03.May.2009 We don’t really get what God is doing.
Luke 24:1-12, 35-49:
But very early on Sunday morning the women went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. They found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance. So they went in, but they didn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus. As they stood there puzzled, two men suddenly appeared to them, clothed in dazzling robes.
The women were terrified and bowed with their faces to the ground. Then the men asked, “Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead! Remember what he told you back in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and that he would rise again on the third day.”
Then they remembered that he had said this. So they rushed back from the tomb to tell his eleven disciples—and everyone else—what had happened. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and several other women who told the apostles what had happened. But the story sounded like nonsense to the men, so they didn’t believe it. However, Peter jumped up and ran to the tomb to look. Stooping, he peered in and saw the empty linen wrappings; then he went home again, wondering what had happened.
…
Then the two from Emmaus told their story of how Jesus had appeared to them as they were walking along the road, and how they had recognized him as he was breaking the bread. And just as they were telling about it, Jesus himself was suddenly standing there among them. “Peace be with you,” he said. But the whole group was startled and frightened, thinking they were seeing a ghost!
“Why are you frightened?” he asked. “Why are your hearts filled with doubt? Look at my hands. Look at my feet. You can see that it’s really me. Touch me and make sure that I am not a ghost, because ghosts don’t have bodies, as you see that I do.” As he spoke, he showed them his hands and his feet.
Still they stood there in disbelief, filled with joy and wonder. Then he asked them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he ate it as they watched.
Breaking away momentarily from our ongoing series—“If You Build It…”—let us examine briefly a proper post-Easter narrative. Well, two actually: the first when the women discover an empty tomb after they arrive to anoint Jesus’ body in the wake of his crucifixion (located in Luke 24:1-12); the second, found shortly thereafter, when Jesus first appears to his disciples (verses 35-49).
In the first story, the women—among them Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary, the mother of James—turn up to the cave where Jesus’ body had been laid in order to bathe it in expensive spices as an act of reverence and preservation. They, however, find that the tomb is empty save for two angels declaring that Christ had risen. The women were, to say the least, a bit surprised, maybe even half-skeptical. And doubtlessly afraid. In the second story, Christ himself appears before his band of disciples. Their first reaction, as well, is fear and doubt. It is not until Jesus displays the scars of his crucifixion and satisfies his hunger with a fish that they accept his resurrected, human state.
There is a common theme between these two groups of people, the women at the tomb and the disciples in the home: both groups were expecting something different out of Jesus. The women figured that a dead body would stay put, and naturally so. The men probably thought Jesus, who they knew to be the Messiah, might return with a bit more gusto, adorned in robes, perhaps, with a crown upon his head and a band of angels in his wake. Not as a ghost. Their reaction, both these groups, resonates down through the ages because you and I, too, have a tendency to shoehorn Jesus into a particular, and predictable, role. Surely God will act in this manner, we’ll think. Surely God will manifest in these places, we’ll assume. But we are so often, indeed almost always, incorrect in our assumptions.
But the Bible sets us up to be confounded, doesn’t it? Not only through its convicting us by aligning our suppositions with the men and women from Luke’s 24th chapter, but through Christ’s teachings themselves. Borrowing unapologetically from Donald Miller’s text Searching for God Knows What, the author writes, “[Jesus] is always going around saying, You have heard it said such and such, but I tell you some other thing. If you happened to be a person who thought they knew everything about God, Jesus would have been completely annoying.” And what an apt and astute revelation, Miller’s conclusion being that if you wake up everyday of your Christian walk thinking, “Yep, I’m still right,” then you are probably not progressing very quickly nor coming to know God very intimately. Because God confounds our reason. As Isaiah 55:8 plainly states, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”
It is good to stop and consider the means by which we might be restricting God’s movement in our lives. Are we doing it because of our family histories, binding our Heavenly Father’s behavior and demeanor by our earthly father’s shortcomings? Are we using our culture to dictate our spiritual expectations? Or is our personality restricting our beliefs? Are the control freaks, for instance, seeking to control God?
Conversely, our consideration should become how much room we going to give God to operate in our lives. And how much versatility we can push ourselves to allow. Jesus, let us not forget, was always challenging, at times even mocking, the highly religious and restrictive methods of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Their logic told them, for example, that men mustn’t do works on the Sabbath, so Jesus enacts a miracle to spite them. Likewise will he challenge our own narrow views of his ways and his processes.
To conclude, let me encourage you, church, to commit (or perhaps recommit) yourselves to opening your minds up to His ways, and what’s more, getting out of His way. And just wait to see the bigness and truly fantastic manner with which He will arrive.
alan 
