The road to Emmaus

An address given at Templederry & Killodiernan on the 3rd Sunday of Easter, 8th May 2011

Going to Emmaus, Robert Zünd, 1877, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

St Luke is an immensely skilled story-teller.

In today’s NT reading (Luke 24:13-35), he has given us one of the world’s great short stories, as he relates what happened between Jerusalem and Emmaus on that first Easter day.

He is economical with words, but he paints a vivid scene. There is suspense and character development too. And like the best short stories it leaves us with more questions than answers.

Let’s try to enter the story in our imaginations.

Two disciples of Jesus, Cleopas and his friend, set off walking on the road to Emmaus in the late afternoon.

They walk into the setting sun – Emmaus is about 7 miles west of Jerusalem, much the same as the distance from Templederry or Killodiernan to Nenagh. Their journey will take 2 hours, more or less. And as they walk, they talk – trying to make sense of the shocking events of the last 3 days.

They had hoped that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah who would redeem Israel. But the chief priests and leaders had handed him over to the Roman authorities to be condemned to death and crucified. Their belief in him was shattered, their dreams turned to ashes. And early this very morning, some women of their group had astounded them by claiming to have had a vision in which angels said this Jesus was still alive. The shock of his crucifixion must have unbalanced them. And yet …

As Cleopas and his friend walk and talk, they fall in with a stranger walking the same road. It is Jesus, Luke tells us. But for some reason they do not recognise him, even though they know him so well. Will they recognise him later? We are kept in suspense.

When they explain to him what they are talking about, this stranger/Jesus says, ‘Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ He goes on to interpret for them all that the Hebrew Scriptures have to say about the Messiah. Their hearts are strangely warmed by this conversation. Yet still they do not recognise him.

When they get to Emmaus they press this stranger/Jesus to stay and eat with them because it is late. Finally, only when ‘he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them’, they recognise the stranger to be Jesus. He promptly vanishes – but everything is changed for them, changed because they recognise the risen Christ.

Cleopas and his friend recall how their hearts burned within them while Jesus expounded scripture to them on the road. They hurry back to Jerusalem to find the other disciples to tell them about meeting Jesus. But before Cleopas and his friend have a chance to tell their story, those who remained in Jerusalem tell them excitedly, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon’.

Luke’s story of the road to Emmaus leaves so many questions hanging.

For instance, why did Cleopas and his friend not recognise Jesus until they ate together? I can’t believe it was just because the setting sun was in their eyes.

The Gospel stories in which the disciples meet Jesus after his resurrection are mysterious. His friends find it hard to recognise him – not just the disciples on the road to Emmaus, but Mary Magdalen who mistakes him for a gardener, and Simon Peter and other disciples who meet him as they are fishing on the shore in Galilee. He appears and disappears suddenly. The risen Christ is not just Jesus’s corpse magically brought back to life. The stories, I think, are about spiritual meetings - not physical meetings, as you and I might meet as we come and go.

And Christians have continued to meet the risen Christ in ways which change their lives. Just as Paul met Christ on the road to Damascus. Just as St Francis heard Christ speak to him in a ruined church outside Assisi. And just as innumerable others have felt Christ’s presence make their hearts burn right up to our own day. This should not surprise us – after all, in the last words of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age’.

Cleopas and his friend recognise Jesus when the stranger says grace before their supper – when he gives thanks for the food they are about to eat: ‘He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them’. This is quite simply what Jesus used to do at the start of a meal. He did it at the last supper, but the Gospels record him doing so many times before. I think he intended his Eucharistic action – the Greek word literally means ‘thanksgiving’ – as a sign that God’s kingdom is present with us. God’s kingdom in which we take God’s good gifts, processed by human hands, give thanks for them, and share them with our neighbours. May God grant that like Cleopas and his friend we too may encounter the risen Christ in the Eucharist, which we with all other Christians re-enact to this day as Holy Communion.

I would love to know what Jesus said to Cleopas and his friend, what made their hearts burn so.

How amazing it would be to hear Jesus open the scriptures in person!

But I will never know. Any more than I can know what Jesus meant when he said ‘Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ Or know what happened when Jesus appeared to Peter. Luke simply does not tell us.

Yet that surely is as it is meant to be. I feel certain that the risen Christ reveals to each one of us just those things which are right for us, which we need to know. We recognise this is Christ at work because we feel our hearts warmed. But there are other things which we will never know, which we are not meant to know, and which would do us no good to know.

Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again!

Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again!

In a few minutes, just after the Rector consecrates the bread and wine, we will all join in this great acclamation, which is sometimes called the mystery of faith. On this joyful Easter Day, surely it is appropriate to reflect on these words.

The 1st reading we heard (Acts 10:34-43) is just a part of the story of the baptism of Cornelius - it’s worth summarising the whole of it.

Cornelius, a Centurion in the Roman army and a gentile, is a devout man who fears God – today we might describe him as a God seeker. He is prompted in a vision to send for Peter to visit him, and Peter too is prompted in a dream to go to Cornelius.

When Peter reaches Cornelius’s house he gives the speech that is our 1st reading. In it he tells Cornelius and his family the good news about Jesus – about his life, death, resurrection, and by implication his second coming as judge and forgiver of sins. In fact Peter is proclaiming the mystery of our faith - Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again!

And Cornelius and his whole family respond to it immediately. The Holy Spirit falls on them, we’re told - they begin to praise God and speak in tongues, just as the disciples did at Pentecost. Peter then arranges for their baptism - they are actually the very first gentiles to be baptised.

What a suitable reading it is for today - because today is not just Easter Day, it is a joyful day of baptism for Molly Sara Shelly and her family!

No human eyes saw Jesus rise from the tomb on that first Easter day.

None of the Gospels suggest any such thing. But they do describe incidents that day in which several different disciples encountered Jesus after he had done so. Let’s remind ourselves of them.

We are told in today’s reading from John’s Gospel (John 20:1-18) how Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb early in the morning. She sees the stone which sealed it has been moved. She rushes to tell Peter and another disciple that the tomb has been robbed – tradition says the other disciple is John. Peter and John find it hard to believe, so they race to the tomb to see for themselves.

Mary also goes back to the tomb a little later, more sedately perhaps. She sees two angels, as if in a vision, and then a man she takes for the gardener. She does not recognise him at first, until he speaks her name. ‘Mary!’, he says, and immediately she recognises him to be Jesus and answers ‘Rabbouni!’, which means teacher. She goes to embrace him, but he forbids her – why is that I wonder? Instead he says, ‘go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” ’

Mary is the first to see the risen Christ.

Let’s go back to Peter and John running to the tomb - John gets there first. From outside he sees the winding sheets lying there, but he does not go in. Peter, brave Peter, goes in first, followed by John. They confirm with their own eyes that the body is gone. But they do not see Jesus, nor do they yet understand that he has risen from the dead.

Peter must have seen the risen Christ later in the day, though, because Luke’s Gospel tells us so. When Cleopas and his friend, the two men who went to Emmaus, return late at night, the disciples in the upper room tell them, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon’ Peter.

Cleopas (Luke 24: 13-35) then recounts the story of their journey to Emmaus, and the stranger who walked with them. When the stranger spoke their hearts burned within them. They persuaded him to stay and eat with them. And it was only when ‘he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them’ – as he had done three nights before at the Last Supper - that they recognised the risen Christ.

Later still that night - as the disciples talk about these amazing events, trying to make sense of them - Jesus suddenly appears again to a large group of them, gathered behind closed doors in the upper room.

Throughout that first Easter Day, God gradually opens the minds of Jesus’s disciples to understand that Christ is risen.

What are we to make of these appearances of the risen Christ on the first Easter Day?

On the evidence of the Gospels the risen Christ is rather different to the man Jesus. His close friends do not recognise him by sight, but by such things as a tone of voice or a characteristic action like blessing bread. He appears and disappears, unlike any human being.

For the disciples who knew Jesus before his death, meeting the risen Christ seems as much a spiritual as a physical experience. But whatever the nature of their experience, it changed them completely – it drove them to go out and preach the good news, even at the cost of their lives.

They described it as Jesus risen from the dead, and we might as well call it the same thing.

Christians ever since continue to meet the risen Christ, as a spiritual if not a physical reality.

It is a dynamic process that goes like this, I think:

• God prompts those who seek him to investigate the good news about Jesus;
• they come to faith, accepting Jesus as Christ their saviour, through the witness of his disciples - that's you and me;
• God responds to their faith with the gift of his Spirit;
• and the Spirit leads them to understand that Christ is risen, and what this means for them.

In other words: We come to believe in the resurrection because we first believe in Christ – rather than the other way about. We do not come to believe in Christ because we first believe in the resurrection.

This process is displayed in the story of Cornelius. And Christian disciples still seem to be made by this process today. So I believe it must also be true for Mary Magdalene, for Peter & John, for Cleopas and the other disciples too - though their faith came not from the witness of disciples but from personal knowledge of Jesus.

Before his death Jesus promised his disciples that he would come again (John 14:3)

He tells them that he is going away to prepare a place for them in his Father’s house, but that he will come again and take them there to be with him.

Christians sometimes imagine the second coming as Christ returning in glory at the end of time, in a last great judgement of the living and the dead to usher in God’s kingdom. But I think the end of time is better seen as a metaphor for any & every time - a typical time if you will. I prefer to imagine that Christ will come again to each one of us, at just the time that is right for each one of us personally.

In our hearts we will hear his voice. He will speak our name. And we will reply as Mary did,
‘Rabbouni – my teacher.
Now I understand -
Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again!
Let me be your disciple now and always.’