May 8, 2011
Text: Luke 24:13-35
Our text, the focus of my teaching, is Luke 24. Before getting into the text I would like us first to think about a psychological concept called “cognitive dissonance”, and how different approaches to interpretation deal with cognitive dissonance. In general, we say that a dissonant relation exists between two things which occur together, if, in some way, they do not belong together or fit together. Biblical stories often confront us 21st century people this way. There is a clash of information. The story of Jesus’ resurrection in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John is an example – a dead man coming to life. The synonyms for “dissonant” in the dictionary include harsh, jarring, grating, inharmonious, inconsistent, contradictory, incongruous, discrepant. Cognitive dissonance causes bewilderment and bewilderment is not a comfortable experience. It is a problem, but cognitive dissonance is also a motivator. Spiritually hungry people have a propensity to take it on.
There are three main ways of dealing with stories and details that cause cognitive dissonance in scripture. At one end, fundamentalists say, “No problem!” If God chose to resuscitate Jesus, God has the power to do so. If the Bible says it, it is so, just the way it is described. End of conversation.
At the opposite pole the answer to the problem of cognitive dissonance is to consider the reported fact as a metaphor. In other words, Jesus died, stayed dead, and the early Christians had the vision of a dead man as alive in their midst. New Testament scholar Dominic Crossan interprets Luke 24 from this angle. He says, “Emmaus never happened; Emmaus always happens.” In other words, the story is a metaphor. It symbolizes subjective spiritual experience of us human beings. He says that we are not talking about fact here. We are talking about subjective spiritual experience.
This second view is taken for granted today in many circles, both in scholarship and in churches. The view is that the Emmaus story and other resurrection stories in the Bible have nothing to do with things that actually took place in the real world of space and time and everything to do with what goes on in an invisible reality in which Jesus is ‘alive’ in some sense. This reality did not involve an empty tomb or bodily encounters but rather that the hearts and minds of believers were and still are strengthened by the memory of Jesus. In such spiritual experiences we feel the presence of the divine. The ground of this experience is not fact but metaphor.
Triggers of cognitive dissonance keep cropping up such as the death of Osama bin Laden. Within a few hours of his reported death different interpretations started surfacing about what actually happened. Was he offering resistance or not? In various places, reports quickly began to circulate that the whole thing was a hoax. Suppose years from now reports begin to circulate of numbers of young men confessing, “Osama came to me last night and talked to me like I am talking to you. He said, ‘Now is the time to stand up and be counted.’ So I joined his movement.” What would you make of such testimony? Do you read the New Testament the same or differently?
A third way of interpreting the facts of the Jesus story is to struggle with them as facts – facts that by their very nature create cognitive dissonance. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John each do this in their own way. They differ in some details in their respective versions of the Jesus story, but in the main facts they are consistent.
The novelist John Updike, I believe, speaks for them in strong language in his poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter”.
Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages; let us walk through the door.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
At this point I invite you to join me in working with the Road to Emmaus story from this third approach to Biblical interpretation. Let us explore the text as three examples of cognitive dissonance.
The first example occurs in the description of the conversation between two disciples, one named Cleopas and perhaps his wife. They are experiencing cognitive dissonance from information circulating in Jerusalem. They were already grieving about the loss of their beloved leader Jesus. Added to this they heard of radical new development which has plunged them into confusion. They don’t know what to believe. They are walking along deep in conversation when a stranger they have never seen before comes alongside them and asks what is it that they are talking about?
They start by telling this stranger about Jesus of Nazareth who in their eyes was a prophet “mighty in deed and word” in his public ministry to high and low. Watching him operate they had come to believe that he was the long awaited chosen one sent by God to redeem Israel. But the people in power turned on him got the Romans to crucify him and so he died. Then just that morning, on the third day after the crucifixion, some women of their group astounded them. They reported that when they went to the tomb early that to anoint Jesus’ body, his body was not there. The tomb was empty. Next, these women said that they saw a vision of angels telling them that Jesus was alive. With that story they reported back to the other followers. Some of the men then went to the tomb to see for themselves and found it empty as the women had said.
This is cognitive dissonance – a dead Jesus, an empty tomb, and a vision saying he was alive. These starkly different things don’t happen in ordinary life. What’s going on here?
That’s one example of cognitive dissonance in the text. Let’s go to a second. It starts with the stranger gently reprimanding the couple and indirectly all of Jesus’ initial followers. He says, in effect, “you loyal but very human followers just don’t get what the prophets have been saying all along. If you did, you would recognize that what’s going is no accident. These things are following a pattern that God is behind. The prophets of old saw it and wrote about it – rejection, suffering, death and then a great reversal.” Then beginning with Moses and the other prophets he pointed out the similarity between what they foresaw and what has and is happening.
This is pretty straightforward – the fulfillment of prophecy. In itself it is not cognitive dissonance. You either believe it or you don’t. You either believe Osama Ben Laden is dead or you don’t. That is a choice. But cognitive dissonance is more. Cognitive dissonance occurs when contradictory data enters your brain and given who you are you have to work with both sides of the dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance shows up again in the next scene. Cleophas and his wife are drawn to this stranger. They want to spend more time with him. They plead with him to have a meal and stay the night – either at their house in Emmaus or at an inn on the way home. They are eating around a table and Jesus “took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them” in a way reminiscent of the feeding of the 5000 and the Last Supper. Note these four action verbs – took, blessed, broke, and gave. Luke is clearly describing a ritual familiar to his readers a generation later. This and baptism were two rituals that they associated powerfully with the risen Jesus.
As the three eat the bread the text says that the eyes of the couple were opened. The description is the same as used in Genesis chapter two when the eyes of Adam and Eve are opened and they see that they are naked. Here the shift is different but just as radical. They see the stranger for who he is – Jesus. Then as soon as they see him for who he is he vanishes.
As the psychologists say, the experience of cognitive dissonance is a motivator. These followers have mysteries to process – an empty tomb, a missing body, the report that Jesus is alive. Now they have something else to process – Jesus breaking bread with them one moment and gone the next, without any transition from one to the other. The reports from Jerusalem were strange enough, but they just had their own strange experience. How do they process this? They discuss how back up the road as this stranger was explaining scripture to them their hearts were burning as he reframed the stories from the perspective of the prophets.
Now a third example of cognitive dissonance. The text says that that same hour the couple got up from the table where they had shared a meal with Jesus and headed back to Jerusalem to track down the eleven closest companions of Jesus. They had to compare notes. When they found them they heard those disciples exclaiming, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” The couple responded by telling their experience with the stranger whom they recognized as the risen Jesus in breaking bread together.
As this exciting sharing was going on, Luke says that Jesus materialized among them and greeted them, “Peace be with you.” Here we get into cognitive dissonance big time – not just individual here and there having unusual experiences but a large gathering witness the same thing at the same time. Luke describes the gathered followers as startled and terrified and convinced that they were seeing a ghost. To their amazement, this figure before them says, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”
Luke says that the disciples react with joy and disbelief. How do people react with joy and disbelief? The answer is cognitive dissonance! Looking at this in the big picture of Luke and Acts, the disciples are in an interim time between the crucifixion, the empty tomb, the appearances of the risen Jesus and the cessation of those appearances and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
Deciding whether to engage the story as essentially fact or metaphor is one step. The next step is what do the facts or metaphors mean? I don’t have time today to go into meaning except to say that how we resolve the first dilemma – that is, as essentially fact or metaphor, goes a long way toward shaping how we will interpret the meaning. If we go the metaphor route, we will spend most of our time talking about ourselves, our feelings, experiences and responsibilities. If we go the fact route, we will grapple more with confrontation of beliefs about ourselves, the world and God and the times and culture in which we exist.
A Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. What I propose is that we in this community continue to read and apply scripture the best way we know how. For some of us that will be the reading scripture as metaphor way and perhaps for others the literalist way. I also invite us to recognize and respect the existence of a third way. It might be helpful to practice from time to time reading scripture all three ways and reflect on what comes to us in each different way of reading.
Any questions? Any comments?