Stuck in an Upper Room

A sermon by Dr. Jim Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
April 26, 2009
The Third Sunday of Easter

Luke 24:36b-48 

          I can’t tell you how excited I was to see that the Gospel reading for this Sunday was from the 24^th chapter of Luke.  I’ve enjoyed sharing the Easter story from Mark and the “Doubting Thomas” passage from John, but I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the Gospel of Luke and about half of it was on chapter 24.  So, I thought that instead of preaching a sermon today (hauling a huge black book out from under the pulpit and dropping it on the pulpit desk with a thud) I would just read the last 150 pages of my dissertation. 

          OK, I’m joking, but my dissertation was serious.  It was a long, focused look at the purpose of Luke, which you may remember from the first four verses of the Gospel.  Luke writes to a “most excellent Theophilus,” and tells him that since others have been writing about Jesus it seemed good to him also—having followed all things closely for some time, and having interviewed a number of eyewitnesses—to write his own account of Jesus’ life and ministry so that Theophilus (and here’s the purpose statement) might know the certainty of the things he had been taught.  But in the Greek New Testament that word that we translate as “certainty” is asphaleia, which is something more like “assurance.”  Assurance (as I argued in the first half of my dissertation), is an affective word: it’s not so much about what you know as how you feel about what you know, and apparently Theophilus had heard some things about Jesus that made him question what he knew, made him wonder if it was true.

          That can happen to any of us. 

I can still remember a time in college when I was riding around in a car with some other members of the track team.  I was sitting in the back with Mitch, the hurdler, and Wally, our shot putter, was riding up front.  I can’t remember what Mitch and I were talking about, but he said something about Jesus, or resurrection, or everlasting life and Wally said, “Do you still believe that stuff?”  And everything got very quiet in the car.  You could almost see Mitch taking inventory of his faith, asking himself if he did still believe “that stuff” or if he was just quoting what he had heard in church all those years.  He finally said yes, but he didn’t say it with much conviction.  My guess is that Theophilus, like Mitch, had learned some things about Jesus and accepted them as true.  He had learned that Jesus of Nazareth was God’s own anointed one, his Messiah, that he had suffered and died on a cross, been buried, and three days later come back from the dead.  But then someone had come along who said Jesus couldn’t be the Messiah, that while the Scripture said some things about a suffering servant it never said anything about a suffering Messiah.  And that’s true!  Nowhere in the Old Testament will you find the word Messiah linked to the idea of suffering and death.[1]

          So, now Theophilus had a problem.  If the Messiah wasn’t supposed to suffer and die, was there any way that Jesus could be the Messiah?  In many ways, it is the same problem those first disciples had.  When Jesus rode into the city of Jerusalem on a donkey the crowd had gone wild, throwing their coats down on the road, tearing branches off the palm trees, shouting “Hosanna!” and saying, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.”  They thought he was the Messiah!  The king they had been waiting for.  The one who was going to run the Romans out of town and restore the nation of Israel to its former glory.  But a few days later he was dead and that was the end of that, or so they thought.  Two of them, walking back home to Emmaus, told a stranger, “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel, but now…well.”  And that’s when that stranger said, “Oh, how foolish you are, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!  Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”  And then, beginning with Moses and all the prophets this stranger pointed out to them the Scripture’s testimony that the Messiah—the true Messiah—would not only suffer and die, but on the third day rise again.

          Later they would say that their hearts “burned within them” as he opened the scriptures to them on the road, and in my dissertation I argued that this was an experience of assurance, the confirming evidence that what they had believed about Jesus was really true.  It reminded me of that story I had heard about John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement.  He had come to America when he was a young man, to see if he could persuade Native Americans to accept Jesus as Lord and savior.  He failed miserably, and on the way back to London he was on the verge of giving up his faith.  But then he had this experience, which he recorded in his journal on May 24, 1738.  He wrote: “In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans.  About a quarter before nine, while the leader was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

          He felt his heart “strangely warmed” Wesley said.  Those disciples on the road to Emmaus remembered that their hearts “burned within them.”  In both cases it was an experience of heartwarming assurance, that what they had heard about Jesus was really true.  And in both cases it was absolutely necessary, because without that assurance Wesley might never have gone on to found the Methodist movement which has brought so many people to Christ, and those two disciples might never have run back down the road to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples what they had experienced.  No sooner had they burst through the door, gasping for breath, than the other disciples began to say, “The Lord has risen indeed, and appeared to Simon!”  And then, when they had caught their breath, these two from Emmaus told the disciples what had happened to them on the road, and how they had recognized the risen Jesus as he broke bread with them.  And that’s where we pick up our Gospel reading for today.

“While they were talking about this,” Luke says, “Jesus himself stood among them and said, ‘Hi.’”[2]  They were startled and terrified, Luke says, just as you or I would be.  They thought that they were seeing a ghost.  But Jesus said, “What’s the matter?  What are you afraid of?  It’s me!  Here, look, I’ll show you.”  And then he showed them his hands and his feet, the places where the nails had been.  But they still didn’t seem convinced, and so he said, “What, do you think I’m a ghost?  Touch me!  You’ll see that I’m flesh and bone, just like you.”  But even then they couldn’t believe it; Luke says they “disbelieved for joy,” which is another way of saying that it was just too good to be true.  And so Jesus asked if they had anything to eat.  They gave him a piece of broiled fish and he ate it right there in front of them, and then what could they say?  He was alive all right—alive as you or me.

But only when they were convinced of that could he move on to the next thing, which was to convince them not only that he was alive, but that his suffering and death had been part of the plan from the beginning, and frankly, this is when I have to wonder about those disciples.  He had told them, hadn’t he?  In the Gospel of Luke Jesus makes reference to his suffering and death a half dozen times before he gets to Jerusalem, and then he takes his disciples aside and says, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished.  For he will be handed over to the Gentiles; and he will be mocked and insulted and spat upon.  After they have flogged him they will kill him, and on the third day he will rise again.”  Could he have been any more direct?  And yet, Luke says, “they understood nothing about all these things; in fact, what he said was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what he said” (18:31-34).

I think I know why they didn’t grasp what he said.  In the same way that his resurrection seemed, literally, too good to be true, all that talk about his suffering and death seemed too bad to be true.  When Jesus had pinned them down and asked them who they thought he was Peter said “You are the Messiah!” and apparently that was the right answer.  But then Jesus began to tell them what it meant to be the Messiah, that it meant suffering and dying, and they just wouldn’t—or couldn’t—believe it.  In those days everybody was talking about the Messiah, but they weren’t talking about suffering and dying; they were talking about conquering and ruling.  The book that everyone was quoting was The Psalms of Solomon, which didn’t end up in our Bible but in those days was considered by many to be the Word of God.  Here’s what it says about the Messiah:

Behold, O Lord, and raise up unto them their king, the son of David, at the time known to you, O God, in order that he may reign over Israel your servant. And gird him with strength, that he may shatter unrighteous rulers, and that he may purge Jerusalem from gentiles who trample (her) down to destruction (17:21-22). 

Now, that may not sound like Jesus to you, but it sounded like the Messiah to them: someone who would shatter the unrighteous rulers who had taken over their land, and purge Jerusalem from those gentiles who had trampled her down to destruction.  So when Jesus talked about the Messiah suffering and dying they couldn’t believe it.  That wasn’t the one they were looking for at all. 

          That’s why he had to “open their minds” to understand the Scriptures.  He had to remove that old understanding and replace it with this new understanding.  The Messiah was supposed to suffer and die.  It was necessary.  And then, just as he had on the road to Emmaus, Jesus shared those passages of Scripture that made his point.  “You see?” he said.  “It is written: the Messiah is to suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning in Jerusalem.  And you are witnesses of these things” (Luke 24:46-48).

          Well, you know what witnesses do: they testify, they tell what they know, and these disciples weren’t going to be able to do that in that upper room.  They would have to go out into the city of Jerusalem and tell people that Jesus of Nazareth was God’s own Messiah, and that yes he had suffered and died but that’s just what he was supposed to do, and that now God had raised him from the dead so that people could turn from their sins and be forgiven, all people everywhere, but they couldn’t do that until they had been convinced of two things: 1) that the Messiah was supposed to suffer and die, and 2) that Jesus the suffering Messiah had risen from the dead.  Without that assurance they would be held captive by their unbelief and ignorance.  They would have been stuck in that upper room forever.  And you and I wouldn’t be here today. 

          But here we are and now I wonder: what’s keeping us from being his witnesses, from sharing the good news of repentance and forgiveness with our friends and family, our neighbors and co-workers?  What’s got us stuck where we are?  Maybe like the disciples we would leave our upper rooms if we could only be convinced of a couple of things, whatever those might be.  Maybe like Theophilus we need to be reassured that those things we have heard about Jesus are true.  I appreciated something one of my colleagues said on Tuesday.  We were having coffee at Starbucks, talking about this passage from Luke and he said, “You know, when I was in seminary I had all these questions, and I kept thinking “If I could just find a good answer to this question I would be fine, nothing would hold me back, I would be out there preaching the gospel every day.  He was stuck in that seminary classroom, with many more questions than answers.  And then one day he said, “You know, I’ll always have another question.  There will always be one more question.  What I’ve got to do is get out there and be a witness, tell all the truth about Jesus I know, to all the people who will listen.”  That’s what he’s been doing ever since, and that’s what Jesus calls us to do.  “Don’t let the questions hold you back,” he would say.  “Don’t get stuck by unbelief or ignorance.  Just get out there and be my witnesses.

          “I’ll take care of the rest.”

—Jim Somerville © 2009

home | calendar | magazine | sermons | contact us

FBC exists to make disciples of Jesus Christ through joyful worship, caring fellowship, spiritual nurture, faithful service & compassionate outreach in the Richmond area and throughout the world.

This site is maintained by the Communication Ministry of First Baptist Church.
Send comments or suggestions to the FBC webmaster.