“You
Are Witnesses of These Things.” Among Jesus’ last words
to his disciples before his ascension is this powerful statement,
both of fact in the present and commissioning for the future.
What you “are,” they might have been surprised to know,
is– according to the ancient manuscript– “martyrs,” from
the biblical root martys (v. 48). Here, the martyr-witnesses are those who have seen
and experienced Jesus’ death and resurrection, and understand
their own confession as an historical, corporate reality.
In a strange way, Luke’s intriguing account, book-ended
by Jerusalem but centering on an unknown village not mentioned
in any history, is a template for what it might mean to
be a community of such witnesses today. But to start there
is of course to tell the conclusion before setting the stage.
The
novelist John Gardner generalized that there are only two
plots to all the stories ever told: one being a
stranger came to town and the other, someone
went on a journey. The two motifs are brought together
in Luke’s account of Resurrection Afternoon on the Emmaus
road. Two disciples, one named Cleopas and one not named
at all, embark on a long walk– perhaps just to get some
distance from the grief and perplexity at their backs– and
on the way are joined by an engaging stranger who opens
the scriptures to them. But even to start with this scene
at the heart of Luke’s fascinating chapter is, once again,
to leap to barn-raising prematurely before pouring a foundation.
For this reason, it behooves us to go all the way back to
the hours before so much came clear to the earliest disciples–
to contemplate the essential context
of the Christian witness–
and then in due time, the conditions
of witness, and at last the content
of our witness.
The Context of the Witness: Deep Dawn
Luke
begins his resurrection account after all seems finished.
The Crucified has been entombed by Joseph of Arimathea before
Sabbath begins, the women following and seeing how the body
was laid. The sabbath becomes a silent interlude, itself
like a stone sealing the week’s tomb. “But on the first
day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they
had prepared.” (24:1)
Richard
Spalding, chaplain at Massachusetts’ Williams College, reflects
upon the women’s arrival at the tomb via the stunning nuance
of Joseph Fitzmyer’s translation: the Greek orthrou,
meaning literally a dawn inscrutable
– or “deep dawn.”
[1]
The description stands for the bewilderment
of these hapless followers, as much as our own. Spalding
unfolds the metaphor in a way that illumines the process
of remembering developed in almost excruciating stages through
Luke’s Emmaus story:
| ...
there is no comforting boundary to plot at all between
light and dark. It isn’t as though the light pushes
back the darkness at a line of scrimmage; it’s as though
the night infinitesimally turns itself, revealing some
startling new side of its nature, one atom at a time.
. . Paul is right: “We shall all be changed – in a moment,
in the twinkling of an eye.” But, sometimes, we need
to approach that change like Luke’s disciples: gradually,
ineffably, turning one memory at a time so as to reveal
the startling newness of our nature in Christ. In deep
dawn.
[2]
|
It
is at this “deep dawn” that the women come laden with spices--
not, as we might imagine, to forestall the body’s decomposition
or preserve it from death’s ravages, but for a very different
purpose. Biblical scholars point out that the practice was
used to hasten the work of death while alleviating the stench
of it; so that bones could more quickly be transferred to
an ossuary, the permanent resting place. What the women
naturally bring to this death, thereby, is the means to
hasten it, their assent to it now the only choice-- regrettable
as it may be, but inevitable. They, and later the two on
the road, will have to be coached to see the world as witnesses
see it (to be, literally, “re-minded”);
and Luke is setting the stage for that to come. Paul would
later challenge the church similarly:
“Do not be conformed to this world; but be transformed
by the renewing of your minds.” While the women’s spices might symbolize a conforming
to what the world knows as deathly real, they are quickly
met by a tomb that is empty.
The
other two synoptic gospels move directly to proclamation:
“Do not be afraid,” Matthew has it, where Mark’s wording
is “Do not be amazed.” “He is not here; for he has risen...”(cf.
Matthew, with the clauses reversed in Mark). Luke, however,
proceeds differently. When the women arrive at the opened
tomb, the first words from two dazzlingly attired men
who meet them there initiate a “deep dawn” exploration:
“Why do you seek the living among the dead?
Remember...” (24:5-6)
Then
indeed “they remembered his words,” Luke reports, “and returning
from the tomb, they told all this...” (24:8-9)
It is remembering that precedes the re-animation of their faith and spurs
them to proclamation: a
movement about to be replicated in the next act of the day’s
drama.
The Conditions for the Witness: Instruction,
Hospitality, and Remembrance
It
is here in the story that Gardner’s age-old motifs arise:
the journey and the stranger. Countless times in life, each
of us has been on some ordinary road to an Emmaus– with
no idea what revelation awaits us there. Somewhere along
this road, the one named Cleopas asks the walker
who has joined them, ‘‘Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem
who does not know the things that have taken place there
in these days?. . . The things
about Jesus of Nazareth. . .” (24:18)
Sometimes there aren’t sufficient descriptive words
to give a clear, precise, verbal witness, particularly when
our deep dawn is yet more darkness than twilight; and so
we can only speak of “things.”
And yet, in halting terms they were already
witnessing to a narrative and experience they themselves
couldn’t believe! It is interesting that these two, implied to
be among those (v.11) who did not accept the “idle tale,”
have now entered the conversation.
“But we had hoped that he was the one to set Israel
free.” (24:21) There’s
a poignancy in the words, so that this primitive witness
just beginning to find its legs contains not only a hope
but a disappointment as well. One who preaches Luke 24 might
lead listeners to reflect on how the narrow hopes we hold–
for destruction of enemies or triumph of a nation– are foiled
or exceeded by the unimaginable breadth of a larger witness.
Perhaps here is where “witnesses” are truly “martyrs”: those
who experience the martyring of what they had formerly hoped,
so that a more expansive Life can fill the void.
These
witnesses on the road had been “astounded” at their first
encounter with the women’s story. What are the hopes to
which, with which, your community might witness? What are their astonishments? And where lies their perplexity?
Before
we are sent to the fields of harvest awaiting us, our gaze
is turned backward so that the journey will be rooted in
remembrance. Luke’s narrative hints that if witnessing is
preceded (or enabled) by remembering,
it may well be that the content
of witnessing is first reminding
hearers of what may already be known, or suspected, but
forgotten or long set aside. “Remembering is often the activating
of the power of recognition,” notes Fred Craddock
[3]
. After gently chiding them for their foolishness,
the stranger turns their long walk into an interpretive
venture. Still, it will not be his words that interpret
his next acts, but after they urge him to “stay with us,”
his actions themselves that illumine his foregoing words!
Witness is born not so much in death and sacrifice as in
the context of a conversational journey and at the table
of hospitality. “Then their eyes were opened and they recognized
him.” Perhaps it is in our simple extension of hospitality
to the stranger that we are prepared as witnesses! “Often,
often, often goes the Christ in a stranger’s guise” chants
the traditional Gaelic “Rune of Hospitality.”
We
generally associate “martyr,” the root of “witness,” with
tales of dramatic or bloody sacrifice; but in its fuller
range of meaning, the word is also illumined by the Rt.
Rev. Bruce Cameron’s account of the hospitable conversations
among the churches of Scotland. The dialogue among them
has not yet yielded structural or institutional unity, but
an interrelationship that might be termed theologically
organic: unity in the midst of differences, a true tartan
rather than one homogeneously-dyed cloth.
[4]
The
eloquent complexity here in Luke, as in our ecumenical experiences,
is that the Guest effects a reversal, and becomes Host at
the table of grace. In the churches’ Eucharistic liturgies
from their beginnings, the breaking of bread is an act of
remembering; and the context of remembering is at the table.
It is in that act, that tearing of bread and opening
of hand in offering, that their eyes are enlightened: only
a split second of recognition, but recognition all the same,
“and he vanished from their sight.” (24:31) In the end, we get only a glimpse to interpret
the burning of our hearts. But the story seems to imply
that once we do remember, once we recognize him at the table,
then we no longer need to see. What
happened on the road only becomes a clear, understandable
witness at last in the breaking of bread, the incarnational
reminder.
Immediately,
then, the Emmaus witnesses spring into action– heading back
to Jerusalem, seeking out their companions, narrating– and
it is, significantly, while they do so that Jesus again
stands among them. In the midst of the witness, the One
witnessed to becomes present again. In fact, the earlier
pattern of Emmaus is repeated here,
[5]
the first woven strand of a long braid that
will extend through the ages. It is not the end of table
fellowship, this remembering and recognition, but in truth
the beginning; and it is such a hallmark of how witnesses
are born, that Luke plays it back chiastically. The earlier
pattern of the narrative now reverses, echoing in an ABCDDCBA
pattern: When Cleopas and his companion arrive back in
Jerusalem, they are told of the resurrection by the
other disciples gathered there (D: vv. 34 & 32). Then
the risen Jesus joins them and is immediately recognized
(C: vv. 36 & 31); asks for food and eats with them (B:
vv. 41-42 & 30); and then teaches about Moses and the
prophets and his own suffering (A: vv. 44-47 & 27).
Luke’s
emphasis on remembrance and table fellowship is a natural
prelude to the experience of the early church recorded in
Acts. There, appearances have ceased (with the ascension);
and the process of revelation that impels disciples to witness
happens by other means which sound by now strangely familiar:
instruction, remembrance, testimony, and more shared meals.
Luke 24 offers an almost seamless transition to those new
conditions in the church’s life, which extends across centuries
to our life together as the community of resurrection
faith.
The Content of the Witness: A Surprising
Inclusivity
Luke
24 is a busy narrative, enough to reassure us as aspiring witnesses that this
is no linear endeavor but a complex, braided one, going
on all the time around and behind and ahead of us. We have
simply to plunge into the stream that is already flowing.
First, two “men” announce to the women that he is alive;
then the women report that he is alive, and are not believed;
then the two on the road voice their hopes, their perplexity,
and their continuing disbelief, and receive instruction
from a stranger. Finally, it takes eye-opening table fellowship,
not merely hearing, to set them back on the road to Jerusalem
to resume the cycle of witness. Lo and behold, before they
can give their breathless report, the community they had
left behind for only a day now witnesses to them.
Who
is to say that any of those steps could be omitted in the
journey to becoming martys? What preparation is
required to make witnesses?
Perhaps it is not one grand gesture, not one climactic
conversion, but all of the little conversions building upon
each other, that compel us at last to run quickly and tell.
Finally,
Christ declares us “witnesses of these things” (24:48):
among them, the challenge to repent and the message
of God’s grace “to all nations” (panta
ta ethne). It is a vastly inclusive word. The
phrase “all nations” is significant not so much in its geographical
scope but in its inclusion of those we would never have
chosen naturally. “[A]ccording to Luke the Holy Spirit has
moved the church into areas in which it otherwise would
not have gone and into activities in which it otherwise
would not have engaged.”
[6]
To be witnesses of these things is to see the
resurrection live among us in startling ways. It is never
an onerous burden to carry out, but a self-renewing way
of life for those who take care to look around and remember.
The
last word is this: There is a “we”– a corporate essence–
in the witness to the resurrection. Witnesses are sought
out, re-minded, and commissioned, together.
They keep each other honest; they verify the truth of a
common confession. And in the institution of our witness
is the test of our unity. In exploring the content of Christian
witness over the years, I too have sat among a company of
beloved peers at the table of a lectionary-rooted seminar
called The Moveable Feast. I have harkened to their words
in order to be re-minded– and have become a better witness
myself in their company. I name some of them gratefully
here, to acknowledge the particular influence of these on
my understanding of Luke 24, and as a way of affirming that
the “you” in “witnesses” is always plural:
Christine Chakoian, Cynthia Campbell, Bob Dunham,
Mark Barger Elliott, K. C. Ptomey, Jr., Rick Spalding, Jon
Walton, Ted Wardlaw, Robin White. Without knowing it, they
have accompanied me at table in this reflection, and in
the process have attested the Risen Christ to me yet again
across long miles. And isn’t that, always, the way of witnesses?
