Waiting…
Way back in 2006 John Mayer sang, “We keep waiting, waiting on the world to change. We keep on waiting, waiting on the world to change.” To which I have to respond sitting here in 2023, You thought things were rough back in 2006, John, just WAIT! Get it? Anyway, it is an eternally applicable song.
But we have an issue with waiting. . .namely we hate to wait! We are all about instant gratification. This is how our world increasingly operates. Consider Amazon. They don’t want you to have go to your virtual shopping cart any more to buy something. If you do you might actually think twice and not purchase that gravity blanket or that brand new juicer. You can just swipe and buy it now and get it delivered tomorrow. They’ve relieved you of all of that second guessing yourself. How kind of them?! Or think of Netflix or Hulu or Apple TV. You don’t have to wait til next week for the next episode of your favorite show, you can watch the whole season right now, for the next 6 hours straight. No more waiting. Except for Ted Lasso, of course…the one show I WANT to binge right now. I can’t wait til next Wednesday! Maybe it’s cause I’m hoping it will somehow live up to the excellence of the first season…alas not yet. There are still moments of brilliance (Rebecca and Roy Kent are my absolute faves!), but overall not quite the same magic. But, I digress.
We don’t want to wait because then we might actually have some time on our hands, and that’s bad to us. You know what happens when you have some space and time? You actually begin to feel. You might actually become self-aware again, and we don’t want that! If we start to become self-aware, if we start to actually feel, then we might hurt. We might actually start to feel some pain. That sounds…painful! We don’t want to hurt. We just want to stay plugged in and numbed out. Waiting, in many ways, equals pain to us. Don’t make us slow down, just give us what we want right now!
As unlikely as it may seem, John Mayer is prophetic in his Waiting on the World to Change. Just like the prophets of the Old Testament, his song breaks the collective denial that we all almost unwittingly buy into. He sings about corrupt world leaders; he sings about war and missing loved ones off fighting some battle in some foreign land; he sings about the misinformation of the news, etc. Just a cursory look at the world and its issues, which have only gotten worse since 2006, and it is plain to see that things are not as they should be. Darn it! There’s that pain we keep trying to avoid. We keep on waiting, waiting on the world to change. U2 sang a song with a familiar message 20 years prior called I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. Here we are over 30 years later still waiting, still looking, still hurting. Things are not as we had hoped they would be.
I wonder if you feel that reality in your personal life. Are there areas of your life where you still haven’t found what you’re looking for? Are there places where you wish you could just rush ahead, but can’t. Are you waiting on things to change in your life? What had you hoped for?
In Luke 24 we catch up with two of Jesus’ disciples on Easter Day, the day of the resurrection, and we hear them dealing with the fact that what they had hoped for, what they had waited for had not come to pass in their minds. They were walking to Emmaus from Jerusalem talking about all the things that happened that weekend, namely Jesus’ crucifixion on the cross and then the stories of the empty tomb that they had heard that morning from Mary and the other women, but it’s clear they didn’t understand any of it. They didn’t know how any of it fit together, in fact, they didn’t think that any of it really did. When Jesus joins them on the road, but doesn’t let them recognize him yet, and asks them what they’re talking about, Cleopas tells Jesus the whole story. What a wild thing to be telling Jesus all about himself without knowing it. In this retelling of the gospel by Cleopas, he says, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” We had hoped. You can hear their implied conclusion…but there’s no way he could have been. How could he have been?…he was crucified as a criminal. Can you hear the choruses? But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…we keep on waiting on the world to change!
They thought Jesus was going to redeem Israel, that he was going to deliver them from the oppressive Romans and hypocritical Jewish leaders. They thought he was going to set things right, change things, but he didn’t from their perspective. They actually wanted the wrong thing when it came down to it. They thought they knew what redemption was, but they didn’t. You can hear them have a glimmer of hope when they heard the resurrection story from the women…maybe he’s gonna come back…? But then they reference Peter and John who had run to the tomb and found it empty, and what do they conclude? Cleopas says, “but him they did not see.” We had hoped, but him they did not see. They were back to waiting, back to the pain of disappointment.
Amazingly, Jesus gives them the time and space to feel the pain, to connect with their disappointment. He doesn’t let them recognize him yet. He waits and makes them wait because he’s got something else he wants them to see first before they see him risen. He wants them to see him in the Scriptures first. He calls them foolish, which is a little bit of a harsh translation…a better one might be “How dull you are and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Wasn’t it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And he opens the whole Bible (which is important to remember here refers to the Old Testament…they were living the beginning of the New Testament here)…Jesus shows them that he is all through it. It is all about him. He shows them what redemption really meant.
Jesus wants them to recognize the truth about himself in the Scriptures first and foremost because that is what they will use to show him to everyone else. This is a major emphasis of Luke…believing because of the testimony of someone else…someone who understands how Jesus is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets…how Jesus is the Christ. Luke is doing this very thing as he testifies to Theophilus in writing his gospel account. This is Jesus’ plan. He knows that he is not going to stay around for them to point to and say, “See, here he is…risen from the dead.” He knows he is going to ascend, and they will be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. It will be their job to help others see him risen through opening the Scriptures. It’s clear Jesus was an effective preacher and teacher because they are desperate to have him stay with them once they reach Emmaus. He looks like he’s just gonna keep on going, but they strongly urge him to stay with them. He does, and that’s when he chooses to reveal himself as resurrected to them. He sits with them at the table and takes the bread, blesses it and gives it to them, and their eyes are opened.
Why did he choose to wait til this moment? Well, just a few verses after our passage we hear Cleopas and his companion relay their experience with Jesus to the other disciples back in Jerusalem. This encounter made them drop whatever they intended to do in Emmaus, and they ran back to Jerusalem to report to the others. When they get there they hear that Jesus had appeared to Peter too, and we can hear them starting to actually believe the women who told them all of this in the first place. Just as an aside, it’s one of the great things about the Bible that the writers tell on themselves all the time. Luke shows us that they all doubted the testimony of the women, but after Jesus appeared to Peter and then to Cleopas and his companion they are finally believing. They say the Lord has risen indeed.
Cleopas tells the others that the Lord was known to them in the breaking of the bread. We see the significance of this for these two disciples. It is a picture of fellowship. Jesus wanted them to see him in the context of intimacy. He wanted them to see the full picture of why he did what he did. He explained the Scriptures to them, which equips them for being his witnesses, and then he reveals himself to them in fellowship. He came to live, die, and rise again from the dead so that we all would have fellowship with him…with God. Remember the curtain being torn on Good Friday, well here we see the resurrection fruit of that. It is what the Lord’s Supper was pointing to on Maundy Thursday…full fellowship between God and humanity…sinners welcomed at the Lord’s table.
This is actually what we are all waiting for. This is actually the change that we are looking for…that our relationship with God has been made right through the suffering of Jesus Christ and his resurrection. He has forgiven our sins. We are free to live with him now, to enjoy full fellowship with him. There is no more shame, no more condemnation, no more fear. This does not mean that it is always simple. The plain truth is that even this story still points to the reality of waiting. We have entered into a new kind of waiting. We are free from the condemnation of our sins, we are welcomed into fellowship with God, and at the same time we are still waiting for the full consummation of everything. Jesus disappeared after he broke bread with them. And we today are not sitting physically with Jesus at his table. We are still waiting for him to return and bring us home to be with him forever. And in this waiting we are still often reminded of the pain in us and around us. We are still broken, but now we have the promise that our brokenness will not last and does not define us. It has an end date on it, and we even get to experience him bringing us into more and more healing here and now. Whatever the pain is that you feel the good news is that he even uses that to bring you back to himself. We don’t have to run from the pain. We don’t have to constantly numb out, we don’t have to be afraid of the pain because he will use it to show us how much he loves us. He will use it to show us how much we need him, and how he always fills that need. Praise God! How merciful our God is! So to that I say, bring on the waiting.
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