Risen? It Just Ain’t Logical

Caravaggio - "Emmaus"

Puppy or baby – take your pick.  They whimper at night, alone in their place, while you are in the next room.  You peek in, comforting them, “I’m right around the corner.  I’m here.  Don’t be afraid.”  Maybe you reach out and touch them, so they know you’re really there.  And bit by bit, day by day, they begin to understand that out of sight does not mean gone.  They begin to feel better just knowing you’re near.

So Doubt Week is the first week after Easter, and during this second week we begin to enjoy a process of reminding, of Jesus peeking in again and again telling us, “I’m still here” and tucking us in, comforting us, teaching us faith.  On this Third Sunday after Easter, Jesus begins to teach us not in our heads but our hearts.  Two men are walking “conversing and debating”

about the death of Jesus, and the rumors of his rising from the dead.  Their exchange of logical argument is joined by Jesus, who they don’t recognize.  They begin to give him information, to bring him up to speed, so he can participate in their debate and help them arrive at the truth. 

It’s a prolonged “duhhh moment”.  The truth is that Jesus is right there with them.  But their heads are full of argument and logical analysis, and all of that fails them right up to the time that he disappears.  They recognize that it is Jesus not because of anything that he says, but in something he does.  He breaks bread with them, and then he is gone. 

After he is gone, they see the source of truth that they failed to consider.  “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?”  Their hearts, they realized, had been telling them the truth all along.  Jesus had given them a tip about this earlier, but they had missed it.  He had said,  “Oh, how foolish you are!  How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke!”

I am of the male persuasion.  Evidence tells me that men are inclined to come to conclusions logically based on facts.  See, I’ve just done it, based that statement on evidence, just like the guys on the road to Emmaus.  But Jesus peeks around the corner and in our whimpering in doubt and fear consoles our hearts.  Our breathing becomes regular, our sniffling stops, our heartbeat slows.  We are at peace.  We feel better.  But God invites us, as he does there with these two goombas in Emmaus, to draw aside the word-curtain of logic so that we might enter the consoling, knowing peace of myth.

When, after comforting our puppy or baby we return to our room, we become myth to them: true though unseen.  To the extent that the puppy or baby accepts that myth, they are comforted. 

Next: Logos and Mythos, Belief and Faith