The Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-25)

A Sermon preached by Rev. J. Stuart Taylor III

St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church

April 8, 2007

In John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, there is a roadside encounter that has always haunted me. Picture Tom Joad, played by Henry Fonda in the movie walking down a dusty road in the dustbowl Oklahoma of the depression years. Joad has been released from prison and his heading home to the family farm. Along the way, he encounters a stranger sitting under a tree beside the road, whistling a gospel tune. Tom, mopping his wet brow, greets the stranger: "its hotter than hell on this road". The stranger asks, you Joad’s boy? Well you wouldn’t remember me, but I baptized you. Turns out the stranger is Casey a preacher who used to howl the name of Jesus and fill an irrigation ditch so squirming full that half of them drowned before they could be baptized. But no more. Not a preacher now, just plain old Casey. Tom Joad and Casey share a pull on a bottle of store bought liquor as the ex-preacher tells how he lost his call, lost his call because he was a little too passionate about the women he was baptizing. Lost his call because he no longer knew what he believed or where he was leading his people. Now he was just walking the road, seeing where it would lead and what he would learn along the way. And it seemed good to Casey that he walk along with Tom Joad into the heart of America as only Steinbeck could render it. Roadside encounters can change your life.

Luke, the master storyteller describes to us another roadside encounter in our Gospel lesson today. "That very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus about seven miles from Jerusalem and they were talking about all these things that had happened. We cannot really imagine this scene unless we understand how highly charged it was. This was not a stroll in the park as two disciples discuss spiritual matters. Their leader had been arrested, tortured, and publicly executed as a subversive. These two disciples are getting the hell out of Dodge hoping that they can avoid the fate of their master. While they walked, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, "What is this conversation which you are holding with each other as you walk? And they stood still, looking sad. Then one of them named Cleopas answered him. Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days? What things? Jesus said. And they said to him, concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.

At every point, Luke’s story offers psychological observations of the disciples: they are deeply distressed, looking sad, surprised. This story more than all the other accounts of the Resurrection, invites and challenges us to enter into the lived experience of the disciples, to feel it from the inside. Luke enables the reader to understand the extraordinary intimacy that characterized the disciples’ experience of Jesus. They had to descend to the depths of disappointment and despair in order to exult with Easter joy. As I have been with this text the last week I was drawn again and again to the words of the disciples: We were hoping that he would be the one to liberate Israel. Beyond even the personal loss and grief, and the terror and danger, the two disciples were living out of a story line, a controlling narrative that went something like this. Personal holiness, zeal for God and the Torah, and the coming of a messiah who would free the nation from the oppressive Roman Empire. We had hoped he was the one to liberate Israel. Here was a Messianic story in search of an ending. But for these disciples the crucifixion of Jesus was the complete devastation of their hopes.

We are not so different from those disciples. Our lives are stories that we construct in search of a happy ending. But sooner or later every one of us will experience those painful moments when those stories collapse, when those narratives that help us make sense of our lives, begin to come apart. Maybe the story I have been living is that I will always be married, maybe it is that I will always have good health. Or that I will always be meaningfully employed. If I am good or try to be good, bad things won’t happen to me. The disappointment that we feel when our hopes are sometimes crushed is the collapse of a story line, a narrative that we are living that gives meaning to our lives. What can happen to us individually can happen as well to entire societies. We hear people talking about the post-modern world. And I am not sure I entirely get what that means. But maybe part of it is that we now experience as much change in a year as was once known in an entire century. And with this much change, we no longer know what to trust, what will be a sure foundation. The great meta-narratives of our culture are no longer adequate to give meaning to our lives. Science, technology, consumer capitalism, democracy, the whole western notion of progress, – all these meta-narratives that have given meaning and purpose to life are seemingly coming apart if not bankrupt. And its not just these narratives but even and especially the religious narratives that are being widely questioned. In the late 19^th century, more than a century before post-modernity, Matthew Arnold in his poem Dover beach captured the mood of this historical moment. "The sea of faith was once, too, at the full and round earth’s shore. But now I only hear it’s melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating! For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; and we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night. "

We had hoped that he would be the one to liberate Israel. But the response of the stranger is to tell the story differently. To re-narrate it their hopes and expectations by telling the story of God’s covenant of love, and how this miraculous, unconditional love brings life out of death, good out of evil, opens up a way where there is no way. You see the disciples on the road to Emmaus had been telling and living the wrong story. But now with the right story in their hearts and minds, a new possibility, huge and astonishing, breath taking started to emerge before them. Suppose the reason the key would not fit the lock was because they were trying the wrong one. Suppose Jesus ‘s execution was not the clear end of the movement, but rather it’s beginning. We too need to learn how to listen to the Stranger on the road who will explain how it is that these things had to happen, and how a whole new world is waiting to be born.

So they drew near to the village to which they were going. He appeared to be going further, but they constrained him saying, "stay with us for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent. So he went in to stay with them. When he was at table with them he took the bread, and blessed and broke it and gave it to them and their eyes were opened. And they recognized him. Eugene Peterson has observed that it is striking just how much of the life of Jesus can be told in stories about meals. Jesus was criticized as a drunkard and a glutton, a party boy who associated with the wrong kind. Jesus unveiled a miraculous hospitality in the wilderness where thousands were fed. Jesus described the Kingdom of God as a great banquet where everyone has a seat at the table. Jesus practiced this open table fellowship right up to the end of his life, when as a marked man being hunted by the authorities, he sat down to enjoy what would be a final meal with his discipleship community. But this founding meal as one theologian rightly observed was only one link in a long chain of meals, which Jesus shared with his followers and continued into Easter. "When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them and their eyes were opened and they recognized him. These are the same words that describe the last supper, these four words are repeated in the wilderness feedings and these four words are used here on the road to Emmaus. These four words, these four verbs: Take, bless, break, and give: these are not simply the shape of our communion liturgy. These four word, take, bless, break, and give are the whole of the Christian life. They are the key to recognizing the Risen Christ in our midst.

Let us meditate on each word beginning with Take. Jesus takes what we bring him. Implicit in his taking is our offering. We offer what we have, our daily food, our bread and wine, our money, our passion our struggle, our hopes and dreams, the work of our hands. We offer and Jesus takes our best selves and our broken selves. We offer and he takes. Bless. What we offer to Jesus, Jesus offers to God with thanksgiving. What we offer to Jesus, Jesus offers to God with a blessing upon it. Jesus doesn’t evaluate it or criticize what we offer. He doesn’t say is this all there is. Two fish? Forget it. He simply takes what we offer and blesses it and gives thanks. Break. Our gifts don’t remain what we bring. We sometimes give to Jesus out of our abundance, we stay in control, we are smug, complacent, but at the open table we are not permitted to be self-contained, self-sufficient. God is working deep inside our hardened egos to break and remold. Just a Jesus said, this is my body broken for you; So Christ takes what we offer and breaks it so that it can be transformed. Give. Jesus gives back what we bring him. But it is no longer what we brought. It has been changed into what God gives. Everything on the table and everyone around the table becomes gospel and is distributed to all who hunger and thirst for justice and righteousness. We eat of the bread and drink of the cup and we know that the Risen Christ is in us. The communion we have in Christ reverberates in the communion we have with one another. Dorothy Day once wrote. "We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too even with a crust, where there is companionship". The breaking of bread is the key to the opening of eyes.

"He took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them and their eyes were opened and they recognized him. At the very moment of recognition, of opening eyes, the Risen Christ vanishes from their sight. Let us return to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Casey and Joad join the Joad family in the great migration of farmers who have lost their land and are headed west to California in search of work. In Steinbeck’s great odyssey of American history he tells the story of farmers who struggled against hunger, who struggled against the violent abuse and exploitation that is always heaped upon strangers. And Casey our ex-preacher has become a labor organizer. And tom remembers him spouting out some scripture, not hellfire damnation scripture but from Ecclesiastes where it is written, " two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow. And Casey is finally murdered by the thugs of the land barons. And in that fight tom is injured and knows that as a marked man, he must leave his family. In the dark of night, just before dawn as Tom prepares to go, Ma Joad, whispers to her son, " How am I going to know about you, they may kill you an I wouldn’t know? They might hurt ya. How’m I going to know? Tom laughed uneasily, "well maybe like Casey says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own but on’y a piece of a big one- an’ then – " then what tom? Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere- wherever you look. Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way that guys yell when they’re mad an- I’ll be in the way that kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know suppers ready. An when people eat the stuff they raise and live in the houses they build- why I’ll be there". For people of faith it is the Risen Christ who will be there, everywhere, coming to us unrecognized in the form of a Stranger. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, " for Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his to the Father through the features of men’s faces". Or in the words of St. Patrick, "Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger."