesus alive, but he won't stay put, because he keeps finding us gathered around tables and showing up in the flesh.  (In fact, in the very next verse from Luke's gospel, after having appeared to the two disciples on the road and at their dinner table, Jesus appears once again, now for the whole group of apostles, and eats some more with them.  This was a very full day for Jesus!)

For the early church, the confession that Jesus is risen wasn't just a way of saying he wasn't in the grave anymore, and it didn't just mean that Jesus was off somewhere away and unavailable.  They didn't tell other people as they shared their faith, "We believe in Jesus as our Lord, and he's alive, but you can never see, meet, or experience him, because he's evaporated and went to heaven."  That kind of talk sounds rather like the old "I have a girlfriend, but she lives in Canada, so you can never meet her or see her" line that never really convinces anybody.

No, for the first Christians, saying that Jesus is risen also means that Jesus reserves the right to keep showing up among us, often when and where we least expect it.  But definitely at the table.

That turns out to be a really important idea for us still, now some two thousand years after that first Easter evening, because we keep gathering around the Table of Jesus, and we keep discovering that Jesus shows up there.  In all seriousness, that's what we (at least in the tradition to which I belong as a Lutheran Christian, among other branches of the Christian family tree) believe happens when we break the bread and pour the cup that is called Holy Communion.  We dare to believe that the same risen Christ who showed up on his own initiative at the table with the two disciples on the Emmaus Road, and then later crashed the party around the table for the rest of the disciples, too, keeps showing up at our Tables, too.  And like Cleopas and his traveling companion discover, we keep finding Jesus' presence is revealed in the breaking of the bread, too.

That means when we gather, we aren't just remembering or reciting a story about a past event.  We aren't merely enacting a ritual--we are being fed by the very presence of Jesus. He is really there, and he is really real.  If that makes us uncomfortable, maybe we should recall that the Christian story centers on the idea that no less than God became flesh in the person of Jesus--that in the human life of this Palestinian Jew, there is both humanity in all of its earthy messiness and God in all of God's divine holiness. And if we don't blush about that (or at least if we are prepared to get some weird looks from others over the idea that God really knows what it is like to sweat, to be tired, to be lonely, and to be potty-trained) then it's no more scandalous, really to say that Jesus keeps showing up, really and truly, in the breaking of the bread.  It's no stranger to say that the bread and the cup also bring us the body of blood of Christ than it is to say that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human.  Our faith is an incarnational one, and Easter doesn't change that.  Just because Jesus is risen from the dead doesn't mean that God stops caring about bodies, showing up in the physical, or loving and honoring the earthiness and physicality of the universe God made.

So let me suggest something.  Instead of seeing Easter as Jesus' exit strategy for getting out of this physical world full of flesh and blood, of sweat and suffering, maybe we need to see it as just the opposite: as the way Jesus can now be present all over creation all at once--at a dinner table in Emmaus, back in Jerusalem on the same evening, and at our Tables, too, all around the world.  Instead of seeing the resurrection as Jesus' farewell to the slings and arrows of this world so he can "go to a better place," maybe we should honestly say that Easter is what allows Jesus to be present among us in every corner of the world, from the gilded altars and carved stone buildings of the richest cathedrals to the modest accommodations of the country church with an outhouse in the back, to the kitchen table of a poor homebound lady whose house reeks of fly strips and a dozen unkempt animals, to the hospital tray table of a dying man in the ICU, to the saints gathered under the blistering sun in refugee camps holding onto their faith that Christ is with them there as they break the bread and pass the cup.  Easter means that Jesus is more present to this physical, hurting, broken, bleeding world, not less.

Maybe today it is worth having our eyes open to see Christ's presence still, even in such seemingly common elements as bread from someone's oven and wine in a clay cup.

Maybe from there, we will learn to spot his real presence in all sorts of unexpected places we didn't think a respectable God would dare show up in.  There may be places we think are so dirty, so disreputable, so dangerous and risky that we think Jesus wouldn't be caught dead there, but that's not an issue for Jesus.  He is alive--so every corner of the universe, and every table, too, is fair game for him to show up.  May our eyes be opened to spot him.

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to see you in the breaking of the bread... and everywhere else you choose to be seen.