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Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, the text for this Sunday and Easter comes from the Gospel reading. You may be seated. It is in this morning’s text where Jesus is said to have opened their minds. Now the people about which Jesus that was said were the Apostles. So when Jesus says he opened their minds, it does not imply that the apostles were unbelievers. It implies what was striking the apostles at this time, and that is, they’re being startled, they’re being troubled, they’re being that they thought Jesus was a spirit, doubts in their hearts, and a troubled mind and heart. That brings closeness to a believer’s mind.
In fact, as a believer, you struggle not with your mind being open. It’s been open since your baptism. You struggle, like I struggle, with doubts and fears that wish to close it to what God has declared to you in your salvation. So there is this opposition between the open mind that God’s Holy Spirit has worked in your heart and the closed mind of your own experience.
So the old man that I mentioned—I didn’t tell you how old he was. He was in his 70s when he went to prison for shooting his son-in-law. He didn’t kill him. He had severe heart disease and emphysema. And guess what kind of a home and town he grew up in? It wasn’t the streets of some drug-ridden city. It was in a small town like Lexington or Fedor or Mannheim or Serben or Giddings. A Lutheran German community going to a Lutheran school all the days of his life, sitting in the pew hearing the good news of Jesus every single Sunday. That’s the kind of man that his life he grew up. His mind had been opened by God’s Holy Spirit.
What he struggled with is, now that he had done this deed, did God still love him? Does that sound familiar? You see, when things are going so swimmingly in your life or in my life, you and I have no problem applying, Jesus died for me. Jesus’ death and resurrection was for me and my salvation. It applies to me. That’s easy. Sitting in a jail cell, dying and rotting? Not so much. Sitting in your jail cell of fear and doubt? Not so much.
I hope you’ve seen kind of an interesting theme over the last three Sundays. Quick recap. Easter morning. Who struggled with doubts and fears? Mary Magdalene and the apostles. Last Sunday. Who struggled with doubts and fears? Thomas. This Sunday. Who’s struggling with doubts and fears? The apostles. The apostles. Believers are struggling with doubts and fears. People who have had their mind opened by the Holy Spirit struggle with doubts and fears. Can you relate? I sure as shoot and match can.
Now Jesus does some interesting things to the apostles here when he appears to them. He gives them two historical facts upon which to hang the truth of his resurrection. First, behold my hands, my feet. And shows them… So that they know He is flesh and bone. Resurrected bodies will be flesh and bone. They will not be spiritualized, ethereal spirits up there. You will have flesh and bone like He did. In fact, John’s epistle says that. We shall see Him as He is. Which is how He was then.
The second thing that he does, he doesn’t need to, but he asks for something to eat. It’s not as if he’s been fasting for the last several days and has had nobody to fix him some food. He asks them if he can eat some fish and does it before them in the text so that they can see with their own eyes that he is not a spirit. He is flesh and blood and eats, which implies heaven. It can be some place we can eat and drink. Isaiah talked about that. The feast of the best of meats and the finest of wines. In the book of Revelation and in other places, the marriage feast of the Lamb and His kingdom talks about eating and drinking and celebrating.
But it’s the next statement that is the most important. When Jesus is said about Jesus, that he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, again, it’s not a matter that they didn’t believe. It’s that the closed-mindedness of their fears and doubts and anxieties and all those other things crept in to try to mask the Son of Jesus in that believer’s life, just as it did for the old man who died in prison, just as it has in your life. But it’s important to note what Jesus uses. Yes, he did show them his hands and his feet. Yes, he did eat fish. But he doesn’t go back to historical data to bring them an opening of their hearts and minds to the Scriptures.
What does he use to open their hearts and minds to believe in the Scriptures? The Scriptures. He does not point them to anything that they have seen or experienced yet thus far to look to. He doesn’t say, remember how I came to you the first time and said, peace be with you? That should be something you should rely upon. Don’t you remember how I revealed to you and had you put my hand inside there? Shouldn’t that not be what gave you strength in the midst of this doubt? And yet, each Sunday for the last three, where have we found the apostles? Hiding for fear. They have seen Jesus. They have touched Jesus. They have heard Jesus. And yet they still have fear.
Jesus doesn’t point them back to those things that they perceived with their senses and or with their reason. Jesus points them back to where their minds were first opened in the Scriptures. And what texts did Jesus use to open their minds to the Scriptures? The New Testament hadn’t been written yet. He used the Old Testament, and here is something profound that I don’t want you to forget or miss. The faith of the Old Testament is exactly the same as the faith of the New Testament. What did he use for the apostles to write the New Testament and to confirm their faith but the promises of the Old Testament? Therefore, our faith is the same as theirs.
Jesus’ intent to bring His Word into your life in the midst of your predicament or struggle is so that you can believe it is for you. As mentioned earlier, when you’re not struggling or being sifted or going through a difficult time, not too hard to believe that Jesus died for you and that the flesh and blood of Christ cleanses you from all sin and so forth. But let you be put into a predicament—changes perspective. And this old curmudgeon-y man sitting in a prison cell in northwest Missouri had such an attitude. I never thought he wasn’t a believer. I knew he was, but boy, he was hardened about something. And I’ll never know what that is. But a bitter and angry man was he.
That hymn that we sang—seven verses of it—I wrote it out to him in a letter and sent it to him. It wasn’t until the next time that I saw him and brought him communion that he said, that hymn meant so much to me. And I’ve been writing to him and visiting him for well over a year by then. I don’t know how and why it got through, but it got through. The Holy Spirit opened his mind through the Scriptures, these scriptural truths. And he believed that Jesus died for him.
You can imagine in a church, did you hear about him and what happened, how he shot? All kinds of conversations were going on. He was well-known in that part of town too, right? Jesus wants to bring you that same comfort, and He opens your minds from the closedness of your own fears and shortcomings and sinfulness so that you have faith in and confidence in that everything of which He speaks applies to you. And you don’t have to figure out how to do something to make Him happy. He has made Himself happy through the death of His Son for you.
Now, it changed his attitude, this old man. He who only saw himself as being injustice done to him, saw himself imprisoned within a prison. Finally, by God’s good news, he was freed—not from the prison, but from the prison here. Can you relate? All of you do not live in a prison, and yet you and I struggle with prisons here. Here. A sermon of closeness, of fears and anxieties that we need to be freed from. And He chooses to do that to you. Having done it, it changes you as it changed Him. You have been changed, and you know so.
Jesus then gives them this mission of what they are to do with this having been released from their sins: to go and proclaim it. Proclaim repentance. Repentance. For not having it all together as a Christian, for having closed-mindedness drive you and lead you around by the nose more than you and I wish to admit. Fears and anxieties pushing us when we don’t want to be pushed in those directions.
But also, not just repenting of those things, but receiving the freedom and forgiveness that He has given you. That it applies to you in your worst day, not in your best day. That His forgiveness fulfills its work in you when you are in prison having murdered your brother-in-law—son-in-law, I mean. Now none of you can claim that in a real sense, but all of us can claim that in the spiritual sense.
Remember when Jesus said to you, I am in the midst of you as one who serves? That’s what He’s been doing to your heart since you began to hear and sing the words of the Lord. In the liturgy and in the hymns and in the texts when you came into church, He’s been in your midst serving you. It applies to you. It’s your good news. It’s your hope. It’s your freedom. It’s your brightness of tomorrow. This is God’s work for people He calls, my children, my children.
In the name of Jesus, amen. The peace of God which passes all understanding. Keep your hearts and your minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting. Amen.
