Easter Ends Our Illusions

‘R ob the average man of his life illusion,” wrote Henrik Ibsen, “and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.”

That must have been the emotional outlook of many pious Jews as they witnessed the gruesome execution of a Nazarene prophet at the hands of Roman soldiers. No one in Israel’s collective memory had stirred their hopes as he had. No one spoke so movingly about God’s relentless love for his chosen people, or so convincingly about God’s triumph over his enemies.

Yet now, in Jerusalem, at the scene of his death, all his magnificent words have dissolved into the rancid air of Golgotha. This man of peace, this champion of the weak, had confronted the most powerful men in Jerusalem — and lost everything in the contest. “He saved others,” an onlooker taunted, “but he can’t save himself.”

It was a scene of utter disillusionment.

The violent end of the ministry of Jesus instantly transformed his inner circle of disciples. Once devoted foot soldiers in a religious revolution, they devolved into frightened and demoralized fugitives. They became men on the run.

The gospel of Luke tells the story of two of these individuals, Cleopas and his unnamed companion. It is the experience of disillusionment, above all others, that has set these men to flight, to Emmaus, a village about 7.5 miles west of Jerusalem. Along the way they encounter “a stranger,” who sees their grief and asks them what has happened. The man they believed to be a prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, they say, has been crucified. “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.”

The restoration of Israel as a political and religious community was a dream that had fired the imagination of Jews for centuries. They had escaped the bondage of Egypt, endured a long desert Exodus, and took possession of the land God had promised them. Slaves and the children of slaves became victorious warriors and landowners. God had shown the Jews — and the world — that he could deliver his people from the greatest empire on earth.

Now they lived under the brutal lash of Rome. Nevertheless, to the Jewish people the promise was certain: The political and spiritual revival of Israel would arrive. It would occur after a final prophet, a man sent by God — a Messiah — led the way forward. He would be an awesome figure indeed: empowered to crush the hated Romans, destroy the enemies of Israel, gather the faithful together, and establish God’s sovereignty over all the nations of the earth. This hope loomed large in the life of every Jew in Palestine.

And then the Teacher appeared: a man who spoke with fearless authority, as if to ignore him would be to taunt heaven itself. He worked miracles not heard of since the days of Ezekiel. He not only understood Israel’s history; he described its history as though he himself was the hand guiding it. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” he said, “you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” In the life and teachings of Jesus, God’s promise to the Jewish people was about to be realized: The Great Rescuer, it seemed, had arrived.

Yet now it all looked like a wretched mistake. There was no escaping the truth of it. The last prophet in God’s long history of prophets could not possibly be defeated by God’s enemies. First-century Jews had no mental category for a crucified Messiah.

Indeed, the psychological shock for the disciples cannot be overstated. They were not only wrong about Jesus. They were wrong about everything. They were wrong about his miracles, wrong about the truth of his teaching, wrong to think that God was at work again on Israel’s behalf. We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.

The modern mind smiles condescendingly at such hopes. In The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud claimed that religion functions as “a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality” — the defining feature of neurosis. Freud’s modern-day disciples, atheists such as Sam Harris, have derided religious believers for peddling “ancient ignorance and derangement” to the masses. “It is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness,” Harris writes, “than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.”

It requires a troubled mind, indeed, to believe that the faith that transformed the cruelty and despotism of the ancient world into the most humane civilization in world history was the product of mental illness. No, something other than a psychosis was at work on Easter morning. Something entered the lives of the disciples that banished doubt and cynicism from their minds.

It was the stranger on the road to Emmaus — the road of disillusionment, a road familiar to most of us — who invaded the story. It was a flesh-and-blood man, the Son of God, who filled dark and desperate souls with unspeakable joy and immovable courage: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

Out of the blackness came a shaft of irresistible light: the risen Christ.