On the Way to Emmaus

On the Way to Emmaus

Luke 24:13-35

In order to hear what’s going on in the Gospel of Luke, I need to set the context this morning.  Last week, we watched as Luke told us the story of the women at the tomb on Easter morning.  They were there to care for Jesus’ body but when they got there, the stone was rolled away and the tomb was empty.  Nothing was the way that they expected it to be.  At first glance, the women had to be thinking, “Someone has stolen Jesus’ body.”  When you’re in a novel situation, the tendency is to make sense of the unknown by making it fit in categories that we already know.

As the women struggle to make sense of things, they are met by two “dazzling” men.  Now, if you meet two “shiney” guys, you might get lost on why they are so shiney, right?  The fact that they are shiney is one more thing that makes no sense. At best what they bring is a little light into the darkness, which is never a bad thing in any dark place or time.  However, they are not there to be flashlights.  Rather, they are angels—messengers—and their message is meant to illuminate something, namely, to bring the truth of what has happened to light within these women.  In essence, they are there to make sure that something “dawns” on them.

The men tell the women that they shouldn’t look for the dead among the living, that Jesus is not there.  Then, the shiney guys ask them a question:  “Do you remember what Jesus told you a long time ago about what was going to happen?”  The women do what the women tend to do in Luke’s gospel:  they ponder that question in their hearts.

The women don’t flee in the face of what is unexpected and what seems to make no sense.  The women don’t focus on the messengers but instead focus on the message, “What do you remember?” They search their hearts and minds until they remember for themselves what Jesus had told them in the first place, that Jesus would be arrrested and tried and die and rise again.  And as they remember, the horror show of the previous week begins to be reframed and reinterpreted until what is revealed is resurrection.  It felt like everything had gone wrong until, suddenly, they realized that what happened was exactly what Jesus had said would happen.  Because the women were open, what opened for them was the possibility that, regardless of how terrible things had been, in the end, love wins.

Let me tell you why I think this matters so much to Luke.  Luke was written somewhere around 80 A.D.  This means that two things are true.  First of all, nearly everyone who was an eyewitness to Jesus’ ministry—everyone who knew him or heard him or were touched by him—has died.  Undoubtedly, the dynamics of the early faith communities turned on a, “You had to be there” understanding. The more direct contact you had the more authority you would be granted.  (The exception here would the Paul, who never met Jesus.) The eyewitnesses would tell their stories. The eyewitness stories would be retold.  The goal was to try to “be there” yourself in your imagination.  The gospels were written to preserve the stories that those who were there had told.

The question had to be, “How will faith come to life for future generations?”  If the answer was, “You had to be there,” then the future of the church was in serious trouble.  Either Jesus was going to have to come back every now and then or a way had to be discovered to think about and experience faith that didn’t depend on meeting either the earthly Jesus or the resurrected Christ.  So, Luke tells us stories of how Christ’s teachings transform people from the inside out—just like the women. The switch goes on and they get it, even if the disciples don’t believe them, even if Peter sees the same thing and really doesn’t get it at all.  (Later, in the Book of Acts, Luke would talk about the Holy Spirit as God’s transforming presence, as the “animating” force working through faithful people.)

The other huge thing that would have shaped Luke’s response was the complete decimation of Jerusalem by Rome, ten years earlier.  An ambitious Israelite did what many had wanted Jesus to do: he started the revolution against the occupation.  An ambitious Roman leader arrived, blockaded Jerusalem, starved most of the people to death, and then tore the temple and the city and its walls apart, stone by stone.  A great city which had been the “land of the living” had been turned into a graveyard.  The language of “the living and the dead” had to be profound for a traumatized nation.  There’s the natural process of generations dying off and then there are moments in which a whole people are nearly exterminated.  The people of Israel had stood before a giant pile of rubble that used to be there most sacred place.  Like the women at the empty tomb, they had to shake their heads and ask, “How can this be?”

So, you’d think that after giving us Easter morning without the risen Christ, Luke would finally tell us about the disciples getting the message, right?  Wrong!  If the women were a surpising set of central characters at the tomb— because, well, they were women—then the next characters are even more unlikely.  As our text unfolds two guys are walking down a road, heading back home to Emmaus after being in Jerusalem for the Passover feast.  These two men are not apostles or disciples.  It’s not clear that they ever met Jesus at all.  They had hopes when they heard about Jesus that he would be the one to save the nation.  Like the women, they showed up to find out for themselves.  However, having seen what they had seen—that the one on whom their hopes rested had been arrested and crucified and died—they left.  Still, as they walked, they kept talking about what had happened.

So, here’s what we have.  Two “nobodies” from an obscure little rural town cared enough to go to Jerusalem and find out for themselves who this Jesus was.  We should never underestimate how important showing up is.  If we don’t make ourselves available and we are not ready to be open to what we see, then we will end up being like the disciples—hiding from what frightens us, trying to save our own skins, sulking about what we wish we would have done differently or telling ourseves how different things would have been had we been in charge. We have to get ourselves to “Jerusalem”—to church, to the hospital to the hospice to see that friend, to any other location where we feel called to go as a matter of faith.  We have to be willing to show up and find out.

Here’s the other thing about our two nobodies from an obscure town.  “Nobodies” living in small towns were pretty much the only people left in 80 A.D.  Those who lived in Jerusalem—the rich people, the powerful people, the beautiful people—they are dead and gone.  If there is a future for the faith then it rests with the survivors.  This is why I think that Luke’s decision to introduce us to these two men is so intentional and important.  Part of what he is saying to us is that from the start, the risen Christ was present in the countryside to common people.  That had to raise some hope in a time when the countryside was going to be the setting for the faith for the forseeable future.

So, these two men are walking home together.  They are doing what we all do when something huge has happened: they are figuring out the story of what happened, together.  They are talking about everything that they had seen and heard.  They are talking about their sadness and their disappointment.  They are—in my language—sharing their “joys and concerns.” As a “come as you are” church we should be drawn to these men who are “being who they are” with one another.  As they are doing this, I believe that they are becoming the earliest version of the church—a place in which faithful people come together not because they understand everything and have all the answers but because they are willing to struggle with their faith, together.

Then, a stranger shows up.  Luke tells us that this stranger is the risen Christ.  So, when two men struggle together to make sense of things, Christ shows up.  However, Luke also tells us that the men’s “eyes are kept from recognizing him.”  Luke does not make them “eyewitnesses.”  He’s going to show us how these two men recognized Christ in their hearts and essentially became “heart-witnesses.”

The risen Christ asks the two men what’s up:  “What are you talking about?” The men are slackjawed.  Unlike many religious authorities who tell their followers what they have to think and believe, Jesus asks them to talk to him in their own words, to let him in on the struggle. 

Eventually, Jesus rolls up his sleeves and shares his perspective with them.  The “shiney guys” challenged the women to remember what Jesus had told them.  The risen Christ challenges the two men to remember what they learned in Scripture:  “Wasn’t what happened to Jesus exactly what the Scriptures themselves had pointed to?” The men are present and open.  Even though they don’t know that they are listening to Jesus, they are listening.  The truth is planted.

Then, as the night settles in, the two men actually start doing faithful things.  The women, after their time at the tomb, essentially preach to the disciples.  Their sermon “bombs” but its not their fault.  The men aren’t led to preach.  Instead, they are led to live their faith.  They recognize the needs of a stranger for shelter and food.  They invite him to come eat with them:  “Stay with us.”  (Can you imagine how proud the risen Christ must have been at this?) When they are getting ready to eat, Jesus transforms the meal, just as he had on his last night with his disciples.  He blesses the bread and breaks it and hands it to them.  And in that instant, their eyes are opened.  They recognize Jesus and their hearts burn.  Then, Jesus vanishes.

Luke tells the faith community that the risen Christ was present to the least likely people in the least likely of places.  What mattered was not who the people were but whether those people were “available.”  When they are willing to show up and struggle, women become preachers, country bumpkins become religious authorities, and Christ becomes present in the breaking of the bread.  The church was born, from the start, not in a place and not according to society’s hierarchy, but in the fertile ground of open hearts and minds.