Walking the Emmaus Road

 

Luke 24:13-34 

I’ve been to Emmaus. You have too. We all get there eventually. Emmaus is the place you go when your world has collapsed, the tossing and turning of the night has left you  exhausted and fragile, your dreams are shattered, and your hope is gone.

 

Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian pastor and author, put it like this:

Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred… where we spend much of our lives, you and I, the place that we go to in order to escape – a bar, a movie, wherever it is that we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole damned thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.” But there are some things that even in Emmaus we cannot escape. We can escape our troubles, at least for a while.  We can escape the job we did not get or the friend we hurt. We can even escape for a while the awful suspicion that life makes no sense and that the religion of Jesus is just a lot of wishful thinking. But the one thing we cannot escape is life itself…

[The Magnificent Defeat, Seabury Press, 1966; pg. 85-86]

 

It was a Sunday afternoon on the day we now call Easter, as two disciples walked the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Cleopas and another were leaving everything behind, and walking some seven miles northwest into the setting sun.

 

They went with a sense of confusion and defeat, something like heading home at sundown with nothing to show for the day’s labors; maybe crawling toward home to share the news that your boss told you to clean out your desk and leave… only ten times worse.

 

This story stands in stark contrast to the scene just before it at the beginning of Luke 24… verses filled with the thrilling news that came at dawn that same day. First some women disciples, then others including Peter, went to the garden tomb and found it empty. The story began to spread.

 

So these two disciples, like the others, had been trying to make sense of what had happened over the past week since Jesus had ridden into the holy city on a donkey. Like the other disciples, they surely had prayed that everything would work out – that God would make the pieces come together as Jesus had promised.

 

It looked as though he’d been wrong. Now, bone-weary and spiritually-exhausted, they walked away. Even the rumors of the empty tomb weren’t enough to rekindle their hope. They wouldn’t be easy to persuade. They knew their history and their scripture. Messiah, whenever he really came, would not die the death of a criminal at the hands of the occupying army. Messiah would be a liberator, a freedom fighter, and a conqueror; not a victim.

 

This Jesus, son of Joseph, had held great promise. The disciples had followed, waiting for him to reveal his power and to rally the troops. But the Romans had nailed him to a cross. Their dreams were dashed. That seemed to be the end of the story. So it was time to get back to their work-a-day world.

 

Up and down, back and forth went the roller coaster. First opinion, second opinion. Good news, bad news. So there they were, walking and talking and trying to make sense out of it all.

 

When they met a stranger walking toward them with his back to the sun, they didn’t have any idea who he was. He asked what they’d been discussing and they showed their amazement that he must have been the only person in the region who hadn’t heard the rumors.

 

They told this stranger what had happened and then spoke a most memorable line in verse 21: “We had hoped that he would be the one to save Israel.” That could be the Chamber of Commerce slogan for this little town of Emmaus where you and I have often gone:

“Welcome to Emmaus – the little town where our hope is in yesterday.” Like the sign at the portals of hell in Dante’s Inferno, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

 

“We had hoped that Jesus would be the one to save us…” they said. Isn’t that the fellowship we’ve all belonged to, at some point, we who’ve walked our Emmaus roads? S’pose there’s a Facebook Group where we can tell our stories:

• We’d hoped the shadow on the CAT scan was just a false alarm…
• We’d hoped when the hurricane had passed the damage would be limited…
• We’d hoped the first signs of forgetfulness were nothing to worry about…
• We’d hoped the company would rebound before there had to be lay-offs…

 

“We had hoped,” of course, is only the first part of the sentence. You know what comes next. “We had hoped… but we don’t any more.” That’s the way it is when we walk along this particular road. This Emmaus we’re talking about isn’t so much a place. It’s our spiritual condition. It’s where we stand when we’ve reached the end of our rope.

 

That’s why I ask a rhetorical question: – knowing how true this story is… how it resonates with the realities of our lives and God’s presence… knowing how clearly this faith is the keystone and cornerstone for living hopefully in a chaotic world, how important is it to insist this is a factual story?  Would the story be any less true if we were to say it is a parable, a powerful truth that’s wrapped in rich and relevant story?

 

Or, put more simply, I see this story to be so true regarding the nature of God and of our lives, I don’t really care whether it’s factual and historical.  Easter, like so much of the faith we share, is the collective witness of Jesus’ disciples there and then, here and now, always and everywhere. Even though you couldn’t capture it with a camera, the truth of resurrection still changes lives.

 

There was a time when I somehow thought hope was based on knowledge and proof – facts and persuasive evidence; and that if you kept at it long enough you’d finally push back the veil and everything would make sense.

 

I know that’s what Christian faith means to many people. But that doesn’t work for me. Maybe it’s because I’ve sat too many times with too many people who’ve had every reason to question God’s love and healing presence. And I’ve dried my own tears and swallowed around the lump in my throat and simply said “I don’t know…that’s a question no one has ever answered.”

 

 

The disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t experience the Risen Christ through proof, or knowledge or information, but through the opening of their hearts to the One who met them. In the breaking of the bread, the welcoming of the stranger, and the opening of the scriptures, they were changed, and they returned to Jerusalem as witnesses.

 

That conviction has been deepened by a little book I’ve enjoyed over the past few years.  Elinor Redmond introduced me to it, called Learning to Fall, the Blessings of an Imperfect Life, by Phillip Simmons. He wrote the book in 2000, just after he was diagnosed with ALS, “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” He died, as expected, a few years later.

 

I can’t do it justice in a few quotes but want to whet your appetite with the opening lines from the Foreword:

This book is for everyone who has lived long enough to discover that life is both more and less than we had hoped for. We’ve known Earth’s pleasures: sunlight on a freshly mowed lawn, leaves trembling with rain, a child’s laugh, the sight of a lover stepping from the bath. We’ve also seen marriages and careers crash, we’ve seen children lost to illness and accident. But beyond the dualities of feast and famine we’ve glimpsed something else: the blessings of an imperfect life like fruit from a blighted tree. We’ve known the dark woods but also the moon…

 Learning to Fall, by Phillip Simmons (Bantam Books, 2000) page ix

 

Our faith in God, embodied in Jesus Christ, doesn’t really silence life’s most persistent questions. They will always chatter away. But our faith is the assurance that we can face the unknown, the mysteries of this rich, good, heart-breaking and joy-making life.

 

And it’s all the richer because we walk this road together, with the One who comes to us sometimes as a stranger, whose love for us is so strong that he would even lay down his life for us all. Jesus Christ walks with us on every path – and we have nothing… nothing to fear!