Text: Luke 24:13-35
The story of the revelation along the Emmaus Road at the Inn is a story of how Easter becomes local, how it comes into our midst where we live. Two relatively unknown followers of Jesus, Cleopas, and an unnamed disciple…quite possibly his wife as women are often unnamed in the Gospels, are trudging along the dusty road seven miles from the big city of Jerusalem where all the political events and major religious festivals are held, away from complexity and back to the simplicity of a small village called Emmaus when they are joined by a stranger, whom Luke tells us is the risen Christ.
The stranger has a face like all faces, his glory hidden behind the countenance of a stranger. By the time they reach the end of their journey they have moved from discouragement and despair to hope and renewed faith. The first readers of this story would have wept for joy, because they recognize this road on which these disciples were walking was not simply the road to Emmaus, it was the road that WAS the WAY. The first name given to Christians, according to the book of Acts, was “Followers of the Way.”
The road to Emmaus was for them a symbol of the Christian life. They were first called the people of the way, and in this story there was embedded the promise: if you want to experience the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in your life, where you live, get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other and head down the road. Follow the way. Somewhere along the journey, the efforts to care for neighbor and to revere God, you will find yourself walking with one who surprises you. If you are lucky, your heart will burn. If you are determined to do it your way, the Frank Sinatra way, you’ll miss him.
Rembrandt painted the Emmaus Road scene a number of times. In one of those paintings, Rembrandt has captured the very moment when the spark of recognition erupted in the eyes of the two disciples. You can almost see the sense of awe, the awakening of faith and insight, reflected in their eyes. In that same instant, a bored and weary servant is offering them a plate of food with a loaf of bread on the tray, seeing nothing remarkable going on at the table. I suspect Rembrandt caught the truth of the gospel: that the reality of the living Christ is apparent only to those whose eyes are open to see it.
For most of us, instances of spiritual insight come in the form of our ordinary experiences—in happenings that could be read, if we chose, in entirely secular terms. Faith knows that there is infinitely more to existence and to reality that we can see with our eyes. But faith—the assurance of what cannot be seen—is the only way we can know this.
The story is told of John Muir, the naturalist, who as a young man, was out walking in the woods. He happened upon a delicate white orchid. As he stood silent before it he realized it was the very “Throne of the Creator.” He knelt down beside it and wept with joy. Someone else may have simply passed the orchid by with hardly a glance.
Gustavo Gutierrez, one of the wonderful liberation theologians whose work was censured by the late Pope John Paul, II–now being beatified by the Vatican (the Pope, not Gutierrez) suggests that the “initiative in encounter belongs to the Lord. But,” he said, “if we open the door of our being to him, we shall share his life, his supper.” Recognition comes easily if we practice being attuned to the holy in our midst.
In a chapter on “attention”, psychologist William James said: “each of us literally chooses, by [one’s] ways of attending to things, what sort of universe [one] shall appear to [oneself] to inhabit.” And Rabbi Kushner, the author of Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, says somewhere: “Faith is a way of seeing life.” He notes that the multi-colored lights on an airport landing field do not make a lot of sense to many of us. But there are some who CAN discern a pattern in them, and land the plane safely.
Embedded in the Emmaus story is the outline of spiritual formation, of the way we come to faith, of the road to an encounter with the risen Christ. The first step is one in which we acknowledge our disillusionment with other ways of interpreting the world. “We had thought he would be the one to redeem Israel”. That was the illusion….sometimes our expectations of God blind us to the real God. God’s ways necessarily appear meaningless to humans who understand events in terms of their own purposes and ways of achieving them.
The second stage of the faith journey involves study and reflection. The stranger on the road interprets the scriptures for them. This fresh look at old familiar words begins to provide a new vision of how God works in the world for the would-be disciples before a crucified and risen Messiah can make any sense at all to them. No church has ever grown without some kind of study program. The early church began out of a new comprehension of what the author of Peter called the living and enduring word of God.
The third stage is one in which the traveler, in stead of looking always for others to provide for their needs, offer hospitality in their lives and in the homes. Hospitality is about “making room” , room for caring and sharing. The disciples offer Jesus what they have been given.
And then, fourth, in the common, simple acts of every day—the breaking of bread, and pouring of drink—they perceive the Christ in their midst.
The fifth step involves a willingness to head back into complexity once again. Their hearts burned within them, Luke tells us. To have one’s stony heart moved, that is where faith comes alive, where what is dead in us is resurrected…and it drives us back to community, not to isolation, back to living among people who do things we don’t like, who may be cowards when suffering or sacrifice seems to be the order of the day, who may be hard-headed, or who don’t always bow to our superior wisdom. The enemy of church growth is not conflict and differences. The enemy of church growth is to demand simplicity when only the complexity of caring, of the particularity of caring about individuals will lead us to that revelation of being born anew.
You know, it’s a strange thing, but Biblical scholars say that there are three different places in the Holy Land that claim to be the village of Emmaus. Three places. Further, there is no record of any village called Emmaus in any ancient source. The only place in all of the writings of the New Testament where we hear of the village of Emmaus is in Luke’s Gospel.
Marcus Borg, a New Testament scholar, says that “Emmaus is nowhere. Emmaus is everywhere.”
Emmaus is wherever in your life journey, as you are going along the way, either at church or at home, in the forest, on a park bench eating twinkies, or at a family dinner table, Emmaus is where you meet the risen Christ and Easter comes to dwell in you. So Easter MUST be more than one day on the church calendar, celebrated and then packed away, like our Christmas decorations. Easter is a continual unfolding….just as faith continues to become clearer to us the longer we travel its road. The painful and refreshing truth is that it is not in the articulate language of some preacher, or of theology, or even of scripture that the resurrected Christ is known, rather it is in the intimate, yet utterly common gesture of breaking bread in the midst of a community. The risen Christ travels with us. I don’t know about you, but I think I caught a glimpse of his shadow just last Sunday in that new space just under our feet. The risen Christ meets us in the breaking of bread. Taste, and see, the glory of the Lord.
