One of the best things about being a dad to a toddler is getting to read childrens’ books. One of the favourites in our household at the moment is Mr Silly from the Mr Men series. For those of you who perhaps opt for something a little more sophisticated in your bedtime reading, let me remind you: Mr Silly lives in a place called Nonsenseland. And in Nonsenseland the grass is blue and the trees are red, the Zebra crossings are spotty. In Nonsenseland you post letters in telephone boxes and make calls from letter boxes. Which is all well and good. Until Mr Silly leaves Nonsenseland and goes to Sensibleland to buy a hole to plant his tree. There he meets the (nauseating) Miss Wise who can’t understand him and his funny ways. The story ends with Mr Silly, holeless, eating spam roly-poly.

We have no time to look at the obvious literary merits of Mr Silly. Another time. Another community of readers! My point is simply this - that with the final chapters of Luke we are entering Nonsenseland. Certainly it was nonsense for the first readers. As we have tried to show in the previous chapters, Jesus is not the Messiah Jews were expecting. The things he did and the stories he told were shocking and surprising. He was not telling a completely new story - the plot and characters were familiar. The ending, however, was certainly not.

And it is nonsense for us as well. At least for me. They say that familiarity breeds contempt. I think a far more corrosive effect of familiarity is easy credibility. I have read and heard these chapters so many times that I have to work very hard to feel any sense of drama. Everything is in order, Jesus dies and of course he rises from the dead. Of course he eats broiled fish and appears and disappears willy-nilly.

Can I encourage us one last time to suspend belief given to us by neat theological packages (there will be plenty to time re-engage with these packages when we get to Paul!). Let’s linger in these chapters and feel something of the emotion – the fear, the shame, crushing disappointment, bewilderment, hope, confusion.

I only want really to mention a couple of things. The first thing is that we once again find reversal, which ends in the final reversal - of death itself. Seemingly timeless oxymorons – such as servant leadership, crucified Messiahs, empty tombs – are unravelled and make the trip from sensibleland to the world of Nonsense. This is no surprise to us by now. These chapters are the culmination of Luke’s Jesus turning the world upside down.

The second thing is to notice again the connection Jesus makes with the Passover. Luke places everything that happens in Holy Week in the context of the Passover. He is prompting us to make the connections between the first Passover and what Jesus was doing. The meal Jesus shares with his disciples is nothing short of a new Passover, a meal sealing a new covenant, in anticipation of Yahweh once again redeeming Israel.

But beyond this I think it is helpful to remain silent. What words are there left that can even begin to approach the mystery of what happened between Jesus’ death and resurrection? Luke himself shares this reticence. He gives only 53 verses of talking about the resurrection and subsequent appearance. He doesn’t give us elaborate theories of why and how Jesus came back from the dead. He even teases us twice by telling us that Jesus opened the scriptures to the disciples, but then proceeds to give us none of what was said. He gives us simple, pared-down stories: the women at the tomb, Cleopas and friend on the road to Emmaus, disciples in an upper room.

His treatment seems cursory, even perfunctory at first sight. But when faced with such a mystery – such non-sense – what else is there to say which doesn’t begin to trivialise or rationalise what cannot be rationalized. Jesus the Messiah died and rose again. Dead and now alive, and not as a ghost but a tangible physical being.

And so I think that we are faced with three stark choices when responding to these chapters. Firstly we can consign the resurrection to the world of nonsense. We can follow Little Miss Wise and simply laugh at such ridiculous ideas. Secondly, we can spend our time thinking through elaborate theories about why Jesus rose from the dead. Or, and I think this is the course Luke would recommend, we admit that it is non-sense, but glory in that and allow that non-sense to revolutionise our lives. To allow ourselves to become witnesses to a risen Messiah to the ends of the earth, which of course is the story Luke will tell in Acts.

I have been incredibly challenged through these past weeks by Luke’s Jesus story. Jesus’ radical commitment to the poor, the excluded and the marginalized has shone a searching light on my own life. Am I following the gospel of this Jesus, or the gospel of an individualistic, consumer driven society which has co-opted Jesus and reduced his demands to 90 minutes on a Sunday? Perhaps the good news of Jesus is in fact not so good news for my comfortable middle class life. I remember with shame a couple of years ago attending a conference about theories on the atonement at the same time as thousands protested and campaigned for the global poor at the G8 summit.

Jesus died and he rose again. Everything must change. I wonder what the gospel of this revolutionary man might look like in today’s world. I wonder what a life fully shaped by the God who is on the side of the poor might look like. I have a strong sense that much of what passes for Christianity today is more akin to a life in a golf club than the radical example of Jesus.

I wonder where your journey through Luke has taken you? And where the resurrected Jesus might take us all?