Before I went to seminary, I served as the interim youth director at my home church in Atlanta for a year while they were in between permanent staff. It was a perfect arrangement for both of us; I had just returned from a year in Australia and had decided to go to seminary, but this was before the Internet was invented, so applying from halfway around the world was almost impossible, and I needed a year to do that. It also gave me a year of ministry experience, which turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened to me before going to seminary, because it was invaluable in figuring out what I really needed to focus on in my studies.
They, on the other hand, needed someone who could walk 
right into the job and help turn around a faltering youth ministry that had declined precipitously in numbers and vitality in the five years since I graduated from high school. And it worked: within six months, we had revitalized both the Sunday School and the youth group for senior highs, and people in the church were noticing.
That’s when the invitation came. And it was a literal invitation: a lavender envelope with my name in elegant handwriting on the envelope, and monogrammed stationery on the inside that was inviting me to come teach the Women’s Bible Class. The monogram, I realized, was that of Miss Agnes, the president of the Women’s Sunday Bible Class. Now, a couple of things. First, the Women’s Sunday Bible Class was supposedly just another Sunday School class, but in reality it wielded a shadowy power behind the scenes in that church that would make the Illuminati jealous if they were real.
Second, you weren’t “invited” to the Women’s Bible Class: you were summoned. And third, it was known among the staff that you also didn’t “teach” the Women’s Bible Class when you were summoned; you were examined by them. So in her elegant, malevolent handwriting, Miss Agnes informed me that they would “like” me to teach the class in three weeks, and that the text that Sunday would be the story of Saul encountering Jesus on the road to Damascus.
Now, if you don’t know that story, it’s told in the Acts of the Apostles, the stories of Jesus’ disciples after the Resurrection as they build up the early church. Saul was a Pharisee who was a zealous opponent of Christianity, going so far as to persecute early Christians whenever he could get his hands on them. One day Saul is riding from Jerusalem to Damascus with a mandate to arrest any Christians he finds when he gets there, when he is suddenly blasted with a blinding light from heaven that is so intense he falls off his horse.
He hears a voice say, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Saul asks who is asking him this, and the voice says, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” Saul follows some instructions that the voice gives, which ultimately connects him to care by Christians in Damascus, and Saul becomes a devoted disciple and apostle of Jesus himself. For many Christians, the conversion of Saul is the paradigm by which any conversion is described, understood, or judged. People talk about “seeing the light.” People talk about their “road to Damascus” experience, a time when Jesus suddenly and forcefully intervened in their lives and re-directed them to a new life of joy, faithfulness and service. And because of that, the Scriptural account of Saul’s conversion is often understood as the paradigm of how how Jesus calls people to follow him.
So I show up at their dedicated classroom at my appointed hour and take my seat, with the class of thirty or so women arranged around me in a semi-circle, and my anxiety dropped a little as we began talking about the passage, which really meant mostly that they talked and I nodded or mirrored back what they were saying, because they were thoughtful and insightful about it all. But then as we were talking about the notion of salvation in the context of Saul’s dramatic conversion, Miss Agnes fixed me with a stare, and I knew something was coming. “So,” she said to me, “when were you saved?” And suddenly everyone was looking at me and waiting to hear what I was going to say.
My dilemma in that moment was the problem for any of us who do not have a singular “road to Damascus” experience about our response to Jesus to draw upon and share: if you’ve never been knocked off your horse by Jesus, so to speak, how do you know “when were you saved?” Now, the irony here is that the story of Saul on the road to Damascus is clearly not supposed to be a paradigm for Christian conversion. In fact, just the opposite; it demonstrates the unusual lengths God had to go to in order to get Saul’s attention. Nothing short of that was going to get his attention, so dedicated was he to searching out and persecuting the early Christians. He was not going to be impressed by any miraculous sign they might do, and he was hardly going to listen to their preaching. So, Jesus takes matters into his own hands and confronts Saul directly and personally, the only such appearance to anyone who wasn’t already a disciple in the entire New Testament.
But, as far as that goes, even a direct encounter with the resurrected Jesus is no guarantee of faithfulness. Just look at our lesson today. Th male disciples have already heard about the empty tomb from the women who discovered it that morning. Now it is evening on the same day, and Jesus has just appeared to two disciples who had been leaving Jerusalem to go to the village of Emmaus. Once they recognize him, they race back to the other disciples in Jerusalem to tell them. While they’re still talking about this, Jesus appears to all the disciples gathered right there in Jerusalem.
And when he says, “peace be with you,” they respond with anything but a sense of peace. First, they are terrified, and to be fair, that’s pretty understandable. It’s one thing to hear prophecies about Jesus being resurrected after three days of death, it’s quite another to see him suddenly standing there in the flesh. And so they make sure he is there, in fact, in the flesh, checking his hands and feet at his invitation, which ghosts were believed, in their time, not to have. At that point, they start rejoicing, but interestingly Luke emphasizes that they’re still disbelieving (the Greek literally means, “refusing to be persuaded”), presumably from the enormity of both what has happened and what they implications are.
So Jesus then asks them if they have anything to eat, and they give him some broiled fish, which he then eats, showing them that he is alive by doing one of the most basic acts of life (which ghosts, of course, never do no matter what cultural paradigms you’re working with). And at that point, he reminds them about what he taught them before they ever got to Jerusalem: that he would suffer, be killed, and be raised from the dead on the third day, and that then the good news would be proclaimed to all nations, starting in Jerusalem. “You are witnesses of these things,” he concludes.
Now, the Greek word for “witness” is “martures,” or “martyrs.” And martyrs is a very loaded word. If I said that a friend was “a martyr to the cause,” you wouldn’t hear that as someone who was a witness, describing what they had experienced and believed about the cause. You would hear it as someone who was tortured and/or executed for describing what they had experienced and believed. That’s because of the dramatic stories of those first apostles and others in the early church who were dramatically murdered, and the Roman Catholic traditions of the saints have preserved many of those stories.
I think my favorite, so to speak, is St. Lawrence, who was roasted to death on a grill in the third century and at one point told his tormenters to flip him over because he was done on that side. In the Roman Catholic church, he is now, and I am not making this up, the patron saint of both cooks and comedians. And that’s just one of literally thousands of such stories, which is why martyrdom has gotten associated with both extraordinary faithfulness and with dying.
But that’s not what the word means when Jesus uses it here. It simply means “witness,” one who testifies to the truth that they have seen and experienced.[1] Not even all the early disciples had dramatic stories of dying for their faith. For some of those disciples, being witnesses to Jesus will lead them to testify dramatically to their faith, resulting in persecution and death; for some, it will lead them to testify to their faith through the day in, day out work of being human. But all will follow, and all will be witnesses, and that, after all, is what Jesus asks of them.
Miss Agnes sat there in the Women’s Sunday Bible Class, unmoving, waiting on my answer, her question of “When were you saved?” hanging in the air. As I was trying to think how to respond, another woman leaned forward, an amiable lady named Nancy. “The same time you were, Agnes,” she said softly but firmly. “The same time all of us were: about 2000 years ago in Jerusalem.” Nancy smiled at me and leaned back. Agnes eyed her for a moment in silence, and then finally nodded. And she was right.
I might have been saved by Nancy that morning, but when it comes to Jesus, all of our individual encounters or experiences or stories of him are finally responses to the empty tomb and Christ’s resurrection on Easter. And Jesus did not die and rise again to create a hierarchy of faith between those who encounter him suddenly, vividly, and dramatically, and those who gradually grow to recognize his power and presence in their lives; nor between those who respond him by laying down their lives in Christ-like love and those who live out their lives in Christ-like love. Jesus died and rose again to absorb the full depths of humanity’s boundless violence and senseless hatred, of the powers of sin and death themselves, to rob them of the last word, and to show us how to follow him through the valley of death’s shadow and into the abundance of life God intends for all of us.
And he continues even now to gather us together in his presence, saying to each and all of us, “you are witnesses of these things.” Few, if any, of us will be called to be faithful unto death; but being faithful unto life, witnessing to God’s gracious love in the extraordinary events of our day and in the everyday-ness of our lives is its own challenge. So come and meet the risen Lord once again, whatever road has led you here this day, and whatever path you will take from here. Come enjoy fellowship with each other and be partners on the journey of faith together. And then go, strengthened to be witnesses of the promise that Jesus embodies and shares in the aftermath of Easter, as the Scripture says: “death shall be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more….see, I am making all things new.” Alleluia!
[1] The Greek word is martus, and it means a witness to facts in a legal sense. The “witness” gives binding, truthful testimony to facts to which she has knowledge, either events experienced first-hand or persons or relationships known to her. See the article on martus in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 4, eds. G. Kittel and G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 474ff.