“UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES”
The Third Sunday of Easter
April 15, 2018
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
[Jesus] opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
Luke 24:45-47 (ESV)
God never seems to do things in quite the same way that we would--or at least not in the same way that I would. For example, just take a look at all of these appearances of the risen Jesus that we hear and read about during this Easter season. Even as a child, while I was certainly overjoyed about the news that my Savior had risen from the dead, I was also somewhat disappointed and let down that, after His resurrection, He seemed to appear only to His friends and followers. I wanted Him to go to Pilate, Caiaphas, and that unruly crowd that demanded His death, just to prove to them that, no matter what they desired or did, He was the Winner in the end. But He didn’t do that. Instead of convincing His enemies that He really was who He said He was, all He did was reinforce the faith of those who already believed in Him.
And even that brought some disappointment as well--not in Jesus but in His disciples. Today’s Gospel is a classic example. Jesus appears to His disciples as they are discussing His earlier interaction with two of them on the road to Emmaus, where the topic of conversation was the crucifixion and rumored resurrection of their Lord. The disciples don’t have a clue as to the eternal significance of these events. Being devout Jews, they were no doubt familiar with the Scriptures that prophesied everything that the Messiah would do and that would be done to Him, but they were completely oblivious to the fact that all of these things were fulfilled in the life and ministry of Jesus. He had to explain everything to them--including things that they should have already known, since they had not only a knowledge of the Scriptures, but also the added blessing of being in the presence of Jesus for three years. As Jesus opened “their minds [and opens ours] to understand the Scriptures,” let’s listen especially for the Source of the message and the content of the message.
The Source of the message is God, especially as He and His will are revealed in the Scriptures. The message of what God has done for sinners in the life and ministry of His incarnate Son is not the result of the emotions or wishful thinking of pious people, nor is it a matter of hearsay or speculation. As the risen Savior explained to His frightened and confused disciples the meaning of what had taken place in recent days, so that same risen Jesus, through His Holy Spirit, explains to us the meaning of these things in His written Word. This is very important because it is an objective and constant source. The message of the Gospel doesn’t change according to our mood or how we might feel on a given day. The message of hope and New Life that was proclaimed by angels at the empty tomb and by the disciples in the months and years that followed is the very same message that continues to be proclaimed by the people of Christ today.
At the same time, this message is nothing new. It is the same message that was proclaimed by the prophets of the Lord ever since the beginning. The disciples shouldn’t have been surprised in the least when their Lord suffered and died and then rose again. It had all been prophesied. The Prophet like Moses (Deuteronomy 18:15) has come and has perfectly revealed the will of God and has accomplished the salvation of sinners. The suffering Servant of the Lord that Isaiah wrote about (Isaiah 53) has been “despised and rejected by men” (Isaiah 53:3) and in the process “has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4) so that “upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). The Jesus who was put to death and rose again is the One who had been promised ever since God first spoke His Word of hope to Adam and Eve in the garden, right after the fall.
The content of the message begins with the simple historical facts of the Gospel itself. Jesus starts to open the disciples’ minds to the Scriptures by telling them these facts: “Thus it is written,” He said, “that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead.” There are a lot of things that we might say and do in our interaction with the unchurched--a lot of different “mission strategies” that we might employ (to use the current popular terminology). Some of these may work and others may not. Some may work at certain times and under certain circumstance but not at other times and under other circumstances. All of that can be argued and debated and tested, but one thing that can never change is that the story of what Jesus did for lost sinners must be communicated to the people with whom we seek to share the Gospel, because if we’re not telling the story of Jesus, then we’re not sharing the Gospel.
Telling the story results in other things as well. What Jesus did in His perfect life and innocent suffering and death accomplished something for the people for whom He lived and died. Jesus told the disciples "that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all nations.” The Law of God convicts people of sin and sentences them to an eternity separated from God and His grace. That being the case, sinners have no choice but to grieve over their sin and to look for a way out of the dilemma into which they have put themselves. The Gospel responds to that need by giving to repentant sinners, in the name of the slain and risen Christ and by His authority, the forgiveness of their sins. That authority to grant forgiveness (which we Lutherans refer to as the Office of the Keys) has been given by the risen Christ to His Church, as we heard in last Sunday’s Gospel. While the Church entrusts the public exercise of this authority to its called pastors, on a personal level every believer has the authority and the responsibility to speak Christ’s Word of forgiveness to troubled sinners.
The Lord specifies in our text that the “repentance and forgiveness [that] should be proclaimed in His name to all nations” will begin “from Jerusalem.” There’s an old saying that goes: “The mission starts at home.” When I was a child that expression was often used as an excuse for not supporting foreign missions, but in a strange sort of way, that has turned around completely in our day, because today the mission field is in our own neighborhood and on our own doorstep and perhaps even in our own home. Those without Christ and therefore without hope are not always oceans away. They are very often people who we see and speak with every day. The Gospel needs to be proclaimed to them. In fact, it needs to be proclaimed to us also, so that we might have the motivation and the strength that we need to be about the Lord’s business. The Good News is that the Lord, through His Holy Spirit, does just that. As He did with His confused disciples, He gently and lovingly opens our ”minds to understand the Scriptures,” empowering us to proclaim “repentance and forgiveness of sins . . . in His name to all nations.” This is His work, and He is gracious enough to do it through us.
Amen.
May the God of peace, who brought again from the dead that great Shepherd of the sheep, our Lord Jesus, by the blood of the everlasting covenant equip you thoroughly for the doing of His will. May He work in you everything which is pleasing to Him, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, to whom be honor and glory forever and ever. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. Amen.