Jerusalem and Emmaus: The Ongoing Journey

One fine full-moon night, a thief entered the hut of a Zen master. The thief had been successful at two other homes, but as he was looking around this house, he was disappointed to see that there was nothing to steal; the room was bare. And then suddenly he saw a man who was coming with a candle in his hand. The man said, with great kindness in his voice, “What are you looking for in the dark? Why did you not wake me up? I was just sleeping near the front door. Had I known you were coming, I could have shown you the whole house.” Because the master looked so simple and innocent, the thief said, “Perhaps you do not know that I am a thief.” The master replied, “That doesn’t matter, everybody has to be someone. The point is that I have been in the house for thirty years and I have not found anything, so let us search together! And if we can find something, we can be partners. I have not found anything in this house; I think it is empty.”

At this point, the thief got a bit scared; this man seemed strange. He said to himself: Either he is mad or, worse, who knows what kind of man he ? The more he stood there with this strange man, he wanted to leave.Besides, outside the master's house he had hidden the loot he had stolen from the other two homes. The master had only one blanket — that was all that he had — and it was a cold night. So when the thief turned to leave, he told him, “Don’t leave just like that, don’t insult me this way; otherwise I will never be able to forgive myself, that a poor man came to my house in the middle of the night and had to go empty-handed. Just take this blanket. And it will be good — outside it is so cold. I am inside the house; it is warmer here.” He covered the thief with his blanket. The thief was just losing his mind! He said, “What are you doing? I am a thief!”

The master said, “That does not matter. In this world everybody has to be somebody, has to do something. You may be stealing; that doesn’t matter, a profession is a profession. Just do it well, with all my blessings. Do it perfectly, don’t be caught; otherwise you will be in trouble.”

The thief shook his head and said, “You are strange. You are naked and you don’t have anything!” The master said, “Don’t be worried, because I am coming with you! Only the blanket was keeping me in this house; otherwise in this house there is nothing — and the blanket I have given to you. I am coming with you — we could live together. You seem to have a few things; it is a good partnership. I have given my all to you. You can give me a little bit; that will be right.” The thief could not believe it! He just wanted to escape from that place and from that man. He said, “No, I cannot take you with me. I have my wife, I have my children, and my neighbors, what will they say? — `You have brought a naked man!’” He said, “Alright then. I will not put you in any embarrassing situation. So you can go, I will remain in this house.”

But as the thief was leaving, the master shouted, “Hey! Come back!” The thief had never heard such a strong voice; it was like a knife. He had to come back. The master thundered, “Learn some courtesy. I have given you the blanket and you have not even thanked me. So first, thank me; it will help you a long way. Secondly, going out — you opened the door when you came in — close the door! Can’t you see the night is so cold, and can’t you see that I have given you the blanket and I am naked? I have no problem with your being a thief, but as far as manners are concerned, I am quite peculiar. I will not tolerate this kind of behavior. Say thank you!” The thief had to say, “Thank you, sir,” and he closed the door and escaped.

The thief could not sleep the whole night. Again and again he remembered...he had never heard such a strong voice, such power. And the man had nothing! He inquired the next day and he found out that this was Ryokan, a great Zen master known all over the country. He had not done well by this master, and he felt bad about it. It was absolutely ugly to steal from that man; he had nothing. But he was a great master. The thief said, “That I can understand myself — that he is a very strange kind of man. Remembering him, a shivering goes through my body. When he called me back I could not run away. I was absolutely free, I could have taken my loot and run away, but I could not. There was something in his voice that pulled me back.”

Well, after a few months the thief was caught during one of his robberies and was hauled to court. There the magistrate asked him, “Can you name a person who knows you in this vicinity?” He said, “Yes, one person knows me” ... and he named Master Ryokan. The magistrate said, "That’s enough — call Master Ryokan. His testimony is worth that of ten thousand people. What he says about you will be enough to give judgment.”

They found Ryokan and brought him. The magistrate asked the master, “Do you know this man?” He said, “Know him? We are partners. He is my friend. He even visited me one night in the middle of the night. It was so cold that I gave him my blanket. He is using it, you can see. That blanket is famous all over the country; everybody knows it is mine.”  The magistrate said, “He is your friend? And does he steal?” The master said, “Never! He simply couldn't do such thing! He is such a gentleman that when I gave him the blanket he said to me, `Thank you, sir.’ When he went out of the house, he silently closed the doors. He is a very polite, nice fellow.” The magistrate said, “If you say so, then all the testimonies of the witnesses who have said that he is a thief are canceled. He is free to go.”

The master went out and the thief followed him. The master said, “What are you doing? Why are you coming with me?” He said, “Now I can never leave you. You have called me your friend, you have called me your partner. Nobody has ever given me any respect. You are the first person who has said that I am a gentleman, a nice person. I am going to sit at your feet and learn how to be like you. From where have you got this maturity, this power, this strength, this seeing of things in a totally different way?”

The master said, “Do you know that night how bad I felt? You had gone; it was so cold. Without a blanket sleep was not possible. I wept that night, that thieves should learn a few things. At least they should inform a day or two ahead when they come to a man like me, so we can arrange something, so they don’t have to go empty-handed. ... It is good that you remembered me in court; otherwise those fellows are dangerous, they might have mistreated you. That very night I offered to come with you and be partners with you. Then you refused, but now you want to come. Of course, you can come. Whatever I have I will share with you. But it is not material: it is something invisible.”

The thief said, “That I can feel; it is something invisible. But you have saved my life, and now it is yours. Make whatever you want to make of it. I have been simply wasting it. Seeing you, looking in your eyes, one thing is certain — that you have some sort of power to change me. Please don't make me leave you; I have fallen in love.”

Zen master Ryokan was not afraid of the thief; he didn't despise him; he didn't judge him; he didn't tell him he had to change. He simply accepted him and shared the little he had, -- and the thief was amazed at the power this naked man began to have over him.

He Qui: Walk to Emmaus

Like Zen master Ryokan transformed the thief with his love and showed him glimpses of a new life, Jesus transformed the two sad disciples walking to Emmaus. They were hopeless, convinced that their hope had died on the cross, and they were clueless, blinded to the divine presence right in front of them by their pain and suffering.

Much like a good therapist, Jesus invites them to talk ("What things in Jerusalem? Tell me!") and as he gets a sense of how forelorn and sad they are, he "softly and tenderly" reinterprets their dim view of the world. He reminds them that their Master, as the Christ announced by the prophets, has proclaimed a new world, and lived and acted for the sake of that new world, even as he was consistent in holding up reconciliation and peace against violence and hate, all the way to his death on the cross.

They glimpse for the first time that his death was indeed a new beginning. They realize that their Master has destroyed the chain that links violence to more violence, and destruction to more destruction. They see that he destroyed that chain that has kept everyone from living; he destroyed the chain that made everyone powerless in the face of death and allowed death to win every time.

Even as they have been transformed, knowing that the cross is the end of the reign of death, they know that the new road they are on doesn't lead them outside of the world. It leads them right back into the place of disappointments and problems and difficult experiences and defeat and suffering and fear.

And so it is with each of us. We walk from one Jerusalem experience of doubt, suffering and pain to the corresponding Emmaus experience filled with peace, hope and joy. But eventually life's twists and turns will land us in another Jerusalem where our hopes get crucified and our dreams get killed, and then to another Emmaus where hopeless and clueless believers get restored.  And so it goes on ... yet because of the Resurrection, there is no senseless repetition.

Our journey has a direction. Because we know where we are going, we will "get better at it".  Because we know that wherever we go that Jesus is going ahead of us, we won't be walking alone. Because the Reign of God is closer than ever before, there is joy in the journey even when it gets tough again.

Luke 24: 13-35

Repentance, or Why I Never Wash

Into our confusion, our terror and our questions in the aftermath of the Tucson massacre, Sunday's gospel text from Matthew 4 speaks to us with some of the first few words from Jesus' mouth:

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

What is repentance?  The Greek word used by Matthew, metanoeo, means "to change one's mind and purpose". The underlying Hebrew word, shub, denotes a turning back, specifically turning away from one's sins and back to God.

The definition suggested by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder is better than most:

To repent doesn't mean to grovel in self-hatred or pious sorrow. When you repent you turn around, change directions, choose a different path, or make a radical rupture. Repentance signals an abrupt end to life on auto-pilot or to business as usual.

The urgency Yoder describes is reflected in the Greek word kairos, which in Mark Chapter 1 Jesus uses together with "repent".  Kairos describes something extraordinary and utterly new, a rupture in normal time that demands a response or a reorientation. It seems as though the disciples described in Sunday's gospel almost instantly "got it", completely walking away from their lives and families and security and routines, and becoming "fishers of men".

Repentance is about change, radical change.

Human beings don't change easily, and every theory of human personality is expected to describe how "resistance to change" is to be explained. A colleague, disgusted with the excuses parishioners offered as to why they didn’t attend worship, offered "Fourty Reasons Why I Never Wash"; those "reasons", however humorous and exaggerated, illustrate just how hard change is for our kind. Here are some of my favorite ones:

• "I only believe in things I can see, and I can’t see bacteria";
• "I’ll start washing when I get older and dirtier";
• "People who make soap are only after your money"; 
• "I know someone who washes every day and still smells bad";
• "People who wash are hypocrites - they think they are cleaner than everybody else".

"Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near" -- how can we hear these words for our day and time? Even as Republicans are working on their efforts to repeal the 2010 health care reform, I remember a powerful 2010 article by Frank Rich of the New York Times, where he said this:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. ... The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

In other words, Frank Rich suggests that ultimately the whole fight (back then and even now) is not about health care or any specific subject at all.

Frank Rich suggests that the whole fight has been about fear of change. 

Even as early as March of 2010, Rich warned that President Obama's “middle-of-the-road bill" had "incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric", with the result that "reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families":

from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

Looking at the events of January 8 from this angle, the violence seems even more senseless; my point is that human beings will go to great lengths to avoid change. No, not "Republicans will go to great lengths to avoid changes", but "human beings will go to great lengths", all of us.

President Obama's call for more civility in our discourse sounds good, but I think the problem lies deeper, much deeper.

• When some people in this nation think they need to stop change by using violence, that's a good indication that some form of dialog stopped somewhere way-back-when; that conversation needs to begin again: about who we are as a people, and about how diversity is part of our identity.
• And when, as Frank Rich suggests, a lot of the fear of change has to do with the fact that the new face of this nation doesn't look like the faces of those fearful ones, we need to have a conversation about the faulty idea of "other".  For Christians, there is no "other"; we are all one, children of the same Father.   

Many of us are used to singing a section of Psalm 51; some of us are singing these words every Sunday.  I wonder whether we know just how serious this stuff is.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit.

If God were to start acting like we do with each other, we would have been flung so far away from God's presence we'd never find our way back.  Each of us depends on God's grace and mercy in our everyday struggle, yet it's hard for the folks around us to feel the grace. The writer Anne Lamott names these reasons why she made her adolescent son go to church against his will:

The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want--which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy--are people with a deep sense of spirituality.

The kairos is here.  In this rupture of time, "business as usual" will not cut it, and living on auto-pilot won't work.  As Rumi says, "All the other [doors] are sometimes open, sometimes shut; yet never is the door of repentance anything but open. Come seize the opportunity: the door is open."

Rather than feeling helpless in the midst of the violence, we know how to find "a path and a little light to see by". We can show purpose, heart, balance, gratitude and joy.  We can reflect the grace of our God.  With God, we are always in the majority.

Matthew 4:12-23; Psalm 51