Wednesday in Easter Week

Artwork by Daniel Bonnell, 2011

In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

SPOILER ALERT.

I’m going to discuss a movie that is now 20 years old, older than any of the students in this room. When this movie first came out, the internet was still in its infancy, and you were more likely to have it spoiled by a human being than the all-caps SPOILER ALERT you might see today on a message board.

This movie is called The Sixth Sense. In it, a young boy named Cole believes that he can see dead people, ghosts walking around. He can even talk to them and interact with them. A child psychologist named Malcolm, played by Bruce Willis, works with Cole, since Cole’s mother is concerned for Cole’s mental health and his interactions with his peers. Cole’s story follows a fairly familiar trope in ghost lore in which a living person is tasked with helping ghosts accomplish the tasks necessary to ultimately set their spirit free. He does so at several points in the film, solving the mysteries of how some of the ghosts died and helping others to reconcile with loved ones.

The movie builds to a stunning and startling climax that, for many viewers, of which I was one at the time, was the kind of moment every filmmaker should strive for; a moment in which I had a physical, visceral reaction, feeling the blood rush out of my head and giving me chills. For it is revealed in the end that Malcolm, the child psychologist, is himself dead--and has been the entire time--and that Cole has been helping Malcolm throughout the film to realize this and to say goodbye to his wife.

This was M Night Shyamalan’s first major film, and it was probably his best. After this incredibly successful cultural moment, he found it difficult to make other films with a similarly incredible surprise ending. But what made, and still makes, the film so successful is the multi-layered experience of watching it. Because immediately after you learn the big reveal, you want to go back and watch the film again and search for the clues. How could you have missed them? How could you not have figured it out? And as you go back and search for the clues, you find them, and you realize how well the story was put together. All the clues now seem so obvious because you have the one piece of the puzzle that fits them all together, the overriding ending of the story that makes the rest of it make sense.

Psychologists and other students of the human experience tell us that this is generally how we process the flow of time, of events in our own lives, especially traumatic events. We often don’t make sense of an experience we’ve had until after the fact, when we look back and interpret it in light of later events. Only after the fact might we see this experience as growth or as some inevitable conclusion to part of our lives. We see the clues and wonder why we didn’t put it together earlier. In fact, what we really do, I think, is what human societies have done for thousands of years--we tell a story that helps us to understand the past, a story by which we can interpret the events of our own lives as well as the lives of others.

Today’s Gospel reading works in a similar way. In it, some of Jesus’s friends are dejected and confused. The one they have been following around for several years, the one they thought was something more than just a merely human teacher and preacher, has been brutally killed by the Romans. Jesus shows up in the midst of them, but they cannot recognize him. Many scholars believe that these two followers of Jesus are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or some variety of it.

They have experienced something that has shattered their psyche, and they cannot yet put it back together again. They are in the middle of trying to figure out the meaning of their lives in a time in which everything seems to have gone off the rails. In a nice touch of dramatic irony, with a bit of humor, Jesus asks them questions about what has happened to himself. They tell him that the women have apparently witnessed something startling and miraculous and that the rumors are that Jesus is somehow alive; but they seem still confused and flummoxed by these rumors.

Now, this part of the story is important. Even though Jesus explains to them the meaning of his life, death, and resurrection, they still do not recognize him as Jesus yet. In other words, on a purely intellectual or rational level, they could be shown exactly what is going on, but the big reveal doesn’t hit them, not yet, not as they just use their heads to figure it out.

Yet something has been working on their hearts. There is something about this mysterious stranger that compels them to ask him to their home, to stay with them. You can sense their sadness, the exhaustion of their grief: “Stay with us,” they say, “because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” While it may be difficult to deal with trauma in the light of day, in the night it is unbearable. “Stay with us,” becomes for these disciples a plaintive cry for some kind of peace that they sense in this figure, not with their rational faculties, but with a kind of spiritual sixth sense.

And then the big reveal: As Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. In a moment that I imagine much like the big reveal at the end of The Sixth Sense, in a moment that gives them chills, they see Jesus for what he is: their Lord and Savior, their teacher, their friend, somehow, defying all rational logic, alive again and with a presence that is overwhelming in its capacity to give peace and hope to their darkness and confusion.

Just as quickly as they perceive him, the moment passes, but the echo of the moment itself suffices, I like to imagine, for the rest of their natural lives. Immediately they flash back: our hearts were burning, weren’t they, as he sat with us and explained what had happened? Weren’t the clues right there in front of us the whole time? Why didn’t we understand it until now? Something bigger than what we imagined was going on the entire time we spent with him!

At the time of the writing of Luke’s Gospel, about fifty years after the events portrayed here, the early Church was also struggling with its attempts to understand what had happened in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Despite the complexities of centuries of Christian theology and history, however, the Church continues to affirm, over and over again, the simplicity of what happens in this Emmaus story as the central teaching of Christianity.

And that teaching is simply this: that God has come near to us in Jesus, a human being. That through the pains and traumas of our own lives, God offers us hope beyond hope, hope beyond death, hope that defies rational understanding, hope that hits us in the gut, hope that we can only ultimately understand in a flash of revelation that, though it may disappear quickly, remains enough for our life’s journey. Hope that in the most ordinary of human creations and actions, in the breaking of the bread, we can know something of God’s love, goodness, and peace.

In the Christian tradition, this love, goodness, and peace comes to us as grace, as pure gift. The writer Frederick Buechner defines grace this way. He says: “the grace of God means something like: ‘Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you.’”

I pray that you know that grace, that sense that God has come near to us, that profound touch of love, goodness, and peace, today, and throughout this joyous Easter season.

AMEN.