The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him, but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place. In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels who said he was alive. Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see Jesus.
(Luke 24:20-24, NIV)
We all tend to swim in the sea of conventional wisdom. Every so often, someone like Bryson DeChambeau shows up and questions it. Why shouldn’t the shaft length for irons be the same? Why not swing from the heels, pound the ball as far downrange as possible from the tee, and then deal with the consequences?
Sure, you might be hitting your second shot from an adjacent fairway or the woods, but you might just be left with a short pitch onto the green. The jury is still out as to whether his challenges to the prevailing wisdom are prudent.
Hard to think outside the box of conventional wisdom, though. When they taught me history, Columbus wasn’t presented as a marauding colonizer spreading venereal disease to the New World. The spin in my day was that he was courageous enough to challenge the prevailing notion that the world was flat. He was right, and the rest is, as they say, “history.”
Like all their Jewish contemporaries, Jesus’ friends on the Emmaus road were stuck on Joshua as the prototype for the Messiah. This military leader would forcibly evict the Romans from Palestine. But, alas, with the Romans and the Jewish religious hierarchy having crucified and entombed Jesus, they were shuffling out of Jerusalem, pondering what might have been.
That they kept heading in the same direction spoke of how dimly they viewed the reports that Jesus had risen from the dead. Dead men, in their experience, tended to remain dead. It’s not in the text, but I can picture them taking a break from walking, sitting in the shade of a tree sharing their water bottle with Jesus, and asking him if he’d ever heard anything crazier than someone coming back from the dead. The conventional wisdom was (frankly, still is) that resurrection from the dead isn’t a thing.
As for the conventional wisdom that the Messiah would be a military hero who would rout the Romans, it took a while for these Emmaus-bound disciples to process the notion that Jesus’ battle was not with people who had conquered and oppressed their country and could tax you and even crucify you but rather with Death itself.
It’s good for us – most of whom are neither Jews nor Romans – that conquering sin and death was Jesus’ mission and not the overthrow of Roman tyranny.
Prayer: Father, be with us as we deliver your message of reconciliation to the ends of the earth.