Easter 3 B -
Luke24:36b-48
The Reverend Kirk Alan Kubicek, Saint Timothy's School for
Girls, Stevenson, MD
Jesus Is Hungry
Alleluia, Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed!
Alleluia!
So there is Jesus standing among his closest friends, the
disciples. He says, "Shalom!" Loosely translated that comes across
as, "Peace be with you." This is unfortunately an inadequate attempt
to put "Shalom" into English. Shalom means so much more than
"peace." Or, "peace" means much more than what we think it
means. Since "shalom" means to convey that all is well with the
world, all is just, all is fair, all is the way God means it to be, it
ultimately means something more like, "What are you doing to make the
world look more like God's world than Caesar's World?" With Caesar as a
stand in for whatever the principalities and powers look like in a given era -
Empires, Rulers, Governments, Multi-National Corporations and the like.
Appropriately the disciples are startled - the dead one is
on the loose - and terrified - because Holy Moley, here he is! And he still has
Shalom on his mind. Always has, always will, always does!
Jesus then says to the disciples, Why are you frightened?
Well, could it be that the last time we saw you you were
dead, hanging on a Roman cross, soldiers all around, angry people all around,
and well, as far as we knew, dead is dead?
Well, he seems to say, that is true enough. Here, look at
the wounds - see my hands, see my feet. See me, feel me, touch me, heal me!
So let's get this straight, upon examining his hands and
feet, hands and feet that have had nails, spikes really, driven through them
are now eliciting some joy mixed with disbelief. They still think it may be a
ghost. But nevertheless, joy.
Then the real Jesus steps forward. "Have you anything
to eat?" Didn't he always say you have to come to God's Kingdom like a
child? And how many times a day do children look at their parents and say,
"What's to eat?"
Apparently, as it is in real life, so it is in the
resurrection of the dead: we need something to eat, something to sustain us,
something to nourish us. So does Jesus. He wants us to feed him.
So how are we to respond to his simple yet direct request?
The disciples offer some broiled fish. Thus providing further evidence that in
the early church, as it was with the feeding of the 4,000 and the 5,000, there
likely were bread and fish Eucharists. There are even illustrations of such on
the walls of early catacombs. There are still places in Europe, I have been
told, where the "Eucharist" is still a foot-washing ritual devoid of
bread and wine as the fourth evangelist, John, depicts it. That is, things are
not always as they seem.
Jesus is hungry. He wants something to eat. They give him
fish. He eats the fish. But perhaps we need to pay attention to what happens
next. He "opened their minds to understand the scriptures."
Suggesting to me that perhaps his hunger is not for fish,
not for bread, not for wine. Jesus is still hungry post-resurrection. He was
hungry before the resurrection as well. We would do well to consider the source
of his hunger before we are so quick to offer him something to satisfy his
hunger. An in-depth understanding of Torah and the Prophets is to be the
starting place.
Jesus was vexed with his contemporary religionists. He felt
that the application of Torah, application of the Law and the Prophets, had
gone off in direction not of God's liking. Instead of bringing God's people,
all people, together, the administration, the understanding, of God's 638 rules, beginning with the First Ten, was
being used to separate people more than bring them together.
This vexation made Jesus hungry -hungry for freedom, shalom
and justice for all people - not some people, not most people, not lots of
people. All people.
Had he not made it clear that the hungry were to be fed? The naked clothed? The
prisoner visited? The sick made well? The stranger, the resident alien as the
Bible calls them, welcomed? The thirsty given something to assuage their
thirst? Had he not self-identified with all these people, including lepers,
women, orphans, children, servants, gentiles and Jews?
In a church that is increasingly consumed with power
struggles within and without, a church looking for the next great Public
Relations scheme to attract people, a church consumed with creating dividing
lines between correct and incorrect "belief," a church consumed with
parking within the lines, a church consumed with chastising nuns who are
devoting "too much time" to issues of social justice, a church that in
1215 under Pope Innocent III decreed that all Jews should wear a yellow patch
of cloth sewn to their coats, a church
consumed with just about anything but Shalom, is it too difficult to see that
Jesus, who promises to be present in the bread and the wine, Jesus who promises
that he is the stranger, he is the prisoner, he is the leper, he is the beggar
on the street, he is the prostitute, sinner, the woman who is bleeding to
death, the mother or father begging for their child's life, and a tax collector;
a Jesus who endlessly teaches about our relationship to the land, the earth, in
countless agricultural stories, parables and analogies; a Jesus who challenges
every sovereign temporal and religious Power - is it too difficult to see that
having been raised from being three days dead and gone and now returned and
back with us for all eternity, that this Jesus whom we are to proclaim in all
that we do and all that we say wants something more than a piece of broiled
fish when he asks, "Have you anything to eat?"
"Repentance, " says Jesus, "and forgiveness
of sins is to be proclaimed...to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are
witnesses of these things."
Are we? Are we really witnesses of all this?" Jesus,
says Luke, is hungry. The Risen Lord, blessed be his Name, is hungry? What in
the world are we prepared to offer him? What in the world are we willing to
give to him? How shall our witness satisfy his hunger?
Is it possible that his "Shalom" is not a greeting
at all?" Is this what he wants from us? Is he asking for Shalom? Are we
prepared to give him this Shalom he
speaks of and died for? Or, are we still satisfied to just offer him a piece of
broiled fish? Jesus is hungry. He wants us to be hungry too. How do we respond
to Him in his need? Amen.
