Third Sunday of Easter
April 2, 2012
Then
He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures…
Wouldn’t that have been great to be there? To stand before Jesus as He
opened your mind to understand the Scriptures? There are those times you’re in
Bible Class and you’re really examining a passage in the Bible and it just
doesn’t make sense. Or those times when you’re at home reading the Bible or
spending time in devotions and a passage of the Bible says the opposite of what
you would expect God to say in His Word. Or the times when someone challenges
you on a particular passage in the Bible and you’re stumped, conceding to them
that you really don’t understand what that passage means.
How great would it be to have Jesus right there with you opening up your
mind to understand the Scriptures? If you could go back to certain times and
places in history, which ones would you choose? This is one of those events in
history I would want to have experienced. What must that have been like for
Jesus to open their minds to now understand the Scriptures? Was this like a
light-bulb moment, where now they understood it all perfectly? All their questions
were answered instantaneously; all those things didn’t quite get before they
now had a handle on; all those passages that had stumped them before they could
now rattle off a coherent explanation of them.
This isn’t quite what happened on that day when Jesus opened their
minds to understand the Scriptures. As much as we would love to have an
immediate and perfect grasp of the Scriptures, on this side of heaven that’s
just not going to happen. Certainly one of the things the apostles understood
as they now had their minds opened by Christ to understand the Scriptures was
that they still had a life-long learning and growing process in those very
Scriptures.
So what does it mean that He opened their minds to understand them? He
tells us in the next words He says: “Thus it is written, that the Christ should
suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and
forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning
from Jerusalem.” This is an amazing statement by Jesus. He’s not just saying,
“You guys now understand that the Old Testament prophesied that I would suffer
and on the third day rise from the dead.” The Old Testament did indeed prophesy
that, but Jesus had on other occasions said this very thing. Look at what He
says now, He says that the Old Testament prophesied these things as well as
this: “and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his
name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” Start at Genesis 1:1 and read all the way
through Malachi 4:6
and you won’t find those words in the Old Testament.
But if we back up for a moment, and those first two things Jesus
mentioned, His suffering and resurrection, what are we to make of these things
having been prophesied in the Old Testament? Does it specifically say, as Jesus
says in our Gospel reading, it is written, that “that the Christ should suffer
and on the third day rise from the dead.” If you look in the Old Testament will
you find those words? Most Christians don’t feel at all uncomfortable in
finding that those exact words are not found in the Old Testament. It is
amazing enough at how the words of the Old Testament do prophesy Jesus’
suffering, death, and resurrection. There are passages such as Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 that when you read them
you can’t help but marvel at how words that were written centuries before
Christ so accurately describe what Jesus went through.
So it’s pretty easy for us Christians to look at the Old Testament and
see how they do indeed prophesy Jesus and His suffering, death, and
resurrection. It’s easy enough for us to see in those and many other passages
in the Old Testament prophecies that do not mention the name of Jesus a direct
fulfillment in Jesus. When Jesus opened the apostles’ minds to understand the
Scriptures, though, what do you think they made of Jesus’ next words, “and that
repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all
nations, beginning from Jerusalem”? Now that they had this new-found understanding
of the Scriptures directly from Jesus, were they able to open up directly to
chapter and verse in the Old Testament and find where this thing Jesus was
talking about was prophesied?
What in actuality was happening is what happens to you. Though you
weren’t there on that day, what Jesus did for them on that day He does for you
today. When Luke says that Jesus opened their minds to understand the
Scriptures, he is showing us that what Jesus was doing was opening up the
Scriptures for us as well. How this is is because he was showing that Jesus
wasn’t just saying that there are particular passages in the Old Testament that
prophesied Him and that He fulfilled. He was showing that the Old Testament
serves this purpose: to bring Christ to us. The Old Testament is admittedly tough
to understand in many ways. But it’s impossible to understand if you don’t see
what Jesus is doing here, namely, showing us that He is the thing the Old
Testament is delivering to us.
There is a religion that only holds to the Old Testament and not the
New Testament. There are many religions that reject the New Testament even as
they do the Old Testament. But Christians look at the Old Testament and also
the New Testament and see the Word of God. The Old Testament shows us how God
paved the way for salvation to come about through Christ. The New Testament
shows us the fulfillment of that. The New Testament lies in the Old Testament
concealed. The Old Testament lies in the New Testament revealed.
Another way of saying this is that apart from Christ the Old Testament
is just another book. Christ is at the center and heart of the Old Testament,
but in a concealed way, not as in the New Testament. Whereas, for example, the
Old Testament will say that salvation will come through the Suffering Servant
and that by His stripes we are healed, as in Isaiah 53 , the New Testament states overtly that Jesus is
the one who was our Servant, who suffered on the cross, and that it was in His
suffering and death we are healed of the sickness of our sinfulness and are forgiven.
This is why it’s such an important statement when Jesus says that it is
written “that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his
name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” What Jesus is doing is not
saying, “If you just turn to Isaiah chapter 30 you’ll find those exact words
there.” What He is doing is showing us that He is the one who interprets the
Bible. He is the one who shows us what the Old Testament is saying, teaching,
and prophesying. And what that is is, well, it’s Him. He is the object of the
message and the prophecies of the Old Testament. They point to Him. They show
us Him. They deliver to us salvation that is completely in Him.
This is what He opened the disciples’ minds to understand. It is what
He does for you in your life. When you read and study the Old Testament you
aren’t just reading a bunch of historical stories and vague prophecies. You
reading, and receiving, Christ who suffered, died, and rose for you. And you
are being delivered to you something you might never have realized before: “repentance
and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations,
beginning from Jerusalem.”
You can see how Jesus’ having opened the disciples’ minds to understand
the Scriptures bore out as Peter points to this reality in the First Reading: “what
God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he
thus fulfilled. Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted
out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that
he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until
the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his
holy prophets long ago.” You can see how this bore out, as two thousand years
later we are sitting here in San Diego, around the globe from where it started
in Jerusalem and we are hearing this very same message, as Jesus said it was
prophesied in the Old Testament, “that the Christ should suffer and on the
third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins
should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
You and I carry the very same message out in our lives, to the people
we know and the people we meet, San Diego becoming our Jerusalem. You don’t
need to wonder if you really understand the Scriptures. You don’t need to fear
that you don’t know what to say. You know exactly what the Scriptures teach and
what they give: Jesus, the one who suffered, died, and rose for the sins of the
world and the repentance and forgiveness that comes about through Him. Amen.
SDG
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