I Cured the Lame

We continue with our Dance on the way to Emmaus as the men resume their conversation with the Stranger who has come up to them. They tell him in Luke 24:20-21, “our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him.” As it says in the song “Lord of the Dance”:

I danced on the Sabbath & I cured the lame
The holy people said it was a shame!
They whipped & they stripped & they hung me high
And they left me there on a cross to die!

Jesus came to challenge the status quo and the leaders did not like that. Healing on the Sabbath was breaking the Law that said no work could be done on the holy day. So, “they left me there on the cross to die.” And that death was the core of the pair’s disappointment and sorrow. “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they tell their Companion.

All the days of walking with Jesus and listening to him preach and watching him heal had made them believe that he was the Promised One, the Messiah. Their conviction that Jesus was more than an ordinary Rabbi was brought up short when he died, leaving them with just the forlorn words, “we had hoped…”

There are probably no sadder words than “we had hoped…” for a baby, “we had hoped…” to purchase a new house, “we had hoped…” for whatever. There times when we feel that our hope has evaporated. We pray and pray and nothing seems to be happening. Or we struggle to make sense of senseless acts of violence in the news. Or we mourn a loss and life seems empty and pointless. Cleopas and his friend felt that same hopelessness as they trudged from Jerusalem to Emmaus.

In those times, Jesus walks beside us. Often we, like Cleopas, do not recognize His presence. The unexpected note from a friend makes us smile. That is the Lord offering hope. A bit of good news offers a ray of sunshine. That is God in the situation. We read of self-less acts of heroism by everyday people. That is Jesus acting through them.

Just this past week, we were reminded of the pain caused by the misguided hatred of humanity when bombs exploded in Boston. With Cleopas and his friend we can ask, where is Jesus? We can think that hope is lost and that there is only darkness. However, in the Dance of Life, the Lord of the Dance is not conquered when our hopes are dashed. Instead, that is often when God's work really starts. Our God still Dances on the Sabbath and cures our lameness, our hopelessness, our sorrow, our despair. We, individually and corporately, can be the hands and feet of God to the hurting world.

Next week, we’ll see how the “Dance goes on.”