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Fall Asleep to The Forgotten 40 Days _ From the Empty Tomb to the Ascension · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Close your eyes. Let the day go. Whatever it brought,
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: whatever it cost you, whatever you are still turning over
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: in your mind right now, as the room goes quiet,
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: let it go. Maybe to night. You are carrying something
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: that does not have a name, not the kind of
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: heavy that comes with a clear cause and a clear solution,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: the kind that simply sits in the chest when the
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: noise finally stops and there is nothing left between you
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: and it. Or maybe you are simply tired, the good
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: kind of tired, where the body is ready and the
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: mind is almost there. Either way, you are here, and
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: that is enough. To night. We are going to walk
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: through a season of the story that is rarely told,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: from beginning to end in one continuous journey forty days.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: The forty days between the empty tomb on Sunday morning
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: and the moment the risen Jesus was lifted into the
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: sky above a hillside outside Jerusalem. Most people know Easter morning,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: the stone rolled away, the angels, the women arriving in
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: the dark with spices in their hands. But the forty
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: days that followed, the appearances, the conversations, the meals shared
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: around fires, the restoration of broken people on quiet shores,
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: the questions asked in locked rooms. Those forty days are
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: almost never told as one unbroken story. Tonight, we will
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: tell them slowly, with room to breathe, with room to
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: feel what the people inside the story must have felt.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Settle in, let your body grow heavy, Let the quiet
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: around you become something kind. The story begins not with triumph.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: It begins with silence, with locked doors and frightened people
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: who do not yet know that everything has already changed.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Let us begin chapter one, the silent Saturday. Before we
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: walk into the forty days, we need to stand for
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: a moment in the day before them, because you cannot
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: fully understand what Sunday morning meant unless you have first
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: sat inside Saturday. The gospel writers move quickly past this day.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: Luke tells us the women rested on the Sabbath according
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: to the commandment. Matthew tells us the chief priests and
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Pharisees went to Pilot to request a guard for the tomb,
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: and then the accounts go quiet. Scripture gives very little
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: detail about what was happening inside the hearts and rooms
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: of the disciples during those long hours. And I think
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: that restraint is itself part of the meaning The silence
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: of Saturday is not a gap in the story. It
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: is the texture of the day, So let us try
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: to feel it. Jerusalem was outwardly still. The Sabbath law
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: required it. No one could travel more than a short distance.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: No markets, no work. The city that had been loud
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: and crowded all week with passover pilgrims had gone quiet,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: in the way a city goes quiet when the law
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: says it must. But inside the room where the disciples
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: were hiding, there was nothing RESTful about that silence. Think
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: about who these people were. They were not distant admirers
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: who had followed Jesus at a safe remove. They were
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: the ones who had left everything. Peter had walked away
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: from his fishing boats on the Sea of Galilee. Matthew
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: had stood up from his tax collector's table and walked
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: out without looking back. James and John had said good
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: bye to their father, standing in the boat with the
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: hired men, and simply gone. For three years, they had
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: walked the roads of Galilee and Judea and the regions
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: beyond with Jesus. They had watched him give sight to
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: a man who had been blind from birth. They had
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: heard him teach in ways that left crowds sitting on
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: hillsides for hours in the open sun, not wanting to leave.
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  Speaker 1: They had seen things they could not explain, and believed
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  Speaker 1: things they could not yet fully articulate. And then Friday happened.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: The arrest in the garden in the middle of the night,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: the trial that moved too fast and too crooked to
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  Speaker 1: be called justice. The crowd that had welcomed Jesus into
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: the city with palm branches just five days earlier, now
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  Speaker 1: calling for his execution in the courtyard of the Roman governor,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: the soldiers, the road out of the city, the hill
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  Speaker 1: the locals called the skull, and then the silence of
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: the tomb. Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish
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  Speaker 1: Council who had followed Jesus quietly and at great personal risk,
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  Speaker 1: had gone to Pilot and asked for the body. He
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  Speaker 1: had taken it down and wrapped it in linen and
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  Speaker 1: laid it in a new tomb cut from rock in
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  Speaker 1: a garden near the place of execution. A large stone
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  Speaker 1: had been rolled against the entrance, and the day had ended.
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  Speaker 1: Now it was Saturday, and the disciples were behind closed doors.
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  Speaker 1: John would later tell us those doors were locked because
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: they were afraid. That detail is important. These were not
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  Speaker 1: people who had processed their grief and arrived at a
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  Speaker 1: stable emotional place. They were people in active fear. The
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  Speaker 1: man they had followed had been executed by the Roman government,
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  Speaker 1: and they were his known associates. The city was still
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  Speaker 1: full of people who had watched it happen. The locked
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  Speaker 1: doors were not weakness. They were the reasonable response of
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  Speaker 1: people who understood exactly what had happened to their teacher
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  Speaker 1: and were not certain they were not next. Now, Matthew
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  Speaker 1: tells us something else about Saturday that is worth sitting
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  Speaker 1: with carefully. He tells us the chief priests and pharisees
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  Speaker 1: went to Pilot and said, Sir, we remember how that
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  Speaker 1: impostor said, while he was still alive, after three days,
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  Speaker 1: I will rise. Therefore, order the tomb to be made
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  Speaker 1: secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and
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  Speaker 1: steal him away and tell the people he has risen
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  Speaker 1: from the dead. Pilot gave them a guard and told
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  Speaker 1: them to make the tomb as secure as they could.
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  Speaker 1: I want you to notice something in that exchange. The
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: people who remembered clearly enough what Jesus had said about
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  Speaker 1: rising on the third day to take formal action against it.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Were not the disciples, They were the chief priests. The
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  Speaker 1: disciples were behind a locked door, not planning a resurrection.
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  Speaker 1: They were grieving. They were afraid. They had not organized
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  Speaker 1: anything at all. The ones who took the predictions seriously
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  Speaker 1: enough to post a guard were the ones trying to
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  Speaker 1: prevent it. And while they were sealing the tomb and
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  Speaker 1: arranging the watch inside the locked room, the disciples were
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  Speaker 1: doing what human beings do when the thing they organized
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: their lives around has suddenly collapsed. They were sitting with it,
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  Speaker 1: trying to understand what was left, trying to decide what
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  Speaker 1: to do next. What were they feeling grief, certainly fear,
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  Speaker 1: as John tells us directly, but I think underneath both
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  Speaker 1: of those there was something harder to name, the particular
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: disorientation of people whose understanding of the world had been
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: built around a person and a promise, and who were
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  Speaker 1: now sitting in the rubble of both. They had believed
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: Jesus was the Messiah, not as an abstract theological position,
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  Speaker 1: as the organizing truth of their lives, the one the
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  Speaker 1: prophets had written about, the deliverer and he was dead
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  Speaker 1: in a borrowed tomb, sealed and guarded by the people
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  Speaker 1: who had killed him. Where does a person go with that?
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  Speaker 1: This is not a question that belongs only to first
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  Speaker 1: century Galilee. The experience of believing something deeply and arriving
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  Speaker 1: at a moment when everything in your circumstances seems to
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  Speaker 1: contradict it is one of the most disorienting things a
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  Speaker 1: human being can go through. The Disciples were not failing
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  Speaker 1: some test of faith by struggling with it. They were
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  Speaker 1: human beings sitting in the dark, and the dark was real.
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  Speaker 1: But here is what only makes sense when you know
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  Speaker 1: what Sunday brought. The resurrection was already try true on
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Saturday morning. The tomb was already empty of any future
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  Speaker 1: that did not include what was coming. The promise was
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  Speaker 1: already in motion. None of that required the Disciples to
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  Speaker 1: know it, or feel it, or hold on to it
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  Speaker 1: with sufficient confidence. The truth of Sunday was not waiting
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  Speaker 1: for Saturday's faith to unlock it. It was simply coming
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  Speaker 1: because it was true. Breathe. There is a kind of
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  Speaker 1: Saturday that almost everyone goes through at some point a season,
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  Speaker 1: when the thing you were counting on has gone quiet,
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  Speaker 1: when the promise you believed has not arrived, and the
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  Speaker 1: silence around it has grown long and heavy, when you
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  Speaker 1: are still in the room with the door locked, and
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  Speaker 1: you are not entirely sure any more what you are
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  Speaker 1: waiting for. The disciples did not know Sunday was coming,
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  Speaker 1: and yet there they were, still together, still in the
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  Speaker 1: same room, not gone, not completely scattered, locked in yes, afraid, yes,
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  Speaker 1: but still with each other, still somehow present, even when
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  Speaker 1: they did not know what they were present for. Sometimes
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  Speaker 1: staying in the room is the only faithfulness available, and
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  Speaker 1: sometimes it is enough. The night was long, the doors
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  Speaker 1: were locked, the tomb was sealed and guarded, and the
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  Speaker 1: morning was already on its way rest. Now you do
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  Speaker 1: not have to resolve to night what is still unresolved.
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  Speaker 1: You do not have to feel Sunday in order for
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  Speaker 1: Sunday to be coming. The silence of Saturday is real,
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  Speaker 1: and it does not last. Chapter two. Before the sun rose,
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: it is still dark. The city of Jerusalem is asleep.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: The streets that had been crowded and loud all week
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: have gone quiet. The fires along the roads have burned
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  Speaker 1: to coals. The sky above the Judean hills is that
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  Speaker 1: deep and particular shade that belongs to the hour before dawn,
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  Speaker 1: when the darkness is at its most complete and the
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  Speaker 1: first suggestion of light has not yet found the horizon
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  Speaker 1: and outside the walls. In a garden near the place
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  Speaker 1: of execution, the tomb is sealed and guarded. Matthew tells
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: us a guard had been posted at the request of
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  Speaker 1: the chief priests. The text does not specify how many
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: soldiers were stationed there. Roman military practice typically assigned multiple
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: soldiers to a nighttime watch, but the gospel account leaves
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: the number unstated. What it does tell us clearly is
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: that the seal of the Roman governor of Judea was
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: on that stone. Breaking a Roman governor's seal without authorization
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: carried severe consequences. This was not a casual arrangement, so
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  Speaker 1: the stone was in place, the seal was intact, the
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  Speaker 1: garden was quiet, and inside the tomb, wrapped in linen,
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  Speaker 1: laid on a stone bench cut from the rock, was
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  Speaker 1: the body of a man who had been dead since
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Friday afternoon. Every human effort available in that moment had
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: been directed toward one outcome, keeping a dead man in
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: the ground. The institutional weight of both the Roman government
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  Speaker 1: and the Jewish religious leadership working together toward a single goal.
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  Speaker 1: The Stone, the seal, the guard, the locked doors of
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  Speaker 1: disciples who had no plan and no intention of changing
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  Speaker 1: any of it. All of it pointed in one direction, finality.
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  Speaker 1: And then something happened that no one saw. This is
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  Speaker 1: the detail the gospel writers do not give us, and
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  Speaker 1: I think it is worth pausing on that choice, because
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  Speaker 1: it was a choice. Not one of the four accounts
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  Speaker 1: describes the moment of the resurrection itself. Not one of
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  Speaker 1: them takes us inside the tomb and shows us what
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  Speaker 1: happened when breath returned and life came back. Matthew tells
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  Speaker 1: us there was a great earthquake, that an angel of
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  Speaker 1: the Lord descended from heaven with an appearance like lightning
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  Speaker 1: and clothing white as snow, and that the guards shook
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  Speaker 1: with fear and became like dead men. But the resurrection itself,
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  Speaker 1: the actual moment when death reversed, no human being witnessed.
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  Speaker 1: No one was there to see it happened, And I
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  Speaker 1: think that silence is intentional. The resurrection was not staged
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  Speaker 1: for an audience. It was not a performance designed to
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  Speaker 1: be observed and verified in real time. It was a
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  Speaker 1: sovereign act, quiet and complete, in the dark before any
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: witness arrived. The stone was not rolled away to let
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: Jesus out. The Gospel of John makes clear that the
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: risen Jesus could appear in rooms where the doors were locked.
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  Speaker 1: He did not need an opening to leave the tomb.
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  Speaker 1: The stone was moved so that people who came later
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  Speaker 1: could go in and see that he was gone. The
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  Speaker 1: first witnesses did not see the resurrection, they saw the
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  Speaker 1: evidence of it. Now consider the soldiers. Matthew tells us
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  Speaker 1: that some of them went into the city after it
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  Speaker 1: happened and reported to the chief priests what had a hered.
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  Speaker 1: And the chief priests gathered with the elders and agreed
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  Speaker 1: to give the soldiers a large sum of money. They
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  Speaker 1: told them to say that the disciples had come in
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  Speaker 1: the night and stolen the body while they slept. Think
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: carefully about that for a moment. A Roman soldier who
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: fell asleep on guard duty did not voluntarily report it
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: to civilian religious leaders. The consequences of sleeping on watch
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: were severe. You did not walk up to any one
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  Speaker 1: and say, we fell asleep at our post. The fact
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: that these soldiers went to the chief priests rather than
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: trying to quietly disappear. Suggests that what they encountered was
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: so far outside anything they had trained for that they
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: did not know what else to do. And the chief
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: priests responded by offering them something extraordinary, protection from the
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: governor himself. They told the soldiers that if this reached
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: pilot's ears, they would intervene and keep them out of trouble.
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  Speaker 1: Religious leaders of an occupied nation were offering Roman soldiers
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: immunity from the Roman govern That is not a small
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: thing to offer, and it tells us something important. The
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: chief priest did not dispute that the tomb was empty,
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: They disputed the reason. And the reason they offered required
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: people to believe that a group of grieving, frightened, hiding
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  Speaker 1: disciples had somehow overcome a Roman guard in the night,
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  Speaker 1: rolled away a sealed stone, removed a wrapt body, and
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: disappeared without being seen, while all the soldiers slept through
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: the entire operation, and yet somehow knew exactly who had
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: done it. It was not a convincing story, but it
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: was the only one available that kept the empty tomb
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: from meaning what it meant. Now, let us look at
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: what was actually inside that tomb when the first witnesses arrived.
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: John tells us that when he bent down and looked in,
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: he saw the linen wrappings lying there. Then Peter arrived
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: and went inside and saw the wrappings and also the
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: face cloth that had been on Jesus's head. John records
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: specific detail about that cloth. It was not lying with
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: the other rappings. It was set apart in a place
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: by itself. John notes this with the precision of someone
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  Speaker 1: who was there and has never forgotten what he saw.
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  Speaker 1: He remembered the position of that cloth decades later when
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: he wrote his account as an old man. Scholars have
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: discussed this detail across many centuries, and I want to
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: be honest with you about what the text does and
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: does not give us. Some have suggested symbolic meanings rooted
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: in various ancient customs, but those connections are not established
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: with scholarly confidence. What the text itself does is simply
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: noted with care. John saw it. It was distinct, It
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: was in its own place. What we can say more
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: broadly is that the scene Peter and John encountered did
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: not have the character of a hurried theft. The rappings
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: were still there, the face cloth was set apart. Whether
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: or not that carries deliberate symbolic weight, the scene at
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: LEAs suggests order rather than haste. That is worth noting
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: while holding the observation loosely. The sun is rising now
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: over the Judean hills. The light is coming the way
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  Speaker 1: it always comes, without announcing itself, without asking permission, simply arriving.
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  Speaker 1: And on the roads leading into Jerusalem, a group of
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: women are walking toward the garden. They are carrying spices
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: and perfume. They are going to do what women in
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: that culture did for the dead. They are going to
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: anoint the body of the man they loved. They do
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  Speaker 1: not know what they are about to find. They do
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  Speaker 1: not know that the darkness is already over, but it
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: is breathe. Let that image rest over you tonight, not
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: as a doctrine to defend or a fact to argue,
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: simply as a room that was vacated, a death that
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: did not hold a stone, moved not to let someone out,
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  Speaker 1: but to let others in to see that he was gone.
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  Speaker 1: The two is empty, and a woman is walking toward
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: it in the early morning light, not yet knowing that
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: the grief she carries is about to meet something It
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: has no category for rest. Now the sun is almost
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: up and the story is only beginning. Chapter three, Mary
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: at the tomb. Her name was Mary, not Mary the
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: mother of Jesus. This was Mary of Magdalah, a town
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, a
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: woman whose past we know very little about, beyond one
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: detail that Luke records early in his gospel, Jesus had
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: cast seven demons out of her. We do not know
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: what her life had looked like before that moment. We
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: do not know what the people of Magdalah thought of her,
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  Speaker 1: how old she was, whether she had family near by.
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  Speaker 1: What we know is that after Jesus she followed him
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  Speaker 1: all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem, all the way
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  Speaker 1: to the cross, where John tells us she was standing
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  Speaker 1: and watching. While most of the male disciples had already
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: scattered into the city, she had not left, and on
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Sunday morning, in the dark, before the sun was fully up,
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: she was one of the first to the tomb. John
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: focuses his account on Mary specifically, and I think he
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: does that because what happened to her in that garden
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: is one of the most intimate moments in the entire
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: resurrection narrative. It is not a moment of grand proclamation
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: or theological announcement to a crowd. It is quieter than that.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: It is the moment between one grieving woman and the
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: person she had lost. She arrived and saw that the
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: stone had been removed from the entrance. That was enough.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: She did not go in. She did not wait to
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: look more carefully. She turned and ran. She went to
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: Simon Peter and to the other disciple, the one Jesus loved,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: And what she said to them tells us exactly where
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: her mind was in that moment. She said, they have
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: not know where they have laid him. That sentence is grief,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: not wonder. It is not the excitement of someone who
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: suspects something miraculous. It is the anguish of someone who
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: believes that, even in death, the person she loved has
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: been taken from her. First the cross. Now this, even
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: the tomb is not safe. Even the small mercy of
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: knowing where he was laid, has been removed. Peter and
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: John ran to the tomb. They went in. They saw
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: the wrappings, They saw the face cloth set apart, and
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: then they left and went back to where they were staying,
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: and Mary stayed. Every one else went back. Mary stayed.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: She stood outside the tomb and wept, and through her tears,
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: she bent down and looked inside, and she saw two
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  Speaker 1: angels in white, seated where the body of Jesus had been,
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: one at the head and one at the feet. They
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: asked her, woman, why are you weeping? And she gave
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: them the same answer she had given Peter and John.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: They have taken away my lord, and I do not
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: know where they have laid him. She turned round and
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: saw a man standing there, and she did not know
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: it was Jesus. I want to stay inside this moment
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: because it is easy to move past it, and it
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: deserves to be felt. Why did she not recognize him?
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: The gospel accounts note this with several of the resurrection
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: appearances on the road to immaas two disciples will walk
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: for miles with Jesus without knowing who he is. Here,
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Mary looks directly at him and thinks he is the gardener.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: Something about the resurrection body was both continuous with who
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: Jesus had been and different from it in ways. The
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: text does not fully explain real enough to touch, changed
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: enough to be mistaken for some one else. But I
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: think something else was also at work in this moment.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: Mary was not looking for a living Jesus. She was
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: looking for a dead one. She had come to the
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: garden to anoint a body. Her grief had already shaped
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: what she was able to see. She was scanning the
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: garden for some one who had been taken, not for
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: someone who was standing right in front of her. The
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: man she thought was the gardener asked her woman, why
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: are you weeping? Whom are you seeking? And she said, sir,
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: if you have carried him away, tell me where you
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: have laid him, and I will take him away. I
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: will take him away. She said this alone in a garden,
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: offering to carry a body herself if it meant she
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: could find him. That is not a small thing to say.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: That is the kind of love that does not stop
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: to calculate what it is capable of. It simply reaches
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: toward the thing it cannot bear to lose. And then
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Jesus said one word. He said her name Mary, and
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: she knew. John records her response in Aramaic Raboni, which
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: he translates for his readers as teacher, I have read
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: this moment many times, and it does not grow smaller
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: with familiarity. It grows larger, because all of Easter morning,
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: the earthquake, the angel, the stone rolled away, the grave,
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: clothes left behind, narrows in this garden to a single
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: word spoken to a single weeping woman, her name, not
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: an announcement, not a theological declaration broadcast to the crowd.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: Anameh spoken the way only he could speak it, and
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: she knew here is something worth holding tonight. Jesus did
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: not appear first to the high priest. He did not
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: appear in the temple courts, or before the Sanhedrin, or
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: at the palace of the Roman governor. He appeared first
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: to a woman who had once been possessed by seven demons,
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: a woman who could not offer legally recognized testimony in
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: a first century Jewish court, a woman whom the structures
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: of her world had largely defined by her past rather
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: than her person. If some one were constructing a resurrection
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: account designed to be maximally credible in that culture, this
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: is not the choice they would have made. You choose
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: the most authoritative witnesses available. You choose people whose testimony
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: the establishment would be forced to take seriously. Jesus chose Mary,
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: and this choice is not incidental to the story, it
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: is woven into the heart of it. The first commissioned
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: witness of the resurrection was the person that nearly every
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: structure of power in her society would have passed over
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: without a second glance. She saw him first, she heard
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: her name first, She was sent first. He told her
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: not to cling to him, that he had not yet
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: ascended to the Father, and he gave her a message
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: to carry. Go to my brothers and say to them,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: I am ascending to my Father and your father, to
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: my God and your God. And Mary Magdalen went and
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: told the disciples, I have seen the Lord. That sentence
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: is the first proclamation of the resurrection in human history,
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: spoken in a garden on a Sunday morning by a
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: woman the world had underestimated, carrying news the world was
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: not ready for. Breathe. If you have ever felt like
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: the person at the edges of things, if you have
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: ever carried a history that you believed put certain doors
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: permanently beyond your reach, If you have ever stood somewhere weeping,
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: convinced that the last thing you had left has now
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: been taken too. He knows your name, not a general
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: announcement to whoever is listening. Your name, the specific and
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: unrepeatable name that belongs only to you, spoken into whatever
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: garden you are standing in to night, the way he
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: spoke it to Mary on that morning, when the world
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: was still deciding what to make of an empty tomb.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: The resurrection did not begin with a press conference. It
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: began with a name spoken to one weeping woman who
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: had stayed when every one else had gone home, and
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: the name speaking has not stopped since rest. Now Mary
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: is running to tell the others the city is waking.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: Two men are about to leave their room and run
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: toward a garden. You are known here, just as she
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: was known by name, Chapter four, The Running Men. There
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: is something about the way John tells this part of
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: the story that feels unmistakably honest. He tells us that
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: he outran Peter. That detail did not need to be there.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: It contributes nothing to any theological argument. It proves no doctrine.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: It is simply the kind of small physical fact that
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: lodges itself in a person's memory when the moment around
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: it is large enough. Decades later, writing his account. As
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: an old man, John still remembered that he had been faster.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: He got there first, but Peter went in first. Mary
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: had come to them with her news. She believed in
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: that moment that someone had taken the body. She said,
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: they have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: we do not know where they have laid him. And
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: something in those words pulled both men out the door
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: and into the streets. John tells us he ran. He
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: arrived at the tomb and bent down and looked in.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: He saw the linen wrappings lying there. He saw the
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: face cloth set apart in its own place, and he
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: stopped at the entrance. He did not go in. He
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: does not explain why. Maybe it was the particular weight
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: of standing at the mouth of a tomb that should
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: have held a body and finding only cloth. Maybe something
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: in him needed a moment before his legs could carry
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: him forward. The text simply tells us that he saw,
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: and he stopped. Then Peter arrived. We know enough about
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: Peter by this point in the story to know that
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: he was not a man who stopped at doorways. He
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: was the one who had pulled out a sword in
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: the garden during the arrest. He was the one who
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: had followed the arrest party all the way to the
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: courtyard of the High Priests while the others scattered. He
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: was the one who had stepped out of a boat
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: on to water in the middle of a storm because
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: he wanted to walk toward Jesus. Peter went straight in.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: He saw the linen wrappings, he saw the face cloth
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: set apart, and then John entered as well. And what
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: John says about himself in the next sentence is quietly extraordinary.
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: He says he saw and believed. That is the whole sentence.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: He entered the empty tomb, he saw what was there,
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: and he believed. And then immediately he clarifies, for as
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: yet they did not understand the scripture that Jesus must
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: rise from the dead. He believed before he understood. The
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: faith arrived, before the theological framework had caught up with
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: the experience. Something in what he saw opened in him
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: before his mind had processed what it meant. And then
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: there is Peter. John does not say Peter believed. Luke
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: gives us one additional detail that Peter went home marveling
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: at what had happened, not believing, marveling the evidence was real,
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: and it was turning over in him as he walked
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: back through the streets of Jerusalem, but it had not
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: yet landed anywhere he could call belief. Same morning, Samum,
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: same grave clothes, two different men walking away, with two
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: different things happening inside them. John believed immediately and did
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: not yet understand. Peter marveled without yet believing. I think
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: the Gospel accounts preserved both responses deliberately because they tell
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: us something true about the way people actually encounter the
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: evidence of the resurrection. It does not produce identical reactions
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: in everyone who stands before it. Some people find that
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: something opens in them quickly before they can explain it.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: Others carry the evidence longer, turning it over before it
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: resolves into anything they would call belief. The resurrection holds
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: both those responses. It is not diminished by Thomas needing
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: more time than John. It is not threatened by Peter's
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: marveling being different from John's believing it is true. Regardless
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: of the pace at which different people arrive at recognizing it,
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: neither of them stayed. Both Peter and John left the
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: tomb and went back. Mary was the one who remained,
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: and Mary who stayed in grief outside the empty tomb,
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: not investigating, but simply refusing to leave, was the one
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: who heard her name spoken in the garden. Let that
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: restin you for a moment. The investigation reached its conclusion,
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: and the investigators went home. The woman who stayed in grief,
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: who had no agenda beyond refusing to abandon the place
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: where he had been laid, was the one who encountered him.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: Not always, not as a rule that can be applied mechanically,
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: but in this story, on this morning, the encounter came
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: not at the end of the careful examination, but in
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: the daying breathe. Two men are walking back through the
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: streets of Jerusalem, now, one with something opening inside him,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: one with something turning over inside him, both of them real,
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: both of them loved, both of them about to have
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: their lives changed beyond anything they can yet imagine. You
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: do not need to be John tonight. You are allowed
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: to be Peter, walking home with the evidence still moving
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: in your chest and no clean conclusion. Yet you are
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: allowed to be in the marveling place without being in
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: the believing place. The story is not finished with Peter,
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: and it is not finished with you. Rest now somewhere else.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: On a road heading away from Jerusalem, two people are
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: walking in a different direction entirely. They are walking home.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: They have given up, and they are about to have
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: company for the journey. Chapter five, The Road to Immaeus.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: They leaving. That is the first thing Luke tells us
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: about them. They were going to a village called Imaeus,
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: about seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking with
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: each other about everything that had happened. Seven miles on
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: foot two to three hours of walking, depending on the
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: pace and the terrain, A long time to talk. And
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: these two had a great deal to carry, and nowhere
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: particular to be when they set it down. We know
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: the name of one of them, Cleopas. The other is
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: never identified. Scholars have speculated across many centuries without arriving
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: at any firm conclusion. Some have suggested it was his wife.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: Others have proposed various disciples. The text does not tell us,
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: and I think that open space may be intentional. The
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: unnamed traveler is a place the reader is quietly invited
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: to step into. They were walking and talking when Luke
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: tells us that Jesus himself came near and began going
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: with them, but their eyes were from recognizing him. That
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: phrase deserves attention. Luke does not say they failed to
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: notice him or were too distracted to look carefully. He
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: says their eyes were kept from recognizing him. Something about
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: this encounter was being held a particular way. They were
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: going to have this conversation without knowing who they were
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: having it with, and the reason for that. As the
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: story unfolds becomes clear. Jesus asked them what they were discussing,
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: and they stopped. Luke uses a specific word. They stood still,
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: not slowed down, stopped. The grief in them was heavy
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: enough to stop their feet mid road. And Cleopus said
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: something that carries the full weight of disappointed hope. He said,
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: know the things that have happened there in these days?
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: There is something almost tender about that question. They assumed
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: that any one passing through Jerusalem that week must know
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: that the event whence they were carrying were so enormous.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: They had filled the whole city that it was impossible
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: to be near any of it and remain untouched. Jesus said,
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: what things? And they told him. They told him about
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in deed and word
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: before God and all the people. They told him how
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: the chief priests and rulers had delivered him up to
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: be condemned to death and crucified him. They described the
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: days that had passed since then, and then they said
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: the sentence that I find more honest than almost anything
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: else in the New Testament. They said, but we had
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. We
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: had hoped past tense. The hope was already in the
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: past tense. It had been a living thing, and now
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: it was something they were describing to a stranger on
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: a road, using the grammar of things that did not
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: work out. Not we hope, Not, we are trying to
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: still believe. We had hoped the verb form of a
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: closed chapter. And then they added something that shows how
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: close they were to the answer without being able to
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: see it. They said some women in their group had
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: astonished them. The women had gone to the tomb early
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: that morning and had not found the body. They had
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: come back saying they had seen a vision of angels
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: who said he was alive, and some of those with
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: them had gone to the tomb and found it exactly
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: as the women had described. But him they did not see.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: They had the testimony, they had the report of the
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: empty tomb, they had Mary's account of seeing him alive,
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: and none of it had been enough to turn the
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: past tense back into the present. The hope had died,
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: and these remarkable facts had not yet been enough to
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: bring it back to life in them. Jesus said something
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: to them that must have surprised them in its directness.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: He said, Oh, foolish ones, and slow of heart, to
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: believe all that the prophets have spoken? Was it not
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: into his glory? And then, beginning with Moses, and going
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: through all the prophets, he interpreted for them in all
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: the scriptures, the things concerning himself. Try to feel what
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: that walk was like. Two hours on a road with
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: a stranger whose voice was opening the scriptures in a
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: way they had never quite heard before, every passage falling
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: into place, the pattern running through the entire story of
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: God's dealings with Israel, arriving now at its completion in
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: the events of the very week they were describing to him.
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: They did not know who was teaching them, but something
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: was happening inside them as he spoke. They would say
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: it to each other afterward. Did not our hearts burn
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: within us while he talked to us on the road,
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: while he opened to us the scriptures? Their hearts burned,
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: not an intellectual recognition, not the click of a fact
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: falling into place, a burning something warming from the inside
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: while the words reached them, and the meaning began to
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: open up when they reached Amaas Jesus moved as if
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: he intended to continue on. And this detail matters, He
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: did not announce himself. He did not impose himself on
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: their evening. He let them choose, and they urged him strongly.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: Stay with us, they said, for it is toward evening
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: and the day is now far spent. Stay with us.
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: He went in to stay with them. They sat down
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: to eat, and Jesus took the bread. He blessed it,
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: he broke it. He gave it to them, and their
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: from their sight. The moment of recognition was also the
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: moment of disappearance. They saw who he was, and he
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: was gone, and they were left at a table with
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: broken bread in front of them, and their hearts still burning,
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: and two hours of conversation re arranging itself into something
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: entirely new. They got up that sete. The road back
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: to Jerusalem was dark, and it was seven miles. They
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: walked it anyway. Now, let me say the thing about
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: this story that I think matters most. Jesus walked seven
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: miles with two people who did not recognize him. He
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: let them tell him about their lost hope in the
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: past tense, without interrupting. He let them explain the situation
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: as though he were a stranger who had missed the news.
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: He walked with them inside their grief and their confusion.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: Before he opened the scriptures, and before he broke the bread.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: He did not begin with a correction. He began with
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: a question, what are you discussing? And he listened to
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: the answer. The burning in their hearts was happening before
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: they knew who was causing it. The meaning was entering
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: them before the recognition came. Something was being done in
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: them on that road that they could not yet name
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: and were not yet ready to receive in its fullness.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: He walks the roads we are leaving on, not only
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: the roads we are traveling towards something. The roads we
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: are leaving on the roads of departure, the roads walked
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: when the hope has moved into the past tense and
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem is behind you and you are heading somewhere that
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: feels smaller than where you started. He walks those roads, too,
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: And sometimes he does not announce himself. Sometimes he simply
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: falls into step beside you and asks what you are
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: talking about, and listens, and then, when the moment is right,
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: begins very quietly to open something. Breathe rest now in
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: that Cleopus and his companion are already on the road
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: back to Jerusalem, moving fast through the dark, carrying something
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: they cannot keep to themselves. The grief that was in
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: the past tense is in the present tense again, and
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: it is no longer grief. The doors of the room
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: in the city are about to open from the inside.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: Sleep gently. Whatever road you have been walking, you have
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: not been walking it alone. The one who keeps pace
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: beside you knows the way home. Chapter six. Behind locked Doors,
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: the doors were locked, John tells us they were locked
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: because the disciples were afraid. Luke tells us the disciples
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: were gathered together. Both of those details together make a
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: picture worth sitting inside. Before anything else happens. In this chapter,
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: it is Sunday evening, the same day Mary had found
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: the empty tomb before dawn. The same day, Peter and
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: John had run to investigate. The same day, two people
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: had walked seven miles to Amaas and seven miles back.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: The day had been full of reports and extraordinary accounts,
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: and yet here, as evening settled over Jerusalem, the doors
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: were still locked. Think about what that tells us. The
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: disciples had heard Mary's testimony. She had told them she
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: had seen the Lord. They had the report from the
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: women who had encountered angels at the tomb. Peter and
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: John had seen the empty tomb with their own eyes.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: And now Cleopus and his companion had just arrived back
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: from Immaus, breathless and burning with what had happened on
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: the road, and the doors were still locked. This is
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: not a failure of faith. This is human beings doing
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: what human beings do when the world has broken open
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: around them and they have not yet found their footing
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: in the new reality. The testimony was accumulating, the evidence
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: was real, and their bodies were still in a locked
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: room because fear does not release its grip simply because
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: the facts have changed. Fear is like that, It holds on.
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: It keeps the doors bolted, even as the reasons for
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: bolting them begin to dissolve. The disciples were not cowards.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: They were people in the aftermath of a trauma they
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: had not chosen, with no institutional protection, no plan, and
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: a government that had just executed their teacher. The doors
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: were locked, and that is exactly where Jesus chose to come.
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: John tells us he came and stood among them. He
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: did not knock, He did not wait for someone to
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: open a door. He came and stood among them. He
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: was not there, and then he was there, in a
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: room with locked doors and frightened people. He simply appeared,
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: and the first thing he said was this, peace be
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: with you. I want to hold those words carefully because
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: they are easy to read as a greeting, and they
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: were something much larger than that. The Greek word used
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: here is irene, which carries the Hebrew word shalom within it,
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: and shalom in the tradition these disciples had grown up
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: inside was not simply the absence of conflict. It was
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: the word for wholeness. Completeness, the condition of a person
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: or a community, when everything is as it should be,
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: when the brokenness that runs through human life is being healed,
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: when the separation between God and his people is being restored.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: The prophets had used this word to describe what the
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: coming One would bring. It was the word for the
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: world being set right. Jesus walked into a room of frightened, grieving,
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: confused people who had spent three days watching everything fall apart,
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: and the first word out of his mouth was the
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: single word that addressed everything they were carrying. Not I
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: told you this would happen. Not where were you when
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: they arrested me? Not let us discuss what went wrong? Peace,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: be at peace. The wholeness you have lost is being
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: returned right now in this room, in the middle of
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: your fear, Not as a feeling you have to manufacture,
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: as a gift being placed in front of you. Then
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: he showed them his hands and his side. This was
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: the answer to the question every one of them had
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: in their chest but had not yet spoken aloud. Is
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: it really him? Is there continuity between the Jesus who
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: died on Friday and the one standing in this way room?
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: Is this the same person. The wounds were the answer.
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: The resurrection had not erased what happened on the cross.
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: The risen body carried the marks of it. He was
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: the same. He had gone through death and come through it,
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: not around it, not pasted it, but through it. And
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: he was still himself, still the same hands, still the
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: same side, the marks still there. John tells us the
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Glad. That
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: word is carrying far more than it appears to on
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: the surface. These were people who had been in locked
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: door grief for three days, who had believed in someone
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: and watched him die, and had spent those days trying
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: to figure out what to do with the ruins of
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: everything they had built their lives around, and now he
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: was standing in front of them. Glad is probably the
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: smallest possible word for what moved through that room. Then
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: Jesus extended what was happening beyond the reunion. He said,
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: as the Father has sent me, even so I am
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: sending you. The mission was not canceled. The death had
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: not been the end of what he was doing in
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: the world. It had been the center of it. And
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: now standing in a locked room on Sunday evening. He
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: was passing the mission forward as the Father sent me.
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: So I send you. Consider what the Father's sending had
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: looked like for Jesus. It had looked like ordinary years
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: in Nazareth. It had looked like roads and meals and
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: the company of people the respectable world had written off.
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: It had looked like a garden and a trial, and
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: a cross and a tomb, and now a locked room
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: on a Sunday evening with frightened people who had not
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: yet fully understood any of it. The shape of the
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: sending was not prestige or power or institutional recognition. It
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: was presents going to people, the same pattern now passed
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: to them. Then he breathed on them. John uses a
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: very specific Greek word here, the same word found in
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: the ancient Greek translation of Genesis when God breathed into
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: Adam the breath of life. Jesus breathed on his disciples
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: and said, receive the Holy Spirit. The image is deliberate.
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: Something new was beginning in this room breath life, the
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: same movement from the beginning of everything happening again here
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: at the beginning of something new breathe. One person was
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: missing that evening Thomas. We do not know where he was.
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: The text does not say, but he was not there
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: when Jesus came. And when the others found him and
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: told him what had happened, he said something that has
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: attached his name to a single word ever since. Unless
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: I see in his hands the mark of the nails,
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: and place my finger into the mark of the nails,
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: We will walk with Thomas carefully in the next chapter,
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: but I want to end this one where it began.
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: The doors were locked, and Jesus came anyway, not when
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: they had worked through their fear and found the courage
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: to open the doors, not when their faith had reached
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: a sufficient level, not when they had gotten themselves into
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: a better emotional state. He came to them where they
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: were behind the locked door, in the dark, afraid, and
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: his first word was peace. I think about the locked
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: rooms I have kept, the places inside that I have
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: bolted because what might come in seemed like too much
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: to face, The grief kept in the dark because looking
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: at it directly felt impossible, The questions locked away because
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: I was not sure I could survive the answers He
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: does not wait outside those rooms. He comes and stands
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: in the middle of them. Not when you have gotten
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: the door open, not when you are ready in the
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: locked room, in the fear, in the grief, in the
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: unanswered question, in the dark of Sunday evening, when the
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: day has been full of testimony that has not yet
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: become certainty, And he says the one word that cannot
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: be manufactured by any circumstance, and cannot be earned by
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: any effort. Peace, Your peace given, not because you found
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: your way to it, but because he walked through the
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: locked door to bring it to you. Rest. Now the
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: room is still, he is standing in the middle of it.
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: The night is quiet, and so is he. Chapter seven, Thomas,
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: one week past, seven days between the Sunday evening when
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: Jesus appeared in the locked room and the next Sunday
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: when he came again, seven days in which Thomas lived
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: with something that deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: We call him doubting Thomas. The label has become so
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: fixed in common usage that it now exists outside any
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: religion context. A doubting Thomas is simply any one who
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: refuses to accept a claim without direct evidence, and the
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: phrase carries a faint undertone of criticism, as if Thomas
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: were a cautionary example of faith falling short at the
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: critical moment. I do not think that reading is fair
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: to him, and I do not think it is what
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: John's gospel intends. Consider Thomas as a full person before
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: we consider him as a theological illustration. He was one
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: of the twelve. He had followed Jesus through the same
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: three years as the others. He had heard the same teaching,
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: seen the same works, walked the same dusty roads. John
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: gives us two other glimpses of him in his gospel
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: that are worth holding before we reach the locked room.
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: The first is when Jesus announced he was returning to
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: Judea despite the clear danger there. The disciples tried to
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: talk him out of it, and Thomas said, let us
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: also go that we may die with him. That is
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: not the state of a timid or faithless person. That
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: is some one who had decided that wherever Jesus went,
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: he would go, including to death if it came to that.
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: The second is at the Last Supper, when Jesus told
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: his disciples he was going to prepare a place for them,
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: and that they knew the way to where he was going.
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: Thomas was the one who said, honestly, Lord, we do
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: not know where you are going. How can we know
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: the way? Which is the question that led Jesus to
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: say I Am the Way and the Truth and the Life.
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: Thomas asked the honest question that made one of the
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: most important declarations of Jesus possible. This is the man
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: who was not in the room on Sunday evening. This
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: is the man who came back to the group afterward
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: and heard their report and said what he said. Unless
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: I see, unless I touch, unless my own hands can
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: reach into the evidence of what you are telling me,
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: I will not believe. Now Here is something worth pausing on.
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: The other disciples had not believed base on the testimony
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: of others either. They had believed because Jesus had appeared
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: to them directly. They had seen the wounds, they had
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: heard him breathe on them. Their faith was not built
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: on trusting some one else's account. It was built on
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: direct encounter. Thomas was not asking for something different from
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: what they had received. He was asking for the same thing,
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: and eight days later Jesus gave it. To him. The
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them.
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: This time, the doors were locked again, and Jesus came
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: and stood among them again and said, peace be with you.
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: And then he turned specifically to Thomas, he said, put
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: your finger here and see my hands. Put out your
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: hand and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve,
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: but believe he knew exactly what Thomas had said. He
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: had not been visibly present in the room when Thomas
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: said it, and yet he knew. He came back a
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: week later with the precise answer to the precise condition
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: Thomas had set. Not a lecture about the virtue of
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: believing without seeing, not a rebuke for the weak of
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: holding out. Here are my hands, Here is my side.
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: Here is exactly what you asked for. And now here
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: is the turn in the story that I think matters most.
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: We do not know whether Thomas actually touched the wounds.
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: John does not tell us that he did. What John
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: tells us is what Thomas said. He said, my Lord
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: and my God. That is the most direct, the most complete,
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: the most theologically full confession of who Jesus is in
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: the entire Gospel of John. Not I believe you are
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: risen not I accept that you are the Messiah, my
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: Lord and my God. Eight words that said everything the
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: man the world remembers as the doubter produced the deepest
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: confession of any of them. John was writing his Gospel
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: for readers who were grappling with serious questions about the
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: full identity of Jesus, and he placed this confession from
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: the one who had held out longest and set the
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: most explicit conditions. At the climax of his resurrection account.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: Thomas the skeptic became Thomas the confessor, and the confession
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: came with a clarity that no one else in the
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: narrative had quite matched. Then Jesus said something that looked
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: past Thomas, past the locked room, past the first century entirely.
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: He said, have you believed because you have seen me?
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: He looked through Thomas at every one who had come after,
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: every one who would hear this account without being in
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: that room, every one who would read about the empty
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: tomb and the grave clothes, and the appearances and the wounds,
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: and would have to decide what to make of it
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: all without being able to reach out their own hands
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: and touch the evidence. That is the blessing, not a
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: lesser blessing, not aolation prize for people who missed the
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: better version of faith, a specific and named blessing for
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: those whose belief is built on testimony. Rather than touch.
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: You and I live inside that blessing. We are the
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: ones who have not seen. We are not at a disadvantage.
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: Thomas needed to see before he could say, My Lord
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: and my God. We are invited to say it first
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: and discover that the seeing informs that do not look
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: like nail marks in hands, follows in its own time
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: and its own way. Breathe, let me say something about
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: doubt tonight that I hope lands gently. Doubt is not
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: the opposite of faith. They are not enemies standing on
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: opposite sides of a line. They are more like companions
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: on the same road, one pulling forward and one pulling back,
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: neither one finally decisive on its own. Thomas carried his
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: doubt all the way back to the room with the others.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: He did not isolate himself. He did not disappear to
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: his certainty that the others were wrong. He stayed with
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: the community. He kept showing up. He was in the
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: room when Jesus came back. His doubt did not keep
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: him from the encounter. It kept him honest until the
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: encounter came. If you are in a season of doubt
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: to night, you are not outside the story. Thomas was
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: not outside the story. He was in the room with
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: the doors locked, the same as every one else. His
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: questions were still live and unresolved when Jesus walked through
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: that door and addressed them directly, personally and without any criticism.
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: For the week of waiting, stay in the room, keep
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: showing up, keep asking the honest questions, even the ones
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: that feel almost too honest to say out loud. Thomas's
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: question at the last Supper produced one of the most
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: important declarations Jesus ever made. His condition in the locked
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: room produced the deepest confession in John's gospel. The honest
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: question does not close the door. Sometimes it is the
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: opening through which the most important answer arrives. He is
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: not afraid of your conditions. He met Thomas's without hesitation
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: and without rebuke. He will meet yours. Early tradition tells
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: us that Thomas eventually carried the message further than almost
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: any of the others traveling east through Persia, and, according
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: to that tradition, as far as India, where Christian communities
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: still trace their origin to his arrival. The man the
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: world remembers as the doubter, may have traveled further with
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: the news than any of them. Doubt when it is honest,
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: when it stays in the room, when it keeps asking
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: rather than closing down, does not end the journey. Sometimes
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: in the hands of the one who meets it without fear,
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: it begins the journey. Sleep gently to night. Whatever is
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: still unresolved, whatever conditions you have set that have not
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: yet been answered, you are not required to have it
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: sorted before morning. Stay in the room. The doors are locked,
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: and he walks through lock doors. He will find you.
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: He always does. Chapter eight, Breakfast on the shore. They
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: had gone back to fishing. That is the first thing
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: John tells us at the opening of the final chapter
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: of his gospel. Simon Peter said to the others, I
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: am going fishing, and they said, we will go with you.
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: Seven of them went out and got into the boat.
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: It is easy to read that as simple logistics men
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: who were waiting and needed something to do with their
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: hands while the days passed, But I think it carries
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: more weight than that. Jesus had appeared to them twice
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: in the locked room in Jerusalem. He had shown them
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: his wounds, he had breathed on them, and commissioned them.
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: And here they were back in Galilee, back on the water,
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: doing the thing their bodies had known how to do
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: since they were boys growing up on the shore of
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: this lake. Why. Part of the answer is straightforward. Jesus
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: had told them to go to Galilee. The angel at
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: the tomb had passed that instruction through the women on
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: Sunday morning, so they had come north, back to the
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: landscape that had shaped them before any of this began.
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: They were waiting for what came next, and they did
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: not know exactly when it would come. But I think
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: there was something else in it too, something more human
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: than obedience to an instruction. When the thing you are
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: living inside of becomes too large for the mind to
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: hold continuously, sometimes the only relief is doing something ordinary
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: with your hands, something familiar, something that requires just enough
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: attention to keep you occupied without demanding that you resolve
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: the enormous, unresolved thing sitting at the center of your chest.
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: They went fishing because the lake was there, and the
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: nets were there, and the motion of the work was
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: something their bodies knew how to do. In the dark,
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: they fished all night and caught nothing. As morning came,
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: they were near the shore, the light arriving in the
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: slow way. It arrives over the eastern hills, that thin
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: gray luminance before the sun clears the ridge and the
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: color comes back to the water. And a man was
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: standing on the beach. He called out to them. He
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: asked if they had caught anything. They said no. He
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: told them to cast the net on the right side
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: of the boat. They did, and they could not haul
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: the net in because of the weight of fish filling it.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: John tells us that the disciple, whom Jesus loved his
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: quiet way of referring to himself throughout this gospel, said
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: to Peter, it is the Lord. The echo must have
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: been immediate for any one who had been there at
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: the beginning, a boat, a night of catching nothing, a
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: voice from the shore with an instruction about where to cast,
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: a catch so large the net could barely hold it.
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: It had happened before. It had happened on this same
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: lake three years earlier, when Jesus had first called them
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: away from their nets and their boats and their fathers.
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: Now it was happening again. John recognized him by the miracle.
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: Peter recognized him by John's recognition. And Peter put on
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: his outer garment because he had taken it off to work,
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: and he threw himself into the water. The others were
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: about a hundred yards from shore. They came in the
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: boat dragging the net full of fish, but Peter jumped
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: in and swam. When they reached the shore, they saw
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: a charcoal fire there, with fish laid on it and
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: bread beside it. Stay with that image for a moment
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: before we move any further. The morning light is just
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: beginning to reach the water. The hills are still in shadow.
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: The air is cool, the way lakeside air is cool
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: before the sun is fully up, carrying the particular smell
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: of fresh water and the faint mineral scent of the shore.
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: And crouched on the beach beside a small fire with
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: fish already cooking and bread already laid out beside. It
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: was Jesus. He had been there before them. The fire
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: was already burning, the meal was already prepared before the
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: boat reached shore. Before the net was counted before any
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: of them had said a word to him. He had
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: already made breakfast and was waiting. Jesus said to them,
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: bring some of the fish that you have just caught.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: Peter went and hauled the net ashore. John tells us
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: there were one hundred and fifty three large fish, and
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: even with that many, the net was not torn. That
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: number one hundred and fifty three. John remembered it when
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: he wrote this account as an old man, many decades
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: after that morning on the shore of Galilee. He remembered
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: the exact count. That is the kind of detail that
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: stays in a person when a morning has been seared
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: into them completely. Not just the large things, the countable things,
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: the things your hands touched and your mind held on
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: to without intending to. Jesus said come and have breakfast,
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: and none of them dared ask him who he was.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: They knew it was the Lord. He took the bread
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: and gave it to them. He took the fish and
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: gave it to them. Now, I want to tell you
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: something about that charcoal fire that I believe is one
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: of the most quietly significant details in this entire narrative.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: The Greek word John uses for the fire here is anthracia.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: It is a specific word, not the common word for
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: fire in general, and in the entire New Testament, that
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: specific word appears in only two places. This is the first.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: The second is in chapter eighteen of John's own Gospel,
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: the Knight of the Arrest, Jesus had been taken to
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: the house of the High Priest. It was cold. The
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: servants and officers had made a charcoal fire and were
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: standing around it, warming themselves, and Peter was standing with them.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: It was there at that charcoal fire in the court
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: yard of the High Priest's house, in the cold of
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: that night, that Peter had denied three times that he
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: knew Jesus. Two charcoal fires the same specific word, one
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: where Peter fell, one where Jesus was crouched on a
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: beach in the early morning, with breakfast already prepared, waiting
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: for Peter to swim ashore. John was a careful and
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: deliberate writer. He knew exactly what he was doing when
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: he used that word. He wanted the reader to feel
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: the echo. He wanted us to understand that this beach
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: and this fire were not simply a warm scene of reunion.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: They were a chosen setting. Jesus had built a charcoal
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: fire because he was bringing Peter back gently and without force,
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: to the emotional landscape of his worst night, not to
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: reopen the wound, to heal it at the route. This
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: is the thing about how restoration works in this story
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: that I find most worth holding. There are wounds that
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: can be managed from a distance, but cannot be healed
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: from a distance. There are failures that stay alive underneath
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: the surface of a life because they have never been
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: addressed at the place where they happened. We carry them forward,
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: We build lives around them that are functional and even good.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: But in the quiet moments, the thing is still there,
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: still present, still speaking in the places where the noise
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: does not reach. Jesus did not meet Peter in a
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: new place with new symbols and a new vocabulary that
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: skipped over what had happened. He went back. He chose
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: the same kind of fire. He brought Peter back to
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: the sensory world of the night everything had broken, because
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: that is where the healing needed to happen. Breathe think
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: about who was sitting around that fire as the sun
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: came up over the eastern hills. Men who had left
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: everything to follow someone, and had scattered when it cost
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: them something. Real men who had heard extraordinary things and
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: seen extraordinary things, and had still, in the end chosen
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: safety when the choice was forced upon them, And as
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: made them breakfast. He did not open the morning with
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: a review of their failures. He did not begin with
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: expectations or requirements, or a list of what needed to change.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: He said, come and eat. He took the bread and
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: gave it to them. He took the fish and gave
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: it to them. The meal came before the conversation. The
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: nourishment came before the commission. The being fed came before
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: the being asked. He fed them first. And when the
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: meal was finished, and the fire was burning lower on
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: the shore, and the sun was fully up over the water,
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: and the lake had gone still and golden in the
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: morning light, he turned to Peter rest. Now, let the
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: image of that fire stay with you to night, the
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: warmth of it against the cool morning air, the smell
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: of fish and bread, the sound of water moving gently
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: against the shore. He prepared the fire before you arrived.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: He has been waiting on the shore. Come and eat.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: The conversation that comes next deserves its own chair and
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: its own stillness. Because what Jesus does for Peter at
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: that fire is not a quick exchange. It is a
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: deep and careful and loving work of restoration. And it
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: is already beginning Chapter nine, three Questions for Peter. The
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: breakfast was finished, the fire was burning lower on the shore.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: The lake was still in the way it goes still
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: after the wind drops, and the light has come fully up,
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: and the work of the night is done. The net
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: was on the beach, the boat was pulled to shore.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: The other six men were somewhere nearby. And Jesus said
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: to Simon, Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: me more than these? The name is worth pausing on
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: before anything else. He did not say Peter. He said Simon.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: Simon was the name he had carried before Jesus had
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: ever looked at him on this same shore, and said,
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: you will be called Peter, which means rock. Going back
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: to Simon was going back before the rock, before the nickname,
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: before the three years, and the promises made and the
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: promises broken, Back to the fisherman, back to the man
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: as he had first been, Simon son of John, the
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: full given name with the father's name attached in the
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: culture of that world. This carried the weight of a
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: formal and significant moment. This was not casual conversation between
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: old friends after a meal. Something was being transacted here,
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: something was being carefully and intentionally put right. Do you
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: love me more than these? The word Jesus used for
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: love in this first question is the Greek word a gape,
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: the word the New Testament uses most often for the
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: highest and most selfless form of love, love that gives
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: without calculating the cost. Peter answered, yes, Lord, you know
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: that I love you. But the word Peter chose in
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: his answer was not a gape. He used for lao,
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: a genuine and significant word for love, deep affection, the
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: warmth of true friendship, the love between people who are
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: genuinely close, but not the same word Jesus had used. Now,
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: I want to be honest with you about what scholars
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: have made of this, because the honesty matters more than
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: a clean and tidy interpretation. Some scholars have seen in
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: the shift between a guppe and filio a deliberate and
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: meaningful movement. Peter, unable to claim the higher word after
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: what he had done, Jesus eventually coming down to meet
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: him in the word he could actually offer others equally.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: Careful readers of the Greek have suggested that in the
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: Greek of John's time, the two words carried more overlap
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: than later readers have sometimes assumed, and that building too
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: much on the distinction may overload the text with meaning
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: it is not clearly carrying. Both of those positions are
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: held by serious and careful people. I cannot resolve that debate,
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: and it would not be honest to pretend I can.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: What I can say is that the repetition across three
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: questions and three answers is clearly intentional in John's account.
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: Something is happening here that John wanted us to feel,
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: even if the precise nature of the shift in language
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: remains a matter of genuine scholarly discussion. Jesus said to
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: Peter feed my lambs. Then he asked again, Simon, son
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: of John, do you love me? And Peter answered again
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: with the same word he had used before. Yes, Lord,
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: you know that I love you. Jesus said, tend my sheep,
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: and then a third time, Simon, son of John, do
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: you love me? And John tells us that Peter was
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: grieved because Jesus asked him the third time. Peter knew
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: what the three questions meant. He was not confused about
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: the structure of the conversation. Three questions corresponding to three denials,
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: three mornings after that charcoal fire, corresponding to three nights
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: beside it in the courtyard of the High Priest. He
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: was being brought back to the exact count of the
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: falling and being given the chance to answer it directly.
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: The grief was not resentment at being asked repeatedly. The
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: grief was recognition. He knew what this was. He knew
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: what the three questions were doing, and I think he knew,
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: even as it hurt, that it was the most merciful
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: thing that could have been done for him. Lord, you
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: know everything, You know that I love you. He stopped
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: defending himself with the affirmation and appealed instead to the
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: knowledge of Jesus. You know everything, You see what is
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: actually in me. You know the truth of what I
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: am saying, even when I cannot find the words to
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: say it with sufficient confidence. You know it is the
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: prayer of a man who has run out of self
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: justification and is resting in the sight of some one
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: who sees him completely and has not turned away. And
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: Jesus said, feed my sheep three times, asked, three times, answered,
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: three times, commissioned. The structure was not repetition for emphasis.
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: Jesus was going back to the exact number of the
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: falling three. He was meeting each denial with an affirmation,
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: not covering over what had happened, not minimizing it, addressing
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: it at the precise count of it, replacing each denial
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: not by erasing it, but by laying something real and
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: true over it. And three times he gave Peter the
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: same commission, in slightly different words. Feed my lambs, tend
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: my sheep, feed my sheep, the language of a shepherd
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: caring for a flock. The shepherd metaphor ran deep in
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: the tradition. Peter had grown up inside God as shepherd
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: of Israel, David as shepherd before he was king, the
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: promised one described by the prophets. In shepherd language, Jesus
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: himself had said, I am the good shepherd who lays
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: down his life for the sheep. Now he was passing
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: that role to Peter. The care of the flock, the
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: responsibility for the vulnerable, the work of tending and feeding
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: and staying with the ones entrusted to you. The man
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: who had failed most publicly was being given the most
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: intimate responsibility. I do not think this was despite the failure,
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: as if Jesus were generously overlooking a liability. I think
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: it was because of what the failure and the restoration
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: together had produced in Peter that three years of successful
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: discipleship had not managed to produce. Peter now knew his
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: own weakness from the inside. He knew what it felt
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: like to be afraid and to choose the wrong thing,
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: and to live with it afterward. He knew the weight
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: of a denial and the specific texture of the grief
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: that followed it. He knew what it was to be
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: outside the fold on the coldest night. A shepherd who
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: has never been lost has a different quality of care
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: for lost sheep than one who has felt the ground
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: give way beneath him and know the cold of the
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: night from personal experience. Then Jesus said something that shifted
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: the whole tone of the conversation. He said, truly, truly,
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: I say to you, when you were young, you used
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted. But when
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: another will dress you and carry you where you do
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: not want to go. John adds the clarification, Jesus said
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: would glorify God. He was telling Peter how he would die.
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: The stretching out of the hands was the posture of crucifixion.
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: At the end of his life, Peter would be killed
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: in the same manner as Jesus. And this was being
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: said directly, without softening, in the same breath as the
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: commission to feed the sheep and the restoration from three
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: questions answered honestly at a charcoal fire on a shore.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: The road ahead was going to cost everything. Peter had
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: been afraid of exactly that cost. On the night of
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: the denial. He had denied knowing Jesus because he was
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: afraid of being identified with a condemned man. And now
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: Jesus was looking at him and saying, yes, that is
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: still what the road looks like. The cost has not changed.
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: And then he said the two words he had said
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: on this same shore at the very beginning of everything.
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: Follow me, the same two words, the same shore, the
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: same lake behind them, and the same hills ahead. Three
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: years of history between the first time and this time,
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: and the call was the same. The Peter who heard
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: those words the second time was not the Peter who
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: had heard them the first time. He was a man
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: who had followed and fallen and been restored, who had
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: stood at a charcoal fire and denied, and had now
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: stood at another charcoal fire and answered, who knew his
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: own weakness in a way he had not known it
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: when he stepped out of the boat without hesitation at
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: the beginning of everything. He was a better follower for
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: having failed, not because failure is good in itself, but
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: because what happened between the first charcoal fire and this
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: one had done something in him that success had not
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: been able to do. It had broken his confidence in
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: himself and replaced it with something sturdier, not self confidence,
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: trust in the one who had built the fire and
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: waited and asked the questions and given the commission and said,
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: follow me again on the same shore where everything had started. Breathe,
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: I want to speak directly to you. For a moment,
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: if you are carrying something you cannot set down, a
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: specific failure, a moment when you were afraid, and it
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: showed in the worst possible way, a denial not necessarily
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: of Jesus, but of something true and important that you
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: walked away from when it cost too much to stay.
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: The three questions were not a punishment. They were a gift.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: They were Jesus refusing to let Peter spend the rest
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: of his life carrying the unaddressed weight of a specific falling.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: They were the merciful work of going back to the
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: exact number of the breaking and meeting it there with
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: something stronger, not a general reassurance from a safe distance,
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: Three specific questions for three specific denials, the precise count
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: of the falling met by the precise count of the restoration.
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: There is a grace that says the past does not
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: matter and we simply move forward. There is truth in that.
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: But there is a deeper grace that says the past
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: matters enough to be addressed directly, that the specific wound
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: deserves a specific healing, that the charcoal fire deserves another
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: charcoal fire. Do you love me? The question is not
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: an accusation, It is the beginning of the restoration. And
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: when you answer, even imperfectly, even with the smaller word,
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: when the question asked for the larger one, he says,
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: feed my sheep. He gives you something to do. He
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: puts you back in the story. He says, follow me
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: on the same sure where he said it the first time.
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: The calling does not expire because of the falling rest.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: Now the fire is almost out, the lake is still,
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: the sun is fully up over the hills of Galilee,
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: and the morning is open and quiet. Peter has been
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: given back to himself, not the self he was before
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: the failure, something more honest than that, more tested, more knowing,
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: more capable of the tenderness that the people in his
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: care will need. The road is long, the commission is given,
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: and the one who gave it has promised to be
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: with him every step of it. Sleep gently, You are
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: being restored right now in this quiet In ways you
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: may not yet be able to name. Trust the one
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: who builds the fire before you arrive, he knows exactly
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: what he is doing. Chapter ten, The Great Commission. There
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: was a mountain in Galilee. Matthieu does not name it.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: He simply tells us that Jesus had directed the disciples
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: to go to a particular mountain, and they went. Eleven
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: men climbing a hillside in the landscape of their childhoods,
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: the same hills they had grown up beneath, the same sky,
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: the same smell of the region, dry grass and warm stone,
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: and the faint salt of the lake in the distance.
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: Try to see it for a moment, the morning light
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: coming flat across the hills from the east, the shadows
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: still long and cool across the slope, the air carrying
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: that particular freshness that belongs to Galilean mornings. Before the
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: heat of the day arrives. Eleven men on a hillside,
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: their sandals on the rock, the sound of wind moving
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: through the dry grass below them, the sound of birds
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: in the trees. Further down the slope. The city of
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem and everything that had happened there was eighty miles
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: to the south. This was their landscape, the landscape of
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: before of the ordinary, years before any of this had begun,
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 1: and Jesus chose it. He did not choose Jerusalem. He
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: did not choose the temple courts, or the hall of
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: the Sanhedrin, or any space that carried institutional authority. He
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: chose a hillside in Galilee, the region the religious establishment
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: of Jerusalem had always looked down upon the place where
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: Nathaniel had said, can anything good come out of Nazareth?
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: He chose the overlooked place. He had always moved toward
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: the overlooked place rather than away from it. When the
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: elevens saw him, they worshiped him. And then Matthieu adds
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: something he did not need to add. Some doubted In
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: the presence of the risen Jesus on that hill side,
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: with the morning light on the grass and the lake
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: visible in the distance, some of the people gathered there
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: were still carrying uncertainty. Matthew does not tell us how many,
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: He does not tell us who. He does not resolve
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: it or explain it away. He simply notes it as
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: part of what was true in that moment, and then
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: moves on. The great commission was given into a gathering
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: that included both worship and doubt. It was not withheld
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: until all the uncertainty was resolved. It was not delivered
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: only to the fully convinced. It was spoken into the
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: middle of the mixed reality of that hillside to all
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: of them, without exception. Then Jesus came to them and said,
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: all authority in heaven and on earth has been given
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: to me. Stop there before the commission, before the instruction
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: before anything else. All authority, Not authority in the spiritual
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: domain with limits at the borders of the physical world.
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: Not religious authority with an asterisk attached for everything else.
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: All authority, the full range of everything that exists in
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: heaven and on earth, given to him. In the Roman
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: world of that moment, authority was a very visible and
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: concrete thing. It looked like the eagle standards of Rome
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: planted in the soil of conquered nations. It looked like
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: legions of soldiers and governors with the power of life
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: and death. It looked like Caesar, whose image was on
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: every coin in every market in the known world, who
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: had given himself divine titles, whose reach extended from Britain
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: to the Euphrates. And on a Galilean hillside, with the
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: wind in the grass and eleven men standing in the
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: morning light, Jesus said, all authority in heaven and on
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: earth has been given to me, not claimed by force,
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: given by the Father through the cross and the empty
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: tomb in the forty days. The Resurrection was the Father's
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: declaration that everything Jesus had said and done and claimed
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: was true, And the consequence of that declaration was authority
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: tortal over everything. This matters for what comes next, because
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: what comes next is a command, and commands carry the
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: weight of the authority behind them. He said, go therefore,
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: name of the Father and of the Son and of
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: have commanded you. The sentence in the original Greek is
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: built around one main verb, make disciples. The other actions going, baptizing,
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: teaching are the means by which disciples are made. The
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: center of the commission is not movement or ritual or
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: instruction taken separately. It is the making of disciples. And
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: a disciple is not simply some one who has agreed
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: to a set of beliefs. A disciple is a learner,
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: some one whose life is being formed by ongoing relationship
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: with a teacher, someone who is slowly, over time, becoming
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: more like the one they are following, not a decision
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: made once and filed away, a formation that continues day
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: by day, teaching them to observe all that I have
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: commanded you, not just to know what Jesus commanded, to
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: observe it, to live inside it, to let it become
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: the pattern of how they moved through the world, and
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: the scope of it all nation, not Israel first, and
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: then the nations, eventually all nations, every people group on earth,
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: every language, every culture, every corner of the world that
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: human beings inhabited. Eleven people on a hillside were being
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: given the entire world as the territory of their work,
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: with nothing, no money, no army, no institution, no infrastructure
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: beyond the teaching they carried and the spirit that had
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: been promised and was almost here. And then Jesus said, behold,
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: I am with you always to the end of the age.
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: The commission and the promise came in the same breath.
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: The enormous task and the sustaining presence were not separated.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: You cannot accept one without receiving the other. The going
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: is underwritten by the accompanying. The making of disciples across
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: all nations is not a venture undertaken alone. It is
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: a partnership between the ones being sent and the one
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: who has all authority in heaven and on earth, and
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: who promises never to leave. I am with you always,
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: not when the work is going well, not when faith
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: feels strong, not when the net comes up full, always,
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: every day, every step, in every language, and every culture,
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: and every generation, until the end of everything breathe. I
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 1: want to say something about the doubt that was still
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: present on that hill side when the commission was given.
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: Matthew tells us some doubted even as they worshiped, And
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: then Jesus immediately spoke, without pausing for the doubt to clear,
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: without waiting for a cleaner moment, without qualifying his words
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: for the uncertain ones. He sent them as they were,
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: the certain and the uncertain, together, and he promised his
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: presence to all of them equally. I am with you
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: always includes the ones who were still wandering on the
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: hillside that morning. The authority behind the commission is not
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: your certainty, It is his. You do not need to
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: have everything settled to be sent. You need to go,
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: and the going is accompanied by the one who has
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: all authority and who never leaves. The wind is still
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: moving through the grass on the hillside. The shadows are
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: shorter now, the morning is fully open, and the lake
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: is bright in the distance. Eleven people are beginning to
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: understand that what they have been called to is larger
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: than they had imagined, and that the presence accompanying them
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: is equal to every inch of the scope of it rest.
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: Now the mountain is quiet behind us. The commission has
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: been given, the promise has been spoken over it, And
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: somewhere eighty miles to the south, Jerusalem is waiting. There
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 1: are things that must happen there before the forty days
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: are complete. Sleep well. Whatever you have been sent toward
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: that feels too large for you, you are not carrying
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: it alone. The Commission and the Presence came together on
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: that hill side. They still come together. I am with
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: you always, including to night. Chapter eleven, the last days
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 1: in Jerusalem. They came back to Jerusalem. The road south
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: from Galilee was roughly eighty miles, three to four days
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: of walking through the hill country, past small towns and
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: olive groves, and the long open stretches where the land
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: rolls south toward the city. They had walked this road
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: many times over the previous three years. Their feet knew it,
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: their bodies knew the rhythm of it. But this return
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: was different from all the others. Every other time they
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: had come to Jerusalem, something had been building toward an arrival,
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: a confrontacion, a festival, a reckoning. There had always been
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: a destination inside the destination. This time they were coming
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: back to wait picture Jerusalem. In those last days of
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: the forty the city was filling with pilgrims again. Pentecost
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: was approaching fifty days after Passover, and people were arriving
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: from every direction. The streets below the upper room would
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: have been alive with the sound of languages mixing Aramaic
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: and Greek, and the accents of Egypt and Persia and Rome,
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: with the smell of cooking fires, and the dust of
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: a city receiving crowds, merchants at their stalls, children weaving
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: between the legs of strangers, the noise and movement of
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: a city entirely unaware of what was happening in one
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: quiet room somewhere above it all. And in that room,
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty people were praying. Bok tells us
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: this in the opening of the Book of Acts. He
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: also gives us the clearest single description we have of
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: what the forty days had contained. He writes that Jesus
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: presented himself alive to the apostles after his suffering by
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: about the Kingdom of God. Forty days many proofs the
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: Kingdom of God. That is the outline, and it is
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: both more and less than we might want more because
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: it tells us the appearances were not rare or random.
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: They were numerous enough to constitute proof, the kind of
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: foundation substantial enough to hold the weight of everything. These
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: people were about to be asked to do less because
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: it does not give us the content. We do not
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: have the words Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: during those forty days, and I think that absence is
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: worth reflecting on rather than simply mourning. The Gospel writers
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: chose what to preserve. John says explicitly that if everything
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: Jesus did were written down, the world itself could not
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: contain the books they selected from abundance, and what they
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: chose to preserve from the forty days is not the
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: content of the teaching, but the shape of the encounters,
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: the appearances, the specific and personal moments of recognition and
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: restoration and commission. We have Mary hearing her name in
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: the garden, two people with burning hearts on a road
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: at evening, ten frightened men meeting peace in a locked room,
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: Thomas receiving exactly what he had asked for seven tired fishermen,
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: finding a fire already built on the shore, Peter being
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: asked three questions beside a charcoal fire, and being given
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: back to himself. We have the shape of how Jesus
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: was with people during those forty days, and perhaps that
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: shape is itself the teaching now. Paul, writing in a
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: small rented room in Corinth, roughly twenty years after the resurrection,
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: set down his pen for a moment before adding a
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: detail that the gospel writers do not include. He was
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: writing to a community he had helped build, people who
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: knew him, people who could question the things he claimed.
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: And he wrote, Jesus appeared to more than five hundred
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: still alive, though some have fallen asleep. More than five
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: hundred people at one time, And then he added those
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: careful words, most of whom are still alive. He was
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: writing to people who lived in a world where those
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: witnesses were still present, still accessible, still available to be
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: found and questioned. You do not include a claim like
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: that in a letter to a community that could verify
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: it if the claim were false. The witnesses were part
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: of the evidence Paul was pointing to them. As he wrote,
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: Paul also mentions an appearance to James, James the brother
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: of Jesus. And this matters because during the Ministry of Jesus,
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: John tells us plainly that his brothers did did not
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: believe in him. They had grown up with him in Nazareth,
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: they had watched him work in the carpenter's shop. They
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: knew him as a brother before they knew him as
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: anything else, and that familiarity had been for them a
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: barrier rather than a foundation for faith. And then the
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: resurrection happened, and Jesus appeared to James specifically. We do
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: not have the content of that encounter. We have only
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: its existence and its result. James became a central leader
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: of the Jerusalem Church. Early church writers described him as
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: a man of extraordinary devotion, his knees worn from the
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: hours spent in prayer. Known in the city as James
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: the Just, he wrote a letter that became part of
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: the New Testament, and eventually he was killed for his
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: faith in his risen brother. People do not die for
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: things they know to be false, and people who grow
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: up in an ordinary household with some one do not
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: construct a willingness to die for them based on sentiment
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: or wishful thinking. Something happened, and when James encountered the
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: risen Jesus something specific and real and permanent enough to
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: cost him everything. Now there is one more thing from
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: those last days in Jerusalem that Luke tells us, one
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: of the most humanly honest moments in the entire forty days.
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: The disciples gathered around Jesus and asked him a question, Lord,
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel.
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: These were men who had spent three years with Jesus.
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: They had heard every teaching, they had received the commission
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: to make disciples of all nations. They had seen him risen,
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: and they were still asking whether the national political restoration
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: of Israel was coming soon. Jesus did not rebuke them.
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: He did not say you still do not understand. After
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: everything he said, the times and seasons were the fathers
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: to know, and not theirs to be given. And then
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: he turned from what they were not given toward what
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: they were. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: the end of the earth. They asked about a kingdom
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: with borders. He answered with a mission that had none.
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: They were looking for a geographic restoration. He gave them
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: a commission that went to the end of the earth.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: He did not dismiss their longing. He expanded it beyond
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: anything they had been imagining. Breathe. Outside the windows of
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: the upper room, the city moves and breathes and goes
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: about its business. Pilgrims on the streets below, the sound
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: of the market rising through the walls, the smell of
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: cooking fires as the day cools toward evening. Jerusalem alive
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: and loud and entirely unaware of what is being prepared
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: in the quiet room above it all. And in that room,
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty people praying, waiting for something they
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: have been promised but cannot produce or hurry through effort.
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: Most of the work that matters most cannot be self generated.
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: It has to be received. The waiting and the praying
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: and the being still before something larger than yourself is
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: not the passive part before the real work begins. For
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: these people in that room, it was the most important
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: part of the work. Itself. You do not always need
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: to be doing something. Sometimes you need to be present
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: to what is being given. Rest. Now the city is
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: alive outside, the room is quiet inside. The promise is real.
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: One more day remains inside the forty days, and it
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: is the day everything has been building toward chapter twelve,
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: the promise of the Spirit. They were in the upper room,
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty people, the eleven apostles, the women
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: who had followed Jesus from Galilee, including Mary Magdalene, who
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: had been the first to see him risen. Mary the
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: mother of Jesus, who had stood at the cross and
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: watched her son die, and had now sat in this
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: room with the others through all the days of waiting.
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: The brothers of Jesus, including James, who had not believed
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: during the ministry and now believed with everything he had.
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: One hundred and twenty people who had seen the risen lord,
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: who had received the commission, who had been told to wait,
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: and they were waiting. Luke tells us they were devoting
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: themselves to prayer. That phrase in the Greek carries the
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: sense of persistence of continuity. This was not occasional prayer.
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: A few minutes in the morning, and a few at night.
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: This was the primary orientation of their days. They were
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: people who had been given a promise and were holding
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: themselves toward it with everything they had. The sound of
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: the city came through the walls Jerusalem, filling with pentecost
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: pilgrims from across the known world, languages mixing in the
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: streets below. The smell of the city, animals and cooking fires,
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: and the dust of thousands of people arriving from every direction,
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: the noise and movement of a feast day approaching. And
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: in the room above it, all stillness, prayer waiting. Consider
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: what these one hundred and twenty people were carrying into
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: those days. They had been through the crucifixion. Several of
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: them had stood near the cross. They had lived through
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: the grief of Saturday. They had experienced the particular disorientation
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: of the resurrection appearances, the quality of joy and bewilderment
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: that comes when you encounter someone you watched be buried,
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 1: who is now asking if you have anything to eat,
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: and showing you his hands. They had been commissioned to
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: reach the entire world, all nation, the end of the earth,
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: with no money, no institutional power, no infrastructure beyond the
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: teaching they carried and the spirit they had been promised,
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: And now they were in a room, praying, waiting for
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: something they could not produce or hurry or manufacture through
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: effort alone. There is a particular kind of trust that
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: this kind of waiting requires, not the trust of some
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: one following a clear plan, the trust of some one
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 1: who has been given a promise and is resting in
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: the character of the one who made it. Two different things.
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: One gives you a map, the other gives you a
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: person to trust. In the absence of a map, the
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: disciples had evidence for the character of that person. They
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 1: had forty days of it. They had seen how he
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 1: handled grief, how he handled doubt, how he handled failure,
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: how he handled the gap between what people expected and
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: what he actually gave them. They had watched him meet
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: each person at the precise shape of what they needed.
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: Mary with a name, Thomas with evidence, Peter with three
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 1: questions and a charcoal fire. They were not waiting blindly.
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: They were waiting with evidence. But it was still waiting.
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: The promise was still unfulfilled. And the gap between a
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: promise and its fulfillment is always the place where trust
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: is either formed or dissolved. They chose to let it
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: form them, and they were together, all one hundred and
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: twenty of them, different histories, different temperaments, different degrees of understanding,
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: all of them in the same room, all of them
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: praying toward the same promise. The togetherness matters. The promise
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: was not given to isolated individuals to receive separately. It
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: was given to a community, and the waiting was communal,
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: and the receiving, when it came, would be communal too.
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 1: Jesus had told them it was to their advantage that
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: he go away, because if he did not go, the
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: helper would not come. And when the helper came, he
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: would be with them and in them, not alongside them,
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: the way a companion walks on a road beside you,
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: inside them, part of them. The presence not just near
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: but within, the mode of presence was changing, but the
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: presence itself was not diminishing. It was becoming, if anything,
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 1: more intimate, more interior, more personal, than three years of
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: walking the same roads could have produced. For three years,
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: the disciples had been able to turn to Jesus and
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: ask a question and hear an answer. They had been
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: able to watch his face and read his response and
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: feel the quality of his attention. All of that visible
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: and audible presence was ending, and what was coming in
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: its place was the same presence, in a form that
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: had no geographic limitation. The spirit who came would not
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: be confined to one location at one time. Every person
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: who received him would carry him wherever they went. Every
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: community gathered in the name of Jesus would be the
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: place where his presence was. The world was too large
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: for one body in one location. The spirit had no
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: such constraint. So they waited and they prayed, and outside
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem was filling with people from every nation under heaven,
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: people who had come for a festival and would leave
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: carrying something they had not arrived with. But that is
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: a story for after the forty days, and the forty
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: days have one more morning now. The Book of Acts
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: tells us that during this period of waiting, the community
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: also tended to a practical matter. The eleven had become
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: eleven when Judas died after the betrayal, and discerning from
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: the scriptures that the role of the twelfth should be filled,
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: the community prayed and identified two candidates and cast Lots Mattias.
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: Thus chosen twelve again, the number that carried the weight
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: of the twelve tribes of Israel, the symbolic wholeness of
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: the foundation restored. They were not simply sitting in suspended
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: animation waiting for something to happen to them. They were present, attentive,
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: making decisions, ordering their community, functioning as a community. Even
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 1: in the waiting, The waiting was active, the prayer was real,
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: and the ten days between the ascension and Pentecost, which
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: is how we arrive at that number from the calendar
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: of Jewish feasts, were not wasted days. They were the
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: days in which these people became the people the spirit
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: would fill. Breathe, let the room settle around you for
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: a moment, one hundred and twenty people in prayer, the
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: city alive, outside the walls, the promise close. Most of
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: the most important things that have ever happened in human
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: history happened in places the world was not watching, in
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: small rooms on hillsides in gardens before the sun was
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: fully up, in the quiet spaces between the announced events.
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: The upper Room in those days was one of those places,
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: ordinary from the outside the beginning of everything. From the inside.
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: The waiting is almost over, and to morrow. Inside this
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: story is the morning the forty days have been building
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: toward chapter thirteen, the Ascension. It was the fortieth day,
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: Thursday morning. The sky over Jerusalem would have been that
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: particular clear blue that comes in the spring in that
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: part of the world, the kind of blue that makes
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: the limestone walls of the city look almost white against it.
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: The air still cool from the night, the Mount of
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: Olives rising to the east across the Kidron Valley, its
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: slopes covered in olive trees whose leaves were turning silver
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: in the early light. They walked out of the city
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: together through the eastern gate, down into the Kidron Valley,
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: where the path crossed the stream, and began to climb
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: up through the olive trees, the light filtering through the leaves,
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: the sound of their footsteps on the stone path, the
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: city walls rising behind them as they climbed. The Mount
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: of Olives was familiar ground. Jesus had wept over the
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: city from this slope when he came over the bridge
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: on the back of a donkey the week of the Crucifixion.
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: He had sat on this hill side and taught about
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: the future, And at the bottom of the slope in
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: the garden of gethsemone. He had prayed three times in
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: the dark, and surrendered three times, and been arrested by
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: the ones who came with torches. He had been here
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: at his most human, at his most costly moments, and
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: now he was here again on the fortieth day, at
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: the place where the story was about to change its form.
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: Luke tells Us that as they were together, they asked
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: him one more time, Lord, will you at this time
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: restore the kingdom to Israel. The question had not fully
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: dissolved even now, even after forty days, even after the
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: appearances and the teaching and the commission on the mountain
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: in Galilee, the hope that had been shaped in them
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: since childhood was still present, still asking. Jesus answered the
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: same way he had before. The times and seasons were
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: the fathers to know that information was not theirs to
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: be given. And then he spoke the promise one final time,
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: of the earth. Those were the last words he spoke
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: to them before it happened, Not a long farewell address,
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: not a comprehensive summary of everything he had taught. A
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: promise and a commission. Power is coming. When it comes,
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: you will be witnesses. That is what the rest of
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: your lives is for. And then Luke tells us he
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: was lifted up and a cloud took him out of
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 1: their sight. Stay inside that image for a moment before
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: we move past it. The Greek word Luke uses for
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 1: cloud here is nephalai. It is the same word used
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 1: throughout the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures for
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: the cloud that led Israel through the wilderness, the pillar
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: of cloud by day, the cloud the descended on the
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: tabernacle when the glory of God filled it so completely
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: that Moses could not enter the cloud on Sinai when
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: the law was given. In the tradition, these disciples had
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: grown up inside. The cloud was not simply weather. It
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: was the visible sign of the presence of God, the Shechinah,
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: the divine nearness made visible in a form human beings
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: could perceive. When the cloud received Jesus, it was not
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: obscuring him from view the way fog obscures a landscape.
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: It was receiving him into the presence of God from
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: which he had come. He was not disappearing into absence.
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: He was arriving at the place of all authority, the
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 1: right hand of the Father, from which the Letter to
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: the Hebrews tells us he intercedes for his people continuously,
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: even now, even to night. The ascension was not departure
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: into distance. It was a rival at the place from
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: which He is most fully and completely present to everything.
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: The disciples stood there watching. Luke uses a word that
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: suggests they were straining upward, their faces tilted toward the
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: last place the cloud had been unable to move, unable
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 1: to look away, standing on the slope of the Mount
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: of Olives, staring into a sky that had just received
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: the one they loved. And then two men in white
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: stood beside them, men of Galilee. They said, why do
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: you stand looking into heaven? The question is gentle, not
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: a rebuke, a quiet and practical redirect. Why are you
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 1: still looking up? This Jesus, who was taken up from
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: you into heaven, will come in the same way as
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: you saw him go into heaven. He will come back
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: the same way he left. The ascension was not the
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: end of the story. It was the opening of the
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: longest chapter in it, the chapter in which we are
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 1: all still living. But in the meantime, there is a
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: city full of pilgrims from every nation under heaven waiting
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: below this hill. There is a promise of power, almost
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: ready to be fulfilled. There is a world that has
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: not yet heard what happened in a garden and a
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: locked room, and on a road at evening, and beside
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: a fire on a beach. Stop looking up, Go back
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: to Jerusalem and wait for the promise. And they worshiped him,
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: and they returned to Jerusalem with great joy. Great joy,
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: not grief, not the bewildered sorrow of people who have
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: just watched someone leave, for good joy, because they understood,
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: in a way that would have been impossible before the
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: forty days, that this was not loss. This was completion,
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: the story, arriving at the place it had always been
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: moving toward. Now, I want to say one more thing
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: about the ascension that I think matters to night. The
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: Letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus as our high priest
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: who has passed through the heavens, who is able to
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 1: sympathize with our weaknesses because he has been tested in
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: every way as we are, and therefore the writer says,
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: we can approach the throne of Grace with confidence to
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: The one who ascended was not a spirit returning to
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 1: a purely spiritual realm. He ascended in a body, a
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: real body, a body that had been tired and hungry,
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: and that had wept at the tomb of a friend,
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: and sweated drops in a garden, and hung on a cross,
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: and eaten fish on a beach, and shown its wounds
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: to a man who needed to touch them before he
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: could believe. That body is now at the right hand
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: of the Father, which means that at the center of
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 1: all authority in heaven and on earth, there is some
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: one who knows from the inside what it is to
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: be human, who knows the weight of grief and the
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: texture of fear, and the particular loneliness of praying in
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: the dark and feeling the silence, who knows what it cost,
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: who carries that knowledge with him into his intercession for
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: every person who call on his name. When you pray
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: to night, you are not sending words upward into an abstraction.
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: You are speaking to someone who knows you, Who knows
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: your name the way he knew Mary's name in a garden,
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: Who knows your failure, the way he knew Peter's failure
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: on a beach. Who knows your doubt, the way he
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: knew Thomas's doubt in a locked room. He ascended. He
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: is at the right hand of the Father, and he
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: is interceding right now in this quiet for you. The
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: cloud took him from sight, but it did not take
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: him from presence. He left so that he could be everywhere,
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 1: and so he is rest now. The Mount of Olives
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: is quiet. The disciples are walking back down the slope
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: toward the city, carrying a joy that no circumstance gave
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: them and no circumstance can take away. The forty days
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: are complete, but before we close, there is one more
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: thing to be said, not at events or history, or
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: what happened on which morning, something for you, for whoever
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: is in this room to night, because all of it,
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: every step of every one of those forty days, was
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: moving in your direction. Chapter fourteen. To you tonight, the
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: story is complete. Forty days from the garden where Mary
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: heard her name in the dark before dawn to the
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: hillside where the cloud received him, and two figures in
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: white asked why any one would keep looking up when
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: there is so much to do down here. From the
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 1: locked room where peace was spoken into fear, to the
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: beach where breakfast was prepared before anyone knew they needed it.
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: From the road walked in lost hope, to the mountain
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: where the commission was given with a promise attached to
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 1: it that has not expired. Forty days, and every one
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: of them was moving toward this room, toward whatever you
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: carried into to night that you have not been able
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: to set down anywhere else. I want to speak to
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: you now, not through the people in the story, but directly,
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: no historical distance, no narrative framing, just this quiet and
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: what I want to make sure reaches you before sleep comes.
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 1: Think for a moment about who was in those forty days.
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 1: There was Mary standing in a garden, weeping, convinced that
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: even the last thing had been taken from her, her
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: hope so completely in the past, tense that she was
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: offering to carry a dead body herself if it meant
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 1: she could find him. And he said her name, one word,
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: and everything changed. If you are that person to night
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: if the grief has become so familiar it feels permanent.
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: If you have run out of places to bring what
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: you are carrying, and you are simply standing in the
• 1:50:46
  Speaker 1: dark because there is nowhere left to go. He knows
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: your name, not a general announcement to whoever is listening.
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: Your name spoken the way only he can speak it
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: into whatever God garden you are standing in. Tonight, there
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: were two people on a road walking away their hope
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: already in the past tense. We had hoped the grammar
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: of a closed chapter, and he fell into step beside
• 1:51:14
  Speaker 1: them without announcing himself, and listened to the whole story
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: of their disappointment, and then open something in them, until
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: their hearts were burning before they even knew who was
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: walking with them. If you know that grammar to night,
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: if something you believed in has moved into the past tense,
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: and you are on a road that leads away from
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: where you had hoped to be, he walks those roads,
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 1: the roads we are leaving on, not only the roads
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: we are running toward. And sometimes on those roads something
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: begins to warm inside you before you have a name
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: for what is causing it. There was Thomas in the
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: room with the others, but not yet believing, honest enough
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: to say what he needed and present enough to stay
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: in the community until the counter came and Jesus came
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: back specifically for him, with the specific answer to the
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: specific condition he had set, without rebuke, without making Thomas
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: feel he had failed for needing what he needed. If
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 1: faith is complicated for you right now, if you are
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: in the room but still working out whether you believe,
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: if you have conditions that have not yet been met,
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: stay in the room. He is not afraid of your conditions. Thomas,
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 1: the one who held out longest and asked for the most,
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: produced the deepest confession any of them gave. The honest
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: question does not close the door. Sometimes it is the
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: opening through which the most important answer arrives. There was
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: Peter sitting at a charcoal fire on a beach, with
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: the weight of his worst failure still in him. Three
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 1: specific denials with an exact number attached, And Jesus built
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: another charcoal fire and asked three questions and gave three commissions,
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 1: and said, follow me again on the sure where he
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: had said it the first time. If you are carrying
• 1:53:03
  Speaker 1: something with an exact count attached to it, a specific failure,
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 1: a specific number of times you chose the wrong thing.
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: The three questions were not punishment. They were the precise
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: and merciful work of meeting the falling at its exact
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: count and answering it there the charcoal fire deserves another
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: charcoal fire. Do you love me? You do not have
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: to answer perfectly. Lord, you know everything. You know that
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: I love you. That is enough. It has always been enough. Breathe.
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: There is some one listening tonight who has been away
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: from all of this for a long time. Faith was
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: part of your life once and it has become distant
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: or complicated, or you walked away and the walking away
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: made sense at the time, and you are not sure
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: whether there is still a place in this story for
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 1: someone who has been gone as long as you have.
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: James did not believed during the ministry. He grew up
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 1: in the same house, he heard the same things, he
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: watched the same life from the closest possible distance, and
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: he did not believe. And then Jesus appeared to him
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: after the resurrection. We do not have the words of
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: that encounter. We have only its existence and what it produced.
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: A man who spent the rest of his life in
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: the community of people who followed his risen brother, a
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: man willing eventually to give his life for that belief.
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: The invitation that went out from the upper room has
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: not been taken back. The table was set before you arrived.
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: The place was there before you knew you were coming. Come.
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 1: Not when you have resolved everything, Not when you have
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: made yourself into some one more deserving. Now as you
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: are in the locked room, in the garden, on the
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: road that leads away, he meets people where they are.
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: The forty days showed us that more clearly than anything else. Breathe,
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: let us pray, Father, we come to you at the
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 1: end of a long journey. Forty days that began with
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: a name spoken in a garden and ended with a
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 1: cloud above a hillside and two figures in white asking
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 1: a gentle and practical question about why anyone would keep
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: looking up. Thank you for those forty days. Thank you
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 1: for the way you built each encounter around the specific
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: shape of what each person needed. Peace for the frightened,
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: a name for the grieving, a burning heart on a
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: road for the ones walking away, evidence for the one
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 1: who needed to touch before he could believe, a fire
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 1: on a beach and three questions. For the one carrying
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: the weight of three denials, you did not offer a
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: single approach for every person. You went to where each
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 1: one was and met them in the shape of their
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 1: specific lines. Need.
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 2: That is who you are. That is what the forty
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 2: days showed us. There are people listening tonight who are
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 2: in one of those shapes. For the ones carrying guilt tonight,
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 2: something specific, something with a number attached to it. Let
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 2: the finished work be finished in them too, not as
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 2: a category they have agreed to theologically, but as an experience.
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 2: Let the weight lift the way it lifted from Peter
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 2: when the third question was answered and the commission was given,
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 2: and the calling was renewed on the same shore where
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 2: it had first been spoken. For the ones in their
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 2: own Saturday, the long waiting, the season when the promise
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 2: has gone quiet and the gap between what was believed
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 2: and what is being experienced has grown long, Let them
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 2: feel tonight, even without the proof they are looking for,
• 1:56:53
  Speaker 2: that the truth does not require their certainty to remain true.
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 2: Sunday was coming on Saturday, where, whether the disciples felt
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 2: it or not. For the ones on their own road
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 2: to Immaeus walking away hope in the past tense. Let
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 2: them feel the one who falls into step beside them
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 2: on those roads. Let something begin to burn in them tonight,
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 2: even before they know who is walking with them. For
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 2: the ones who are Thomas, still in the room, still
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 2: showing up, still carrying the honest question that has not
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 2: yet been answered, Let them know that the question is
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 2: not a threat. That he met Thomas without rebuke and
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 2: without delay, that staying in the room with unresolved questions
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 2: is itself a faithfulness. Father. As sleep comes, settle these
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 2: hearts into the rest that belongs to people who have
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 2: set something down that they were never meant to carry alone.
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 2: He is here in this room, in whatever form this
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 2: moment requires, as close as the quiet around you, as
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 2: near here is the breath in your lungs, as present
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 2: as the name He knows you by. To you be
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 2: all glory now and forever through Jesus Christ. Amen, Sleep
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 2: well beloved. The tomb is still empty. The forty days
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 2: are complete, and the one who walked through all of
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 2: them is here in this room with you right now.
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 2: He is not far, he never was. You are known,
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 2: you are held, You are loved forever and ever. Amen.