"He Opened Their Minds"

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

We have seen that according to the earliest tradition the three parts of the Gospel are that Christ died for our sins, that he was raised, and that this all took place according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Recently we have given a lot of attention to the first two, now our gospel text wants us to reflect on the third. What is the nature and significance of the relationship between the death and resurrection of Jesus on the one hand, and the sacred writings of his own Jewish religion, on the other?

We note first that it is none other than Jesus himself who instructs us how to read the Bible, and that he teaches us to look for and understand the passages that tell about him, himself. “These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled (24:44), specifically, “…that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem (24:46-47).” The phrase, “Law, Prophets and Psalms (Writings)” is used to this day among orthodox Jews to designate what we call the OT and liberal Jews, the Hebrew Bible. Orthodox Jews use the Hebrew acronym of “Law, Prophets and Writings (Psalms),” “Tanach,” to name the OT, and so our gospel reading is not insisting that all three subdivisions are of equal importance as testimony, but merely using the accepted terminology to refer to the scriptures as a whole.

I mention this for two reasons: one because in my Bible Study class we are struggling with Paul’s attitude towards the Law of Moses, which in Galatians he seems to reject as a source of divine revelation, and I do not want us to exaggerate the difference between Paul and Luke in this matter, as if Luke were going out of his way to refute Paul by insisting that the Mosaic law is a testimony like the others. He is not, he is just using the conventional terminology. Secondly, I mention it because the two passages the tradition links most closely to the death and resurrection of Jesus are both from the prophets, Isaiah 52-53, and Hosea 6:2, the former about the suffering servant of God bearing our sin, and the latter about God raising him up on the third day. We shouldn’t think that testimony comes only from the prophets. The whole Tanach is involved. 

Important as these points may be we must drop them here and, in our limited time, concentrate on the most important message of the phrase “according to the scriptures,” namely that the scriptures are a primary witness to the truth of the apostolic testimony to Christ’s death and resurrection. Last week I preached about the will to believe, grounding faith in the realm of interpretation as much as, if not more than, in the realm of empirical fact. It is not simply that Jesus returned from the dead to eat a piece of fish that’s important, but what we make of it. We Christians include it in the totality of a larger event that includes crude empirical happenings like that, as well as mysterious, non-empirical interpretations, attitudes and convictions, like the blessing promised to those who do not see and yet believe. We saw last week that full faith does not need its own first hand empirical evidence, but that it is possible to enter the fullness of faith simply as a result of believing the contents of a letter about the death and resurrection of Jesus (1 John 1:1-4), or in reading a gospel like John’s. The writer tells us specifically that the gospel is a selection from the many things Jesus did, reported with the purpose of pointing the reader to who Jesus is, in the hope that we the readers will, through reading this book, discover for ourselves who he is, put our faith in him, and thus enter eternal life (John 20:30-31).

The point is that while the will to believe is essential, it must be held within a larger context of interpretation, otherwise it too easily becomes willful and dangerous.  The scriptures along with experience, tradition and rational reflection make up this larger context of interpretation. I need give you only one example to remind you of the long and sorry history of human gullibility apart from a safe context of interpretation. A few years ago, when the Hale-Bopp comet was streaming across our skies, a group of people calling itself the “Heaven’s Gate” community committed mass suicide in a house in San Diego. They believed that a space ship was coming to take them to heaven, flying in the wake of the comet. When the telescope they bought to track the spaceship failed to locate it, they returned it to its maker with the complaint that it was defective. In this case the will to believe was fatal, and skeptics were quick to suggest again that all religion, including our own, is essentially the will to believe contrary to reasonable evidence, and therefore a source of poor mental health and worse. In our case, however, the biblical tradition itself, properly interpreted within a tradition of interpretation, in the light of lived experience, reflected on and analyzed by sound reasoning, is an entirely reliable matrix from which Christ emerges in his true identity. The Christ of the Bible properly interpreted is the real Christ whom we can and must safely believe.

What is this proper interpretation? The Bible has always interpreted itself by means of an internal cross -referencing system guided by overarching principles of faith. Jesus himself is the first and most important overarching principle of faith; he it is who tells us what the important passages are, by helping us see how they refer to him. In a biblical tradition different from our present gospel reading, John rather than Luke, Jesus is called the Word of God in human flesh. His life and words together make a living word. In all the gospels, however, who he is and what he does, as an historical person, tells us who God is and what God wants for us and from us. Luke tells us that Jesus opens our minds to understand the things in the Scripture that refer to him; John tells us that the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us and that we saw his Glory. Both of them say essentially the same thing and both call this enlightening, revelatory presence, the Holy Spirit.

Luke gives us a vivid account of how this communication system works, in the story of the apostle Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. The eunuch was the finance minister of the Queen of Ethiopia, who was a descendant of the Queen of Sheba, who, you remember, went home pregnant from her visit to King Solomon. The eunuch reads Isaiah 53,  “As a sheep led to the slaughter/ or a lamb before her sheerer is dumb, /so he opens not his mouth. / In his humiliation justice was denied him. / Who can describe his generation? / For his life is taken up from the earth.” (Is. 53: 7-8). The eunuch quite rightly asks, “To whom is the prophet referring?  Is it to himself or to someone else?” Philip is in a position to assure him that it refers to Jesus, who has been crucified that very Passover, which the Ethiopian had come so far to attend. He had been present when and where the hinge of human history had turned, and now he knows that because the apostle interprets the scripture for him. He makes the appropriate response and receives baptism.

Luke includes this story precisely to show us how the preaching of the Gospel should take place, as a process of the interpretation of the scripture by the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. The events interpret the text and the text interprets the events. Jesus is indeed the suffering servant of God, whose sufferings do us ultimate good; and the events of this sorry Passover are precisely those sufferings. The prophet saw this long ago and Jesus the fulfiller of the prophecy causes it now actually to happen, while the apostle identifies the happening and the eunuch believes the message.

If I were a different kind of preacher I could have taken the statement that he opened our minds in the way that would surely have been taken at the recent centennial of the dedication of Stanford Memorial Church, that is, as a declaration of tolerance and diversity. Tolerance and diversity are certainly among the highest ethical obligations of our Christian faith, but they are not the essence of the Gospel itself. The Gospel requires an open mind of a different kind, a mind open to the full horizon of God’s revealing action in Jesus. That full horizon includes what little we can know of the “historical Jesus,” in the sense of what place he took in the realm of the five empirical senses, of what could be seen, heard, touched, smelled and tasted of him when he was here. That horizon, however, encompasses much more than those facts; it includes what those who loved him later came to see in and through him as time went by, those who left behind in memory most of the empirical activity of his brief earthly life and moved on to the Christ of the Holy Trinity. He so impressed them - His resurrection, of course, was the pivotal moment - that they went to the most important sources the could think of, their Bibles, to find out who he is and what he is doing, and there they indeed found the truth about him. And as time goes by, the fullness of his divine dignity unfolds in our experience, which forms a long tradition from many times and places, and can rationally be checked with the scriptures. Thus we see and believe that Jesus is the Christ of God and that by his life, death and resurrection, God fulfilled his ancient promise to save us from sin and death and open to us the Kingdom of His power and righteousness.

This Jesus was, is and continues to be the key to the meaning of the scriptures, that is, he unlocks for us the cabinet that contains the secret of who we are, why we are here, what we should be doing, and how we might find a life that is profound, fulfilling and finally real. And what is that secret? Just this: the way, the truth and the life is Jesus himself, alive and present! He opens our minds to understand the scriptures, and that in the end is the only absolutely necessary understanding we need, because all the scriptures in one way or another say, “Get in touch with Jesus!” Ask him to help you see him in the scriptures and then study the Bible with a competent guide. That way you can spend time with Christ. If you must hang out, hang out with him! Let your will to believe be informed and disciplined, not willful and ignorant. Let Christ open your mind to understand the scriptures!

Amen.