Butterfly Wings and Other Things That Open

Luke 24:14-39

The church where I grew up had a tradition of releasing butterflies on Easter morning. We would take the blossomed cross outside and then release butterflies who had been in their cocoons all during Lent. We would watch the butterflies flutter amidst the blooms--so many symbols of new life overwhelming the cross that it became nearly impossible to think of it as an instrument of death. Cocoons and flowers symbolize the tomb and new life. But the most powerful symbol for me are the butterfly wings. They are the things which, when open, take the butterfly from the cocoon to the flower...and then from the flower to the field. If the cocoon represents death and tomb, and the flower represents life, then the butterfly wings represent resurrection, that which takes us from the former to the latter.

But open wings also sustain the journey from flower to field. And this journey is just as much a part of Easter as the journey from cocoon to flower. That is to say, Easter is not simply a story of death to life, resurrection is also a story of life to more life. Receiving life to sharing life. Butterflies, you might know, are prolific pollinators. Their flight from flower to flower makes yet more life possible. This, dear friends, is our Easter calling. To take the gift of love and grace and forgiveness out into the world. But what shall be our butterfly wings? What must we open to sustain us on the journey?

The risen Christ appeared to two disciples on their way from Jerusalem to Emmaus, but they were prevented from recognizing him. Their eyes were closed, in a manner of speaking. He even opened up the Scriptures to them, interpreting for them all the things written in the Scriptures about the Christ...still they did not recognize him. It wasn’t until they reached Emmaus and invited this stranger to sup with them that he took bread, blessed and broke it, and their eyes were opened. Then, at the point at which they recognized him, he disappeared from their sight.

Open eyes are very important to Luke. Remember when Jesus opened up the scroll of Isaiah in his hometown synagogue? “Recovery of sight to the blind” was a key element of his mission statement. Luke uses the words “look”, “see”, and “sight” over 100 times. He writes his Gospel with great intention to help us to see and recognize the risen Christ that walks beside us.

For Luke, it is open eyes and open minds which are the butterfly wings that sustain disciples on their journey from flower to field--from empty tomb and upper room to the streets of Jerusalem where they will act out their calling. In the upper room, Jesus opens the disciples minds to understand the scriptures, “He said to them, ‘This is what is written: the Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and a change of heart and life for the forgiveness of sins must be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’” After giving this commission in verse 47, Jesus tells his disciples this: “You are witnesses of these things.” You are witnesses...your eyes and minds have been opened.

Luke doesn’t go into great detail as to how exactly Jesus “opens” up the Scriptures for the two disciples on the road to Emmaus or for the eleven in the upper room, only to say that Jesus points to how the Scriptures predict his suffering and rising, a clash with the powers that be and a conquest over them.

I stumbled upon a few writings of William Stringfellow who helped me see the deeper meaning of this conflict, and in so doing opening up a deeper meaning of my calling. He writes that the most decisive clash in all of history is not between Christ and some men who were his enemies, but between Christ and the principalities and powers of this world, represented by and symbolized in Israel and Rome. (Stringfellow, 154) The church has often assumed the history of redemption to be encompassed merely in the saga of relationships between God and human beings, while ignoring God’s relationship and redemptive end for the principalities and powers of this world. (Stringfellow, 155)

Most institutions (be it a business, a religious order, a nation) are governed by the idolatrous commitment they make of human beings to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the institution’s own survival. “This relentless demand of the institutional power is often presented in benign forms to a person under the guise that the bondage to the institution benefits the person in some way.” (Stringfellow, 156) We heard Walter Wink say the same thing about an empire’s self-preserving use of propaganda: “people must be made to believe that they benefit from a system that is in fact harmful to them.” (Wink, 93)

Stringfellow shares an anecdote of a young man who, upon graduating from law school, accepted a position with one of the great Wall Street firms. “During the summer, before he began work at the firm, he married. He did not consult or inform his superiors in the firm about his marriage prior to the event. Later, when he reported for work and the firm learned that he was now married, he was told that he should have consulted the employer before marrying, but, since he was married, it would be advisable for him and his wife to refrain from having any children for at least two or three years. Furthermore, for the sake of his advancement in the firm, he should want to devote all of his time in the office and in his ostensibly personal life to the service of the firm, and children might interfere with this. In the end the claim for service which an institution makes upon human beings is an invitation to surrender their lives in order that the institutions be preserved and prosper. It is an invitation to bondage…” (Stringfellow, 156-157)

It is this bondage, of which we are largely unaware, to which the cross opens our eyes. It is this bondage from which we are released. And it is from this bondage that we who are freed are now called to rescue others. Our understanding of exorcism has been largely manipulated by Hollywood, but exorcism is simply this: a release from demonic bondage.

“‘Demonic’ does not mean evil,” clarifies Stringfellow, “the word refers rather to death, to fallenness. An angelic power in its fallen estate is called a demonic power, because it is a principality existing in the present age in a state of alienation from God, cut off from the life originating in God’s life, separated from its own true life and, thus, being in a state of death. In the fall, every human being, every principality, every thing exists in a state of estrangement from its own life, as well as from the lives of all other human beings, powers, and things. In the fall, the whole of creation is consigned to death.” (Stringfellow, 157-158)

In Luke 4, a man in the synagogue of Capernaum had the spirit of an unclean demon. “He screamed, ‘Hey! What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are. You are the holy one from God.” In Luke’s gospel, the demonic spirits are the first ones to recognize Jesus as the Christ, hyper aware, perhaps, beyond the rest of us in bondage to sin, of the ways in which Jesus was at work to free us from that bondage. This is the “opening” at the heart of God’s work on Easter, the opening of the tomb in which all of creation is imprisoned, the opening of the way from death to new life, and the opening of the wings upon which freedom flutters from cocoon to flower.

We are, as Stringfellow puts it, “beneficiaries of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.” “That means freedom now from all conformities to death, freedom now from fear of the power of death, freedom now from the bondage of idolatry to death, freedom now to live in hope…” (Stringfellow, 75)

Or, as Bob Franke puts it: “Alleluia! The great storm is over. Lift up your wings and fly.”