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EMMAUS
By The Rev. Thomas Traylor
Pastoral Associate and Hospice Chaplain.
Third Week of Easter
Sunday, April 6, 2008
This has long been one of my favorite gospel stories, this story of two disciples on the road to Emmaus in the waning light of the first Easter day. It is easy in imagination to picture them walking along some dusty road, the late afternoon sun casting long shadows behind them, their steps heavy and slow, their heads bent together in earnest conversation, as if they carried some heavy weight between them. Many artists have depicted this scene, often at the moment when the stranger joins them and the two downcast travelers raise their eyes from the dusty road to study his face and tilt their heads to listen to another voice than their own. Far more often, artists have captured the last scene of the story, when the three travelers sit down at table to break bread.
There are many ways to read this rich story of the Emmaus road. It is a story of having seen but not seeing, then seeing again as if for the first time. It is a story of being met by a stranger on the road and of being met by a friend at the table. It is a story of a grief carried and of grief surrendered, of a hope lost and hope reclaimed. This morning, I invite you to join me in walking along this road with these two disciples, to share in our imagination with their experiences on the road and at the table. For a few minutes this morning, I invite you to hear this story as a study in grief, then hear it again as a story of the rekindling of hope.
Who were these two on this country road? Where had they come from, and where were they bound? The gospel writer gives us only one of their names, Cleopas. They were evidently followers of Jesus, though clearly they were not members of the famous circle of The Twelve. They were, as far as we know, two ordinary people among the hundreds if not thousands who had encountered Jesus somewhere along the way and had decided to follow him. Perhaps they had traveled the roads of Palestine with him. Perhaps they taken the road into Jerusalem with him in joy only seven days before, only to see the road turn from triumph to tragedy. Along with so many others, they had been witnesses to the tragedy of Jesus’ suffering and death.
Now on this first Easter Sunday afternoon, they are on the road again, this time going away from Jerusalem, presumably heading home. Where else could they go? It is the road to Emmaus, but more than that, at the beginning of their journey, it is the road of grief. As they walk, they talk, as any of us who suffer a great loss might talk. “What has happened?” “How did it come to this?” and, “What will happen to us now?” These are the questions the experience of loss always raises in our hearts and minds. We ask them out of need to try to make sense of something that, in the hours of a fresh grief, cannot be made sense of. The need to erect some wall of meaning to stem the rising feeling of chaos that so often accompanies loss. It is not hard to imagine that as they walked, they sifted through the events of the past three days. Perhaps they reached back through their memories of all that Jesus had said and done. But they could not yet begin to make sense of any of it.
As they walk and talk about their shared loss, they become aware that someone has joined them on the road. We know from our vantage point that it is Jesus, but in that moment these two travelers cannot recognize him. The gospel writer tells us that “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” What kept them from recognizing him? Perhaps the gospel writer had some theological point to make, that they were not ready yet to see the true picture. But at a purely human level, I think something else is going on. There is both a remarkable sharpening of vision and a remarkable narrowing of vision that accompanies loss and grief. One the one hand, the loss of someone or something we love and cherish sweeps away all the cushioning ornamentation of our lives and leaves us to confront some stark realities with a kind of heightened clarity. On the other hand, shock and loss always constrict our field of vision. In the hours and days after a great loss, the loss itself is often the only thing we are capable of seeing. You can see this in the reactions of the two disciples when the stranger comes alongside them and asks, “What are you talking about?” In response, Luke tells us, “They stood still, looking sad.” In that moment, when the question is put to them, they are brought to a dead stop and sadness wells up in them. Like all grieving people, they must brace themselves to tell the story of their loss again and experience pain in the telling of it, together with a flash of anger, I think. With what I imagine was a note of indignation in his voice, Cleopas says to the stranger, “Don’t you know what has happened?” He seems to say, in effect. “Our loss is all that we can see. How can you be ignorant of it?” When any of us is in the pitch of grief, it can be hard to comprehend how it could be possible that anyone else not also see and share our loss.
Cleopas tells the story of the three sad days, how Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in word and deed, was handed over and condemned to death and was crucified. Then he adds, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” Here we come down to the heart of their grief and loss: “We had hoped . . .” There is no greater loss, no death more difficult to bear, than the death of hope. “We had hoped, we had hoped.” The loss of a dream, the loss of a bright horizon to press toward, can be as great a loss as the death of a loved one. When Dr. King was struck down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis forty years ago this week, fear rose in many hearts that not only a great man but a great dream had died. For these two disciples, as for all of the followers of Jesus in those dark days following Good Friday, those two losses were joined as well. What they had lost in the death of Jesus was not only Jesus but hope itself, hope that the purposes and promises of God would at last be fulfilled, fulfilled through Jesus. “We had hoped,” Cleopas said. But, no.
Any of us who have suffered some great loss or endured a tragedy or crisis that has shaken our confidence in God has known what it is to walk this stretch of the Emmaus road as those travelers did. Fortunately for them and for us, the story does not end with three travelers standing in the dust of the road to Emmaus. This story is not a grief story alone; it is a gospel story, it is good news. This is not only a story about how grief and loss affect the human heart; it is the story about how hope can be reborn. Above all, it is the story of the purposes and promises of God fulfilled and filled full in Jesus.
The stranger in Luke’s story listens to the two grief-laden travelers tell their story. In their grief, they can only see what happened in one way; they can only give one meaning to it, one that ends in sad resignation. But as they walk, the stranger Christ retells the story of what they have witnessed these past three days. He casts all that has happened, all that they have experienced, in a different light. I do not think that Christ meant in any way to belittle their grief, despite how sharply he spoke to them. He meant I think to shake them out of their belief that there was no other way to understand what has happened. As he talks, something is kindled in their hearts, so much so that when they at last reach the village, they cannot bear to part with this stranger. “Stay with us,” they beg him. So together they turn aside. They leave behind the darkening road to sit down to supper at home. When the table is laid, the stranger takes the loaf of bread, lifts his eyes and breathes a prayer of thanks and blessing, breaks the bread, and gives it to them. It was nothing that did not happen at countless tables everywhere that evening, except that here the guest, in taking the bread into his hands, becomes the host and his companions the guests. In that moment, they see him as if for the first time, the one who is their friend, and not a stranger. And in that moment, that Eucharist, even as he is once again gone from their sight, their grief is banished and their hope is reborn.
When I read the stories of the resurrection appearances of the risen Christ, what most strikes me is the essential simplicity of those encounters. At their heart, these are stories of seemingly ordinary exchanges between human beings. On that first Easter morning, Mary will at first mistake him for a common gardener. The twelve will be greeted later that same day by the Christ who asks them simply for something to eat. In John’s telling of the story, Peter and Andrew and James and John meet the risen Christ crouched over a cooking fire, who offers them breakfast. The two disciples on the Emmaus road will meet him in the simple act of breaking bread. Admittedly, the entrances and exits in these stories are a little abrupt, but Christ himself is present through the simplest of words and actions: The risen Christ who makes himself known through the utterly ordinary; the Christ who makes himself known, not in flashes of heavenly glory and celestial light, but in commonplace events of every day experience .
All who have come to faith in Christ after that first generation of Christians who saw him face to face, came to see and know the risen Christ through the medium of the commonplace. Consider your own spiritual journey. How did you first come to see the risen Christ? How do you continue to meet and be met by him? Perhaps you first met him through a mother or father who got you up and dressed and dragged you off to church every Sunday, like it or not. Perhaps through some other family member whose kindness and faith left its mark on your heart. Perhaps you have met him over endless cups of coffee in twelve step meetings, where week by week you have come to believe that a power greater than yourself is at work in you. Perhaps you have met him through the ministry of a friend who showed up and stood by you when you faced great illness or grief. Perhaps you have met him in the example of ordinary men and women who have stood with great courage against war and injustice because of their own faith in the risen Christ. Or perhaps you have met him by deciding to walk through the doors of this church or some other and coming to see little by little, or all at once, that Christ is present at the Table in something as simple as the breaking of the bread. I see the risen Christ here every week, in the bread and wine we share, in the work and ministry of this parish, and in what I see and know of God working in your lives.
It is a fair guess to say that people all around us, and perhaps some of us here this morning, are walking Emmaus roads of our own, burdened by some grief or fear, carrying sorrow over a lost dream or an unrealized hope. A New York Times poll this week found that 81% of the American public is discouraged and feels that the country is going in the wrong direction. Last month alone, eighty thousand jobs were cut from the labor market. Day after day, families across the nation face the loss of their homes as foreclosures rise. Just last week we reached the four thousandth American death in the war in Iraq, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Iraqi lives lost. Forty years after Dr. King’s death, his dream of a society free of the stain of racism still waits to become a reality. Corruption and conflict are the stuff of daily life of citizens of many nations around the world. Beyond our private struggles, these are the collective Emmaus roads we travel in our day.
In response to such problems, it would be the cheapest kind of bumper sticker theology simply to say, “Christ is the answer.” Our own personal challenges are complex. The problems we face as a nation and a global culture are daunting. But the Christ who has made himself known to us, and continues to make himself present to us through the ordinary and the commonplace—the Christ who is the foundation of our hope, the Christ who is the source of our moral vision of a just and humane world—this Christ calls us to be the ordinary ministers of his extraordinary grace and love on whatever Emmaus roads we and those around us find ourselves on. How do we do that? First, by coming faithfully to this Table, to meet the Christ who gives himself to us in the Bread and Cup. As you come, I encourage you to glance at the person on your right and on your left and look to see in them the Christ who meets us in ordinary human beings. As we go out from this place, we go as signs of Christ’s presence in the world. What might that look like? As I have done before I’ll once again share with you some lines from the farmer/poet Wendell Berry. Some of you will know them well already. In his great poem, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, Berry writes
“So friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. Practice resurrection.”
Amen.
Thomas W. Traylor
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco
6 April 2008
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