Over the past months, as we have been studying John’s account of the last hours before the crucifixion of Jesus, I have been thinking a lot about the disciples, and the wider circle of Jesus’ followers. What must they have gone through as they witnessed the one they believed to be the Messiah be rejected by the Jewish religious leadership, condemned as a blasphemer, brutally beaten, made a spectacle of as an angry mob mocked him, and then nailed naked to a Roman cross where he would endure unimaginable agony until he died? When they had begun to follow Jesus three years before, and when it began to dawn on them that Jesus was the Messiah, they had no concept that God’s plan to deliver Israel from their oppression would lead to the cross! I think it helps to explain why they all ran away when Jesus was arrested. They couldn’t fathom why he would not use the same power that they had witnessed calm the storm—to destroy those who had come to arrest him. Instead, rather than a triumphant procession to a kingly throne, Jesus walked the Via Dolorosa to the cross. All of their expectations must have been completely shattered.
It must have appeared to them in those agonizing hours and days that Jesus had failed, that his mission had been unsuccessful, and he therefore must not have been sent by God as they had supposed. Surely, if he had been sent by God and God’s favor was on him, he could not have lost, and yet he did! At the same time, they had witnessed his divine power; they had listened as he taught them the scriptures with a depth of insight they had never known before; some of them had even heard God’s own voice speaking from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Mt. 3:17).
As they compared the utter defeat of the cross to all that they had witnessed of the power of God over the previous three years, their minds must have been stretched to the breaking point! The two disciples on their way to Emmaus on the Sunday after the crucifixion gave voice to the sense of confusion and disappointment they all must have felt as they tried to explain what had happened to the stranger they met on the road: “Jesus of Nazareth [was] 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. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Lk. 24:19b-21a). “…we had hoped that he was the one…” That says it all doesn’t it?
What they did not know was that the very stranger to whom they were explaining these things was Jesus himself, who had already risen victoriously from the grave! What a shock it must have been when, later, as they sat down to a meal together and the stranger blessed the bread, their eyes were opened and they realized with whom they had been travelling.
Should they have been shocked, though? Should they have been in such despair as they walked the road to Emmaus that Sunday afternoon? The thing is, they had been there earlier in the day when the women who had visited Jesus tomb returned, proclaiming that he was alive; and they had been there when Peter and John, who, hearing their report, had rushed to the tomb to see for themselves and had returned saying that the tomb was empty; and no doubt they had also been present on at least one of the numerous occasions when Jesus had told his followers that he would be rejected, condemned and crucified, but on the third day he would rise again. So why did it take them so long to understand?
I think one reason is that God doesn’t fight his battles in the same way that the world does. As human beings we are enamored with earthly power, and believe that having that power is the only way to get things done. So when they saw Jesus defeated by the power of Rome and the Jewish leadership, mocked and dying piteously on a cross, they assumed he had failed. What they didn’t realize was that Jesus had come to fight a completely different battle than they thought, and that by his very “defeat” at the hands of those with earthly power he had won a far greater victory. He had conquered sin and death itself!
It is tempting to assume, with the benefit of hindsight, that we would have caught on before they did. I’m not so sure. Rather, their failure to see what God was doing because they were looking through the lens of earthly power should be a warning to us. We too can become enamored with earthly power, assuming the way to advance the kingdom is to secure that power and make sure it is on our side; but perhaps God is fighting different battles than the ones we assume he is fighting. Perhaps earthly victories and power are not what God is seeking from his people. Jesus demonstrated that, in God’s economy, the way to victory lies through the defeat of the cross, and he calls all who would follow him to walk the same path.
Pastor Jon