It Seemed to Them an Idle Tale

Craig Anderson

 

Luke 24:1-12   Easter Sunday, April 20, 2003

 

            You are not going to believe this, but this passage from Luke was written for you.  It has your name and address on it.  It is dated this morning, and I’m here to deliver the message.  How do I know that?  Because this week I stopped acting like a reporter embedded in the Gospel, and stepped back to look at the bigger picture.  Two details sent me in search of a larger perspective. First, when the women came back from the tomb, it is said the apostles “did not believe them.”  Secondly, after Peter stooped to look into the tomb for himself, “he went home amazed...”  Two quick sentences running the gamut from disbelief to amazement, and I asked myself, “what’s going on here?”

 

            Using Bible software, I ran a word check on “amazed.”  It is used 14 times in this Gospel, and several more times in Acts, Volume Two of Luke’s story.  Peter was not the first to be amazed in this story, only one of several in a long line.  When the shepherds told a birth story in Bethlehem, “all who heard it were amazed.”  When as a youth Jesus was found in the Temple “sitting among the teachers... all who heard him were amazed at his understanding...”  At the beginning of his ministry in his hometown, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at (his) gracious words... They said, ‘Is this not Joseph’s son?’” When Jesus calmed a storm at sea, his companions “were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water...?’”  Opponents, trying to trap him with a question, were “amazed by his answer and became silent.”  For those who are counting, that’s five.  There are nine more!

 

            Now one might think that by the time the women came back from the tomb, Jesus’ companions would have ceased being amazed and started to grasp the big picture.  They did not:  “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”   No one is more incredulous at their response than Luke.  Through volumes one and two his narrative line is consistent:  astounding and incredible things had happened in the life and ministry of Jesus, but for the most part nobody got it!  At one point, in puzzlement and frustration, Luke quotes the prophet Habakkuk, who also joined the themes of amazement and disbelief:

 

            Look, you scoffers!

            Be amazed and perish,

            for in your days I am doing a work,

            a work that you will never believe, even if someone tells you.

 

Luke felt he was repeating the prophet’s experience: telling an amazing which nobody believed.  To them it seemed an idle tale.  Time after time Jesus’ companions marveled at what he said and did, but being embedded, they failed to see the big picture.  But now Luke was writing for a new audience.  He had another chance to tell the story.  It was too late to open the eyes of Jesus’ companions.  They were dead!  Luke was writing to successive generations hoping to convince them this was not an idle tale.  Luke was writing to us: to me and you.  This gospel has our address on it and this morning’s date.

 

            Suppose that in forty years one of our children accepts the task of telling succeeding generations who Martin Luther King was, or Mohandas Gandhi, or Dorothy Day, or Mother Teresa?  How will they do that?  By then, virtually no one will be alive any longer who were eye-witnesses to the life and work of these men and women.  Won’t authors in the future like Luke in the past, try to put all the pieces together into one coherent framework, with a consistent story-line?  To us therefore, Luke is saying, “You are privileged.  The original embedded audience couldn’t see the forest for the trees.  But for you I’ll start at the beginning with Jesus’ birth, and connect the dots right down to the last moment, the final chapter.  There was one amazing event after another and the original audience should have been astounded by the big picture.  But they missed it.  This seemed to them an idle tale.” 

 

            Luke’s story keeps pushing, pushing toward his punch line: “It seemed to them... but how about you?!  Don’t miss the point!  Let there be no mixture of disbelief and astonishment here!  Jesus’ life was amazing at every stage, and in every detail.  Connect the dots!” Admittedly the cross looks bad: disaster and defeat.  But the story doesn’t end there.  Not everybody experienced it, neither Pilate nor the High Priest were part of the action, but Jesus’ companions began to sense his absent presence.  He continued to be with them in ways which defied description.  More amazement.  At first it seemed like the story was over, but then it continued.  It still continues and you are part of it.  Now Jesus is our contemporary.  It seemed to them an idle tale, but we have another chance.  Luke nearly seems to plead:  “In your generation, in your time, seeing the whole, do a better job, won’t you!?”

 

            At first glance, with the big picture fully in view, perhaps we imagine that we will not make the same mistakes as our first century predecessors.  We have the advantage of 20/20 hindsight.  But not so fast!  In the intervening twenty centuries, the whole of it, not just the empty tomb, the entire narrative has continually been treated as an idle tale.

 

            What better way to diminish a story than to trivialize it, to treat it with indifference.  Notice the strategy: not to protest too much, not to deny the story so much as to act indifferently toward it.  Never show that Jesus’ story gets to you: an idle tale.  Avoid the hard questions.  Ignore the reality that Jesus did some things which were so offensive, so amazing that they had to kill him.  And when they did kill him, they rolled a really big stone in front of his tomb, so he could never get out, not in three days or two thousand years.

 

            But Luke was a marvelous story teller, and Jesus keeps coming back to haunt our memories, and to grab us by the collar with insistent questions.  What was so challenging about what he said and did that they had to kill him?   It is all symbolized in the center of this room, still two thousand years later.  I don’t mean the cross.  There wouldn’t have been the cross without this other central symbol, the table.  It looks innocuous enough now: a nice setting, beautiful even:  candles, flowers, gold thread, silk brocade.  What Jesus started at the table lead to the cross.  There would have been no need for a cross if it were not for the scandalous events at the table.  It starts here, and ends there.

 

            When Jesus sat at table, everyone was invited.  That was a scandal in a society which had invested everything in drawing lines and making distinctions.  Everyone was welcome: young and old; rich and poor, slave and free, male and female, pure and impure.  You can still get in trouble for setting an open table: straight and gay; Jew and Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist; Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, high and low, divorced and married, yellow, brown, black and white.  This isn’t done in polite, controlled society.  You don’t open your table to everybody.  It feels like chaos.  It looks like anarchy.  It was what Jesus did.  It was amazing. 

 

            When Jesus sat at an open table for the last time, he said, “Remember this when you remember me.  Even after they kill me for doing this, remember.”  So you see, this was not so much an idle tale, as it was a subversive table.  Put a “B” in the middle!   A tale about a table.  According to Luke when we gather at this table, our eyes are opened to the big picture, and Jesus is present again, alive again.  Jesus’ movement starts at the table, ends at the cross, and is reborn at the table.  Jesus becomes our contemporary, and we have another chance to live his story and get it right this time.  What shall it be?  Is this an idle tale to be treated with indifference?  Or is this a story which challenges us and our world to disregard distinctions, to welcome the stranger, to feed the hungry, to forgive our enemy, and to live peaceably with all. How amazing it would be to try – yet again.