Luke 24:13-35. The familiar story of the walk to Emmaus. When it comes to the
events surrounding the resurrection of Jesus, the gospel writers record very
few of his appearances. In fact, Mark
records none at all.
Luke's gospel
is a summary account of the women's visit to the tomb, followed by Peter's
visit, Jesus appearance with the disciples in the upper room at which he
provides evidence that he is actually alive, opens their minds to the
scriptures and then commissions them, and finally they all go off to Bethany
for the ascension.
In the middle
of this summary account we have a detailed account of the Emmaus walk. What then do we have in the story? We have
two disciples, not apostles, just ordinary followers of Jesus, like you and me.
When Jesus walks with them they don't recognize him, and when they do recognize
him, after he breaks the bread, he disappears!
How very odd!.
Why didn’t the disciples recognise him? Were
they kept from recognising him? Was
there something about his resurrected body that made him unidentifiable? The
stories tell us that he was appearing in locked rooms and vanishing before the
disciples’ eyes. Clearly, there was something different about Jesus’ flesh and
blood. Does the fact that the disciples did not recognize Jesus point to the
nature of the revelation of God? Could it be that God does not always make
himself known to us in ways we think he will?
On the way to
Emmaus those sad, deflated disciples mistook their Lord for a stranger, someone
who wasn’t of their country. How did they make such a mistake? Maybe because he
seemed to know nothing of what had happened recently. Who knows?
Is it
something to do with the mystery of God. Can we only really recognise Christ when he
reveals himself to us? Could it be, that
he waits until the time is right. They
were grieving when they encounter Jesus on the road. They were expecting Him to be the leader of
the Jews; they thought He was a
political leader, a charismatic victor who would overthrow the Romans. Instead,
he died an ignominious criminal’s death.
He was gone, and they were shattered.
I know one thing; if he’d come in pomp and splendour, they may have kept
on believing, mistakenly, that He was a mere earthly figure. They may never have grasped that he was the
Messiah, the Saviour, the one whose death suddenly made sense, as he explained
the scripture and the prophesies to them.
If he had come to them bedecked with jewels and trappings of an earthly
King, the penny never would have dropped.
Did they fail to recognise him because they were
looking for someone else; a political King. They lost an intellectual
Jesus… he wasn’t who they thought he was, so they were downcast when he was
taken away. But when they finally
realized He was the Messiah, their faith was transferred from a head knowledge
of Christ, which was all out of whack, to a heart knowledge of who he really
was, and what he had done for them and for us. They learned to see and hear
with their souls.
Then he
begins to expound the scriptures to them. He says to them vse 25 “How foolish
you are and how slow to believe the prophets.
He tells them the Messiah had to suffer these things. And then he explains all the intricacies and
the fulfilling of the Scripture;
probably from the line of David and Isaiah through to John the
Baptist. So they’ve had the testimony of
the women and then Jesus himself tells them “the Messiah will rise on the 3rd
day”. They themselves have already told
him at the start of the journey that “it’s now 3 days since he was killed.
Nope. Still nothing. They still don’t
recognise him. The lights are on, but
nobody’s home. You can imagine if it was one of us, by now, we’d have a very
smug look on our faces and we’d be saying “Hello, it’s me. I told you so!”
But he just keeps on, walking with
them, patiently explaining to them. I
think he’s like this with us. We live
out our lives, so close sometimes to opportunities to see so much more of the
Spirit things, the really important things, but we can’t quite see them. We always see through a glass darkly; we’re so taken up with earthly things – what
holiday we’re going to take, what we’re going to cook for tea – what on earth
is that silly driver going to do next!
And all the while, the Risen Saviour walks beside us.
And that’s OK
really; if we were living in terrible
circumstances, where day after day we had to throw ourselves on the power of
God for strength to get through it, even the most stoic amongst us would long
for a change to a more comfortable existence.
He came silently, gently. There were
no recriminations. He didn’t say “well a
fine lot of disciples and followers you
turned out to be!”. He came to ordinary
people – on the road – where they were.
But they didn’t recognise him.
Why didn’t they recognise him? Was
his body so different? I think they were
immersed in their own blindness. They
had failed to really grasp his mission and purpose when he was alive, and they
weren’t expecting him to rise from the dead, even though he had told them, and
explained the scriptures to them.
We don’t see Jesus because we are
looking for someone else. We look for
him as the one to solve all our problems and answer our prayers in the way we
think , we don’t always see him as the tortured, dying Jesus who walks with us
all the time.
Was
it because he appeared as an alien?
Apparently the Greek word used to describe the appearance of Jesus in
this passage is paroikos, which can be variously translated as stranger,
exile or alien.
He came as an
outsider to the disciples on the road, and sometimes he appears to us in this
guise too. He comes in the form of an
alien; an outsider; an unlovely one and an undeserving one. We don’t always
recognise him in this form. American
singer/songwriter Paul Simon’s wrote a song called “Trailways Bus”. It tells the story of a Spanish boy, riding
silent and scared, on the bus to America from Mexico to what he hopes will be a
more prosperous life. It describes the
countryside the bus passes through….over the crest of the mountains, the moon
begins it’s climb and he wakes to find he’s in rolling farmland…the farmer and
his wife sleep and he wonders what their life must be like. A couple with a young baby….the bus is
heading into Washington DC, and his heart is racing with the urge to freedom.
The father motionless as a stone; a
shepherd resting with this flock; the
trailways bus is turning west.. Dallas via little rock. He’s leaving his family
who mourn for him but he has to find a way to help them live. The border patrol outside of Tucson boards
the bus… “any aliens here? You better
check with us. How about you son? You
look like you got Spanish blood. You
mind yourself, you understand?” The boy says in his head “Yes, I am an alien
from Mars; I come to earth from outer
space and if I travelled my whole life through, you guys would still be on my
case”.
On the walk to Emmaus, Jesus is first
recognized as an alien. Jesus was always an alien; someone not accepted by his own; he is a true child of Israel; living in exile
was in his blood, so to speak. His ancestors -- Abraham, Jacob, Jeremiah -- all
lived as aliens at one time or another.
He was present when the world was created, yet was a stranger to his own
people when he came to live in that world.
It seems fitting somehow that when he came back to life after the
crucifixion, he would still seem like an alien. He is not bound by one country
or culture – he is available to all people.
Perhaps this is why he comes in such an “un-Jewish” guise; an alien who
was never really at home on earth.
Do WE sometimes not recognise him? Is he just the one-dimensional cardboard
Jesus we think about sometimes when we come to church or do we walk with him
daily as we journey through our lives?
He’s sometimes
comes to us in a guise we don’t expect;
as a tiny helpless baby; as a
tortured criminal; as the Risen Victor,
yet walking in the humble apparel of the ordinary man; a paradox - with the knowledge of all things
in his head; the power of the whole
universe at his fingertips; but empathy
with the grief of the common man. Perhaps this is the real essence of the
presence of Christ. He walks with us
even when we don’t realize it; even when
we don’t listen to Him.
I’m sure you
are all aware of John F Kennedy, the second son of Joe and Rose Kennedy, who
became the US President in 1961. But JFK
was not his father’s first choice for a son in politics. We have perhaps forgotten Joe Kennedy and his
story is as tragic as is his younger brother.
The V-3 “supergun” was meant to win the war for Germany. In 1943, for
the first time since World War II began, Hitler was on the back foot. Allied
bombs were devastating German cities and the Fuhrer was rattled. His proposed
V-3 cannon would be the biggest gun the world had seen.
The V-3 was
built in a truly enormous bunker buried deep in a chalk hill in northern
France. Millions of tonnes of rock were excavated by hand and among the workers
were hundreds of slave labourers. In its original conception, 25 barrels were
to point at London – about 100 miles away – delivering up to one bomb per
minute and to create an environment of fear that would turn the course of the
war back in Hitler’s favour.
American
Engineers were working on a secret “drone” mission to destroy the V-3. Joe
Kennedy Junior was piloting a B-24 Liberator on August 12 1944. He and co-pilot
Wilford Willy were supposed to take the plane up to cruising altitude, arm the
drone bomb, set the correct course and
bail out. The drone would then carry on and drop it’s bomb on the launch pad of
the huge German rocket. But an electronics officer named Earl Olsen had
discovered that there was an error in the arming mechanism; a small solenoid in the contraption was
faulty and would burn out too quickly, setting the bomb off prematurely. He tried to tell his superiors of the
terrible outcome but was not listened too.
The man in charge of the mission was the top Engineer; the big brass.
He failed to listen to the younger man of much lower rank. Olsen even ran to the airfield and begged Joe
Kennedy not to take off, but Joe didn’t listen either. Olsen was right; there was a fault in the arming mechanism and
so, completely without warning, the bomb exploded over Blythburgh in Suffolk
only 20 minutes after the ‘plane had taken off. Kennedy and Willy were killed
and their bodies never found.
We can be
like this; Jesus tries to tell us of the
power which can be ours; a
road-less-travelled way of living; a
path of blessing and enrichment, with Him at the helm of our lives. But we don’t listen; we are too caught up in other things. We
don’t recognise what He’s telling us.
How
then, DO we recognise him? How did the disciples recognise him? He
explained the scriptures to them. The word made sense, because he came as “The
Word” to them. He came to them as the
word-became-flesh, not as a political King. He does the same with us. It is one
of the ministries of the risen Christ to open scripture to us. When the
scriptures become meaningful for us, it is because the risen Christ has met us
in that word, has engaged with us through Scripture, through our life’s journey
via the Holy Spirit. I’m not asking for
a show of hands, but I wonder how many of us actually read the Bible, at home,
every day?
The disciples
were downcast and low. It was then, in
the midst of their weakness that the risen Christ became real to them. This is
absolutely at the heart of an authentic life in Christ. He will always walk with us; it might be at some hour of crisis, or at the
behest of some awful news, or illness, or an anxious time; the fog of the mundane clears away and the
Christ walks with us, in the midst of our grief or bewilderment. He explains the Scriptures to us; he expounds the word to us, because He
himself IS the word. He always wants us to enter a deeper recognition of Him
but He will never intrude; He will never make us give him his proper
recognition as the Lord of All. (pause) He never imposes where he isn’t
wanted. He waits until the time is right
as he did with Cleopas and his friends.
The bible
says that when we help the most unlovely, the lowest, dirtiest, poorest scrap
of humanity, we are helping Him. There’s a pattern of Him appearing as
something so unlike what we expect. If
He knocks on the door of our hearts as the delightful rich host who showers us
with honour and gifts, it would be too easy to follow Him and we’d be led away
by the glitter of the world. A Jesus
like this would be a fake Jesus. I believe this is at the heart of why His
earthly appearances were in such humble guises.
This Jesus is
so much more than the political hero the disciples thought he was. This Jesus shares not just the gift of his
immortality with us, but his presence with us on our journey to get there as well.
Listen for His still small voice; hear
it through our own personal reading of the Bible. Amen.
