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 “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem…?”

A meditation on Luke 24:18

     “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there?” Cleopas asked this of Jesus as they walked together toward Emmaus, before he realized who Jesus was. The  resurrected Christ must have seemed strange in some way. But even before the cross Jesus seemed a stranger in Jerusalem. He would have gathered its people together as a hen gathers her chicks, but they would not respond. He visited the city and the Temple by day but didn’t stay over night until he was forced to do so under arrest.

Jerusalem was the city of the Temple, the residence of God. And what did Jesus know of the God of Jerusalem but that he imposed great   sacrifices on him and then, just when Jesus was making those sacrifices, abandoned him. Jesus was a stranger, an alien, in the city whose main industry was God. He wasn’t from those parts, and it showed. Maybe he was, in fact, the only real stranger in Jerusalem. Everyone else, more or less, felt at home with a God whose residence had an address and whose service had a price or carried a salary.

Somehow Jesus held himself apart from all that. When he had to  pay the Temple tax the money came from the mouth of a fish. When he had someone to heal he did that despite the Sabbath. When he had people to feed the food came from his own hand. Jerusalem represented the world of institutional religion, and Jesus did seem an alien to that.

So what are we, his followers, to make of that? We have tried to  domesticate Jesus. We have developed our own institutions, our churches, for him to live in and we imagine that he feels at home there, here, with us. But have we succeeded? Would we have to say to Jesus, “Are you the only visitor this morning who doesn’t know the Doxology? Are you the only member who doesn’t read the newsletter?” We imagine that Jesus stands within the church, reaching out, when in fact he stands outside and knocks at our door harder than at any other. It is when we are out on the open road, outside Jerusalem, with our religious guard down, that Jesus has the opportunity to sneak up on our blind side and walk with us for awhile, and  we don’t even know it was him until he is gone--off, we hope, to some new encounter with some equally blind disciple on some other road. Always the stranger.

The only stranger.

Pastor L. Timothy Doty