It's All Christophany

Straight out of the grave, the Risen Jesus wants his disciples to know the whole Bible is about him

Luke 24.13-35

The lectionary Gospel for the Third Sunday of Eastertide is Luke’s account of the Risen Christ encountering two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Notice, Cleopas and the other disciple on the road to Emmaus, they’re not unawares.

They’ve heard the Easter news. They’ve heard from the women who dropped their embalming fluid and fled to tell it. They’ve heard from Peter. They’ve heard that the tomb is empty.

And yet—

Having heard that Death has been defeated, having heard that the Power of Sin has been conquered, and having heard that self-giving, cheek-turning, cruciform love has been vindicated from the grave…

Our moral imagination is so impoverished that the first Easter Sunday isn’t even over and here we are (in these two disciples) walking back home as if the world is the same as it ever was and we can get back to our lives as knew them.

They’ve heard the Easter news, yet these two disciples still make two common mistakes— two common reductions— in how they understand Jesus. “Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God,” they tell the stranger (who is Christ). True enough, but not sufficient. “We had hoped he would be the one to liberate Israel,” they tell him, “we had hoped he was the revolutionary who would finally free us from our oppressors.” Again, their answers aren’t wrong; their answers just aren’t big enough.”

It’s not until this stranger breaks bread before them that their eyes are opened and they run— in the dark of night, eight miles to Emmaus, they run— to go and tell the disciples what they’ve learned. And when they get there, after the Risen Jesus has taught them the Bible study to end all Bible studies— what have the learned?

They don’t call Jesus a prophet. They don’t dash after the disciples to report “God has raised Jesus, the prophet, from the dead.” They don’t call Jesus a liberator. They don’t run to Peter and say “Jesus the revolutionary has been resurrected.” They don’t even call him a savior or a substitute. They don’t dash after the disciples to report, “The Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world has come back.”

No, after the Risen Jesus interprets Moses and the prophets for them (ie, the Old Testament, the only Bible they knew) they take off to herald the return of Jesus the kurios.

They confess their faith in Jesus as kurios.

“The kurios is risen indeed!” they proclaim to Peter. Luke book-ends his Gospel with that inconveniently all-encompassing word kurios.

The whole entire Bible, Jesus has apparently taught these two, testifies to how this crucified Jewish carpenter from Nazareth is the kurios who demands our faith.

Kurios.

Lord.

The word we translate into English as faith is the word pistis in the Greek of the New Testament. And pistis has a range of meanings. Pistis can mean confidence or trust. It can mean conviction, belief, or assurance. And those are the connotations we normally associate with the English word faith.

In Christ alone by grace through trust alone.

Through belief alone, is how we hear it.

But— here’s the rub— pistis also means fidelity, commitment, faithfulness, obedience.

Or, allegiance.

Allegiance.

Now, keep in mind that the very first Christian creed was “Jesus is kurios” and you tell me which is the likeliest definition for pistis.

So how did we go from faith-as-obedience to faith-as-belief?

How did get from faith-as-allegiance to faith-as-trust?

When Luke wrote his Gospel and when Paul wrote his epistles, Christianity was an odd and tiny community amidst an empire antithetical to it.  Christianity represented an alternative fealty to country and culture and even family.

Back then, baptism was not a cute christening. Baptism was not a sentimental dedication. Baptism was not a blessing, a way to baptize the life you would’ve lived anyway. Back then, to be baptized as a Christian was a radical coming out. It was an act of repentance in the most original meaning of that word: it was a reorientation and a rethinking of everything that had come before.

To profess that “Jesus is Lord” was to protest that “Caesar is not Lord.”

The affirmation of one requires the renunciation of the other.

Which is why, in Luke’s day and for centuries after, when you submitted to baptism, you’d first be led outside.  By a pool of water, you’d be stripped naked.  Every bit of you laid bare, even the naughty bits.  And first you’d face West, the direction where the darkness begins, and you would renounce the powers of this world, the ways of this world, the evils and injustices of this world.  And the first Christians weren’t bullshitting.  For example, if you were a gladiator, baptism meant that you renounced your career and got yourself a new one. Then, having left the old world behind, you would turn and face East, the direction whence Light comes, and you would affirm your faith in Jesus the kurios and everything your new way of life as a disciple would demand.

And the first Christians— they walked the Jesus talk of their baptismal pledge. For example, Christians quickly became known— before almost anything else— in the Roman Empire for rescuing the unwanted, infirm babies that pagans would abandon to die in the fields. Baptism wasn’t an outward and visible sign of your inward and invisible trust.  Quite the opposite.

Baptism was your public pledge of allegiance to the Caesar named Yeshua.

If that doesn’t sound much like baptism to you, there’s a reason. A few hundred years after Luke wrote his Gospel and Paul wrote his letters, the kurios of that day, Constantine, discovered that it would behoove his hold on power to become a Christian and make the Roman Empire Christian too.  Whereas prior to Constantine it took significant conviction to become a Christian, after Constantine it took considerable courage NOT to become a Christian.  After Constantine, now that the empire was allegedly Christian, the ways of the world ostensibly got baptized; consequently, what it meant to be a Christian changed.  Constantine is the reason why whenever you hear Jesus say “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and render unto God the things that are God’s” it doesn’t occur to you that Jesus is being sarcastic.  What had been an alternative way in the world became, with Constantine, a religion that awaited the world to come.

Jesus was demoted from the kurios, who is seated at the right hand of the Father and to whom has been given all authority over the Earth, and Jesus was given instead the position of Secretary of Afterlife Affairs.