Seeing the One We Need

Below you'll find online worship from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, for this past Sunday, April 26. We hope that it will help you grow strong in faith in Jesus, whether you already know Him or not. Below that then is the written text of the message included in the worship. God bless you with a safe and healthy week.



Luke 24:13-35

Today, I want to focus on two verses from our gospel lesson: “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him…” (Luke 24:30-31) 

Here is the moment when, on the first Easter Sunday, two of Jesus’ disciples, after walking on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus with a mysterious stranger, realize that this stranger, Whose unfolding of God’s Word had made their hearts burn while they walked together, was Jesus: crucified, dead, buried, now risen from the dead. 

They’d been blind. 

But now they could see.

During His ministry, Jesus had spoken about what He intended to accomplish in Jerusalem. 

“The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” (Luke 9:22) 

“For the Son of Man in his day,” Jesus says in Luke 17:24-25, “will be like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.”

To eyes blinded by sin though, a gracious God going to the lengths that God goes to in Jesus in order to seek and save those lost in sin, death, and darkness, is beyond imagining. 

The blindness of the human race goes back to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. After they rebelled against God and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “...the eyes of both of them were opened” (Genesis 3:7). 

Before, they had seen only God and what was good. 

Now they saw evil. 

From that point forward, whenever the human race gave God a thought, it imagined that God was as lacking in grace and charity they themselves. 

They saw God as a Being to be placated by religious acts, a Deity who demands perfection. 

Or, they were, like me at one time in my life: fools, of whom God’s Word observes, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’...” (Psalm 14:1)

In the risen Jesus, our eyes are opened to Who God really is. 

We see that He is the God Who, out of His grace and love, called ancient Israel to be His own people who would carry the light of His love to all the nations, despite the smallness of Israel’s numbers and power, despite its sin, idolatry, and lies. 

In Jesus too, we see the God Who sent His Son “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). 

This is the God Who, desperate to restore us to the life only He can give, is indifferent to the humiliation others might see in His becoming... 

• like a widow scouring her home for a single lost coin (Luke 15:8-10, or 
• like a shepherd who has 99 sheep securely penned for the night, but still seeks the one that’s lost (Luke 15:3-7), or 
• like a father who doesn’t care what the neighbors say because, though his son has squandered everything he gave him--every blessing--and shown him complete disrespect, will still anxiously look down the road hoping for his return and throw a party when that lost child returns. (Luke 15:11-32)

For three years, disciples like Cleopas and the other disciple who walked to Emmaus on that first Easter had followed Jesus. They hadn’t understood it when Jesus foretold His death and resurrection. 

In Jesus, they had heard the voice of God and had seen, in Martin Luther’s wonderful phrase, “God’s loving face.” 

But they were blind to all of Jesus’ promises, assuming that as Messiah, Jesus would go to Jerusalem and claim His kingdom.

They were right, except that the kingdom of the Messiah, the Christ, could not be claimed before Jesus dealt with our blindness. Until it was overcome forever. 

All who follow Jesus must learn to see the world aright. 

First, we have to see that we are sinners. Jesus didn’t just die for all those “other people” over whom we tsk and shake our heads. We too are sinners whose blindness causes us to brag, tear others down, to be unkind, to hoard paper towels, toilet paper, and disinfectant, to think we’re always right and the other guy is always wrong, to covet, steal, take God’s name in vain, gossip, and lie. The cross should open our eyes to our sin. The condition of sin into which each of us is born and which we blindly indulge, is so bad that it required the sinless God of all creation to take on human flesh, becoming the only human being who could offer a pure sacrifice acceptable to God to overcome the power of our sin. 

And it’s for blind people like us, prone to look no further than our own interests, desires, and preferences, that Jesus came to die...and rise.

Which brings us back to the road to Emmaus. 

Two disciples walk on that road, so blinded by sin and habitual ways of thinking and religion, that they can’t accept the report of the women who had returned from the tomb with news that Jesus was raised from the dead. “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” Jesus tells them while they still don’t recognize Him. (Luke 24:25) 

It’s at this point that Jesus begins to open their eyes, showing them God’s Law is not meant to be the last word over their lives or their eternities. He shows them from Moses and the Prophets that the Messiah was always meant to do what Jesus did...to die and then to rise. 

Jesus points them to the gospel, the good news: God has conquered our sin and our death by dying and rising and all whose eyes are opened to their need of what Jesus accomplished in His death and resurrection and trust in Jesus are no longer lost. God finds us and saves us by His grace in Jesus!

The night is closing in when Jesus and the two disciples come to Emmaus. It will soon be too dark to see and therefore, to travel. They beg Jesus to stay with them. 

It’s at a table in Emmaus that it happens. 

Jesus breaks the bread and blesses it and starts to give it to them, as He has so many times before, and THEY SEE. 

After Jesus reveals Himself to them, their eyes are opened to what Jesus had done--died for the sin of all people and risen so that all who trust in Him can live with God now and always, the darkness outside doesn’t matter to the disciples. Despite the dangers posed by wild animals and highway bandits, they race back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples that they have seen Jesus, risen. Their eyes are open. 

They can testify in the words of John Newton’s hymn, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.”

The same is true for you and me. When God’s Law shows us our need of a Savior and His Gospel presents Jesus as that Savior Who saves us by God’s charity--His grace--through faith in Jesus; whenever His Word causes our hearts to burn within us; when we are claimed by God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--in the waters of Holy Baptism; and when we see Him again (and we will see Him again!) in the breaking of the bread at Holy Communion, our blindness gives way to seeing God in all His glory, grace, and love. 

We move out of the darkness of our cramped, self-serving lives into the bright spaciousness of His kingdom. 

We can marvel, revel, and celebrate the reality that the apostle Peter says belongs to all believers in Jesus: “...you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” (1 Peter 2:9) 

This week, listen to Jesus’ Word, heed His call to repentance and renewal. He will come to You not only as God the Son Who died for Your sins but also as God the Son Who rose to open Your eyes to see how much He loves you and the new life He gives to you. 

Look to Jesus and you will see. And you will believe. 

Amen

Opened Eyes, Burning Hearts

Luke 24:13-35
Today’s gospel lesson begins, as all incidents lived out on the salvation journey wrought by the God we know in Jesus Christ, in grief. But like all such incidents, it ends in life and in joy.

It’s late in the afternoon on the first Easter, the day that Jesus rose from the dead. Two disciples, filled with grief, not yet convinced by the testimony to Jesus’ resurrection given to them by two different groups of their fellow disciples, are walking from Jerusalem, where they witnessed Jesus die, toward Emmaus.

This is where our lesson, Luke 24:13-35, begins: “That very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”

Why were these two disciples kept from recognizing Jesus? Was Jesus engaging in a little heavenly hocus-pocus? No, I think there are two reasons they didn’t know the man walking and talking with them was Jesus.

First, neither one of them was expecting to see Jesus. They had watched Jesus die.

Second, taking all the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection into consideration, one gets the idea that in His risen form, Jesus was the same, but different.

He could express a desire for food. He could be touched. He could show people the wounds He’d incurred during His passion and crucifixion.

But He also could show up in rooms behind locked doors. He seemed capable of being in multiple places at the same time.

Jesus was the same, yet different, just as God’s Word promises that you and I will, beyond our own deaths and resurrections be the same--recognizable as the people we have been in this old creation--yet new, surprising, different, more whole, bathed in eternal life.

Verse 17: “And he said to them, ‘What is this conversation that you are holding with each other as you walk?’ [Jesus always meets people where they are. He often starts with a question, a good way to start any conversation.] And they stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, ‘Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?’ And he said to them, ‘What things?’ And they said to him, ‘Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened.’”

Can’t you hear the hopelessness in the voices of the two disciples here? They had put all of their hope in Jesus. But what had their hope really been in? They had hoped that Jesus would redeem Israel, by which they meant, that Jesus would set the Jews free from the Romans. But it hadn’t happened.

I know a man who was super-active in his church. He was considered a leader in the congregation, a person of prayer. But one day, he just gave up on God, dropped out of church.

What happened? He’d counted on Jesus to make him wealthy and successful. He thought that he had a deal with Jesus: he would be a good guy and Jesus would give him what he wanted. He thought Jesus was a genie subject to his command, rather than the Savior from whom he took commands. When the man’s dream job turned to ashes and when his personal life got hard, he gave up on faith.

Jesus can and does redeem from sin, death, darkness, and futility all who turn from sin and trust in Him. But that doesn’t mean that the lives we live before our own deaths and resurrections will be successful or easy. The Bible reminds us: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Corinthians 15:19)

And Jesus did pity these two disciples who had placed their trust in Jesus for the wrong reasons. We see this as the two tell Jesus about the strange reports they’ve heard of Jesus rising. “‘Moreover, [they continue] some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning, and when they did not find his body, they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see.’ And [Jesus] said to them, ‘O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!’”

Jesus’ words of admonition remind me of Psalm 14:1: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’"

Jesus was saying that the two disciples were foolish for not believing that God is God. He chastises them for failing to believe that Jesus Himself could do what He'd said He would, die and rise for the sake of sinners like them like me and you.

The disciples were stuck in the same kind of thinking you hear from modern-day atheists and agnostics who say, “People don’t rise from the dead. Therefore, Jesus couldn’t have risen from the dead.”

These folks are half right: According the ordinary laws of this world, dead people don’t rise, just as, according to the ordinary working of the law of gravity, an apple that falls from a tree will land on the ground below.

But what if, as I walk by that apple tree and see the apple start to fall and, instead of letting it hit the ground, I catch it?* The law of gravity will not have been rescinded; but I will have intervened to change the usual outcome.

Like every other human being, Jesus died.

But then, God the Father did something: He intervened in the normal outworking of this fallen universe’s laws. He changed the outcome and raised Jesus, His Son, to a new and eternal life.

And by His death and resurrection, Jesus both paid the debt we owe to God and neighbor for our sins and then opened up a perfect eternity with God to all who trust in Him.

The God we meet through Jesus can intervene in our lives to make us new.

It’s foolish to think that the One Who made everything in the first place can’t make it new when it gets messed up.

That’s effectively what Jesus tells these two disciples walking to Emmaus.

Jesus now teaches them how the Old Testament had pointed to His death and resurrection. Jesus no doubt mentioned chapters and verses of prophecy.

But more importantly, He must have pointed to the character of the Creator God,

• Who created out of love, 
• Who was loathe to give up on the human race, 
• Whose passion for us all would inevitably lead Him to stop at nothing--not even death on a cross--to destroy the power of sin and death over our lives. 
• The God with this character and these traits would, of course, enter our stories to write new, everlasting endings for all who believe in Jesus.

The disciples are now stirred by Jesus speaking the Word of God and, as they come to their house, beg Jesus to stay. Then, we read this: “So he went in to stay with them. When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight.”

I love this part of the Emmaus narrative! Notice two things.

First, this: Luke tells us that when Jesus broke the bread, “their eyes were opened.”

Does that sound familiar? It should. Think back to Genesis 3:7. Adam and Eve have just violated God’s command that they not eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Until this point, the two had been blind to sin, knowing only good. But, as soon as they eat of the fruit, Genesis says, “...the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked…”

Suddenly, the two now saw how their bodies and their lives could be misused. And they were ashamed.

Now, come back to Emmaus. The two disciples--who many scholars today believe are husband and wife--see Jesus break the bread and they see, not their own capacity for evil, but God’s infinite capacity to forgive, restore, renew, and remake those who turn from sin and trust in Jesus.

Jesus reverses the curse of Eden.

In Him, this couple sees not their own sin, but Christ’s righteousness. That’s what Christ wants all of us to see.

Our sin left uncovered by Christ’s righteousness will damn us. But Christ’s righteousness can cover even the darkest of sins and most awful of hurts in God’s grace, love, and life!

Secondly, notice how Jesus reveals Himself to this couple and makes it possible for them to believe. He does this in two ways:

• First, He shares God’s Word about Himself. 
• Second, He shares bread at the table with them. 

These are still the ways Jesus reveals Himself to us today. We call them Word and Sacrament: The Word of the Bible which testifies about the loving God we meet in Jesus. And the sacraments, in which Jesus uses common elements like bread, wine, and water to meet us, claim us, shower us with grace, make us new, forgive us, and assure us that He is with us always, now and in eternity.

Jesus is saying to those two disciples and to you and me, that every time we hear His Word and receive the Sacraments, as we are doing together again this morning, He is with us, making us new, replacing our doubts with faith, replacing our sin with His forgiveness.

We can come to Him whatever the current state of our lives--grieving, sad, joyous, contented, depressed, excited, whatever--and He will show Himself to us again. He will open our eyes and remind us once again that He saves by grace and eternally lives with all who surrender to Him and His love.

After their encounter with Jesus in Word and bread, the two disciples run back to Jerusalem. Suddenly, they don’t care if the sun has gone down and they can’t see the ground beneath them as they run to tell the others that they’ve seen Jesus. Their hearts are burning within them and they simply have to add their testimony to that of the others who have encountered Jesus. Their day began in grief and has ended in joy! They have to tell the world about their risen Lord.

Let me ask you: After our encounters with the risen Jesus in the Bible, in Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, can we do any less?

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message was shared during worship this past Sunday.]

*This illustration comes from The Case for Faith.

Knowing Jesus

John 9:1-41
In last Sunday’s gospel lesson, a Samaritan came to have life with God when, to her surprise, Jesus told her every sin she’d ever done while still reaching out to her with love and respect. In today’s lesson, a blind man comes to see that Jesus was “the Son of Man,” a phrase from the Old Testament book of Daniel for God Himself on the earth that He created.

Jesus promises that all who see Him for Who He is in this way and trust Him as their God and Savior will have life with God for eternity.

But as our gospel lesson shows us today, seeing Who Jesus is and trusting faith in Him are two different things. The gap between knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus can only be measured in eternity.

It isn’t easy to believe. In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian, says: “Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you your life.”

The blind man in today’s lesson learned this truth the hard way, deserted and rejected by his family, his neighbors, and religious leaders. But at the end of the lesson, you realize that he became a true disciple, willing to give up on everything the world in which he lived held dear for the privilege of being Jesus’ disciple today and in eternity.

Let’s take a look at John 9:1-41.

In verses 1-7, at the beginning, Jesus and His disciples encounter a blind man. The disciples want to know whose sin was at fault for his blindness.

We human beings love to believe in neat explanations for the messiness that exists in our world. It helps us feel that we’ve got a handle on things we can’t explain. But this world is messy because the condition of sin has imprisoned the entire universe.

This means that bad things, hard things, and sad things happen even to faithful people.

So, Jesus says that it was neither the man’s parents or the man himself who caused the his blindness. But there was a purpose for Jesus encountering the man that day, Jesus says: “...this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3).

Jesus then creates a bit of mud, smears it on the man’s eyes, and tells the man to wash himself in a nearby pool. He does so and, as John puts it understatedly, “[he]...came home seeing” (John 9:7).

When the once-blind man’s neighbors find out, they want to learn how it happened. They smell a conspiracy. “This isn’t really the blind man who used to beg,” some of them say. “Yeah,” others say, “he’s an impostor who just looks like the guy.”

The neighbors don’t like that this guy is healed. It upsets the status quo. It makes them envious that a miracle has happened to him. It introduces mystery into a world they thought they’d figured out. They don’t like it that something so good happened to a man who they, like the disciples, thought deserved his blindness. Most conspiracy theories start in this way, folks. But, in verse 9, the formerly blind man tells them: “I am the man.”

The neighbors still aren’t sold on the truth. Or, at least, they don’t want to see the truth that stands before them. So, in verses 10-12, they start to grill the healed man. “How did this happen?” they ask skeptically. The man replies: “The man they call Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see” (John 9:11).

I love his simple testimony: He met Jesus. Jesus told him what to do. He did it. Now, he could see.

Such simplicity in this circumstance is noteworthy. This man isn’t stupid. He can tell, as surely as you and I can tell when we read John’s account of this “conversation,” that the neighbors are getting hostile. Who is this uppity man to claim that a miracle was done for him?

Instead of talking about some miracle wrought by the preacher they’d been hearing about, it would have been more acceptable to them for him to say, “I was never really blind. I only pretended to be blind so that I could spend my days begging.”

Or, he could have left Jesus out of it altogether: “I washed in the pool of Siloam and it cured me.”

But, instead, he attributes the miracle to Jesus.

The crowd doesn’t like this. Some of you know that an atheist once told me after I’d shared some of my story of coming to faith in Christ after years of atheism that I never could have been an atheist. “If you were an atheist,” he told me, “you still would be.” But God can break through the sin, pride, and pain of this fallen world and bring good.

That’s what Jesus did for the blind man.

It’s what He did when He died on the cross and rose from the dead, offering new, eternal life to all who trust in Him.

It’s what He did when He gave me faith in Him to replace my atheism.

In verses 13-16, the neighbors take the man to the Pharisees, the experts in God’s Law. When the situation is laid before them, they’re scandalized to learn that Jesus performed this miracle on the sabbath.

This proved, some of them say, that Jesus couldn’t be from God. Others disagree. The Pharisees are in gridlock.

They turn to the blind man and ask who he thinks Jesus is. The Pharisees don’t want the man’s real opinion. They’re pressuring him to turn on Jesus, to renounce the whole thing, to say that his blindness AND Jesus are frauds.

Once more, the man doesn’t buckle under pressure. Jesus, he says in verse 17, “is a prophet.” A prophet, of course, is a person called by God to speak God’s Word to the world. Now, you and I know that Jesus actually is the Word of God. Jesus is way more than just a prophet; but He is that too. The man says of Jesus what he so far knows of Him. He tells the simple truth. His honesty is moving.

After their pressure fails to cause the man to renounce Jesus, they enlist his parents’ help. “Yes,” they say in verses 18-19, showing the spines of jellyfish, “that’s our son. But we don’t know anything about his story. He’s old enough to fend for himself. Bye!”

In Matthew 10:36, Jesus warns those who would follow Him that “a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.” When we follow Jesus, we can’t expect that all of our family and friends will be happy about it. Being a Christian who seeks to humbly follow Jesus is not making a popular choice.

The formerly blind man is so innocent about the ways of power and going-along-to-get-along, that when the Pharisees ask him to tell them again how he’d come to be sighted, he doesn’t take the hint. He was supposed to admit that he was part of a hoax. Instead, he asks: “Do you want to become his disciples too?” (John 9:27).

At this, the Pharisees tell the man that he must be Jesus’ disciple and that there’s no way of knowing whether Jesus is from God or not.

Now the once blind man says what was becoming obvious to him: “If this man [Jesus] were not from God, he could do nothing” [John 9:33].

At this, the once-blind man, alone among his neighbors and people, abandoned by his parents, condemned by the religious leaders of his country, was thrown out...excommunicated (John 9:34). The good religious leaders rejected him as one unworthy of God.

In the very next verse, we read about this exchange between Jesus and the formerly blind man: “Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ ‘Who is he, sir?’ the man asked. ‘Tell me so that I may believe in him.’ Jesus said, ‘You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.’ Then the man said, ‘Lord, I believe,’ and he worshiped him.’”

The blind man saw Who Jesus was--God in the flesh--and so believed in Him and worshiped Him. This is the second miracle in our lesson.

The first was the miracle of restored sight.

The second was the gift of everlasting life when the man who had received his sight believed in Jesus.

This is the miracle that belongs to all who believe in Jesus. May we never lose our sense of awe and wonder at this miracle. The God Who made everything, Whose holiness we have repeatedly violated, became one of us, led a life free of sin despite temptation, and gave Himself on a cross we earned. Now He offers us life with God for eternity when we turn for sin and, like the once-blind man, believe in Him.

Jesus wasn’t done teaching others the way to life through this blind man, though.

In verse 39, Jesus says, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”

The Pharisees were offended. “Are we blind too?” they ask Jesus (John 9:40).

Jesus’ response: “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains” (John 9:41).

In other words, the Pharisees could see that Jesus was the Son of Man, the Messiah, the Christ, the King of kings, the Lord, God.

But if they admitted to knowing all of that, they would be compelled by faith to let go of the stranglehold they had on power, position, and the lives and consciences of the people they bullied.

The Pharisees who rejected Jesus knew about God, but they refused to know God when He stood in front of them.

They recognized that Jesus is God’s Son. But they were comfortable in living apart from the living God. (And do you know what you call living apart from God? Death.)

The Pharisees chose blindness and so, Jesus says, they were condemned.

But the blind man focused on Jesus.

In ancient days, the rabbis said that Adam and Eve were created blind. They said that the two were totally dependent on God to lead them and that He only led them to places of freedom and peace, places where they were set free to be all that God had made them to be.

But, when they caved into the temptations of the serpent, eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “...the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked...” (Genesis 3:7).

Now, the rabbis said, having fallen into sin, the two were cursed with sightedness. They experienced more than just the good in which God had led them; they now could also see the evil ways they could use their lives.

Sin ensnared them.

Sin fooled them (and has fooled every generation of human beings since) into thinking that it’s possible to live apart from God.

The vision of the entire human race has been clouded by a universe full of idols vying for our trust and our worship, leading us to selfishness, self-promotion, self-loathing, darkness, and death. Now, of course, the rabbis' teaching about this is a bit fanciful. But it does make an important point: When we take our eyes off of the God we know in Jesus Christ, making Him our True North, we lose sight of the only One Who can give us life. We go off course.

When the once blind man came to believe in Jesus, he was set free from his sin and from death. He didn’t just know about God; through Jesus, He came to know God Himself. He saw Jesus as His God and King.

That’s what Jesus makes possible for us see and experience too. May we follow Jesus and never lose sight of Him as “the [only] way, and the [only] truth, and the [only] life” (John 14:6). Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the message prepared for worship this morning.]