Wednesday in Easter Week, April 4, 2018
Acts 3:1-10, Psalm 105:1-8, Luke 24:13-35
St Thomas the Apostle
The Rev’d Leo Loyola
Downtown Memphis, April 4, 1968. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. collapsed onto the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel. It was a little after six.
A sniper’s bullet had, moments earlier, zinged into the civil right leader’s neck. Ironically the downtown Memphis property was a safe haven for black travelers during the Jim Crow era.
At that moment, a lone gunman ran from the bathroom window at a downtown Memphis boarding house and into the evening. Panicked associates pointed towards the direction of the shot. Don’t die, Martin, the world needs you right now!
The night before held such promise.
King spoke at a rally held at the Mason Temple Church in support of a sanitation workers’ strike. He gave his welcoming audience a poignant vision of victory in the ongoing civil rights struggle.
His closing remarks now seem prophetic:
I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
Almost 24 hours later, an ambulance rushed the bloodied King to the hospital. An hour later, King died. Good Friday was only a week away.
Condolences came from around the country. A message from James Thompson, a pastor in West Branch, Iowa, cried out: Why must we always kill our prophets before we will listen to them?
Exactly fifty years to the day of King’s assassination, one wonders what great things King might’ve accomplished.
If King had lived, would we as a nation be closer to his dream. A dream where “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” are able and willing to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
If King had lived, would we as a nation be able to judge one another not by the color of our skin, but by our character?
The world would never know. All we have is the hope he clung onto, a hope sitting beyond our reach.
Our Gospel reading mirrors this sentiment of despair (Luke 24:13-35).
Days had passed since the public death of another influential leader, Jesus of Nazareth. The pain still stung his most ardent followers. Two of which we meet in tonight’s reading from Luke.
On their way back to Emmaus, a village seven miles outside Jerusalem, Cleopas and his companion were deep in serious conversation.
From out of nowhere a stranger joined them. “What are you two talking about?” he asked.
The two disciples spoke of the conspiracy against “Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people”. How his very own people could give him up to the Romans was beyond them. Jesus was, in their eyes, their only hope to redeem Israel.
But now that hope was gone. Not even rumors of his being alive could rid their bitterness. After all, when people die, they stay dead. End of story.
But the stranger rebuked them. “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into glory?” He then interprets for the disciples everything true about the Messiah, everything said by Moses and the prophets.
The stranger’s words comforted the men. Not wanting to part ways so soon, they invite the man to stay with them, at least for a meal.
They sat at the table as the stranger took the bread and blessed it. He broke it and gave it to the disciples as if saying, “Take, eat”. Suddenly the eyes of the disciples opened and saw this stranger for who he really was. It was Jesus all along, and then he vanished.
What this story reminds us of—is not the loss of hope after the death of Jesus of Nazareth, whose full potential we’d never see—but of the eternal hope we have in the risen Christ.
Unlike the loss we might feel when great people like Martin Luther King die, the risen Christ reveals that hope did not die on the Cross. Hope was fulfilled upon the Resurrection.
As Paul once said, we know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again. If we consider ourselves dead to sin, we are alive in Christ. For if we have died in Christ, we also now believe that we will also live with and in him.
Despite how the world seems today, this is the hope we now have in Christ in this world and the next. Like Cleopas, we must open our eyes so we may see Christ’s presence before us in the midst of uncertainty. A hope that we see whenever we as a spiritual community break bread together at this table.
King always understood. And eventually Cleopas and his companion did, too. Hope never dies.
In Christ and with Christ, hope is within our reach.
