After Emmaus

Sometimes, history is not enough.  It’s true that knowledge of our past is indispensable, a crucial way of making sense of ourselves; it’s true that it offers us insight into the human condition and rich resources of knowledge and experience.  Yet history on its own is not enough.   I say this advisedly, for I am a historian by profession and vocation; I truly believe that without history our humanity is impoverished, that something essential is lost.  And yet, whatever the value and richness and importance of history, it will only take us so far, to the facts and the stories of our past but not beyond them.  However many accurate records or comprehensive datasets we may have, we will not find in them the meaning and wholeness we as humans seek.  For that, we must look instead to the divine Truth which brings life and love to the world.  We must look, or so our readings tell us, to the risen Christ breaking bread with his disciples.

This, I want to suggest, is one of Luke’s emphases in the story of the road to Emmaus.  It’s perhaps the most famous of Jesus’s resurrection appearances – and also Luke’s most brilliant classroom story, a model for how Christians might truly make sense of the world around them.  The two disciples who walk along this road know all the events that have happened in their area, they have been listening carefully to Jesus’s teaching and following his ministry.  Indeed, their hopes and expectations had been raised to fever pitch as they came to see him as the one to redeem Israel, to fulfil all that was set down in the scriptures they knew so well. Then, however, he was arrested, tried, crucified.   But reports were coming in of strange things happening, of an empty tomb, of visions of angels, rumours that Jesus was still alive.  The disciples know all these things, they are extremely well informed about everything going on in Jerusalem.  And yet they are downcast, disappointed, their hopes dashed and their minds bewildered – as they talk to each other and to this stranger they have nothing but piecemeal information, loosely framed around what they thought they knew of God.

So Jesus meets them, talks to them, draws from them their own understanding of what has been happening.  As so often, Jesus allows them to begin, to share their hopes and their fears with him.  In response he teaches them, offering them a new way of seeing God’s action in the world, one where glory is known through suffering and vulnerability, even the suffering of the cross.  The disciples listen and they learn, and they insist that he stay with them; Luke tells us they ‘constrain’ and urge him to eat and rest with them.  And it is here, in the blessing and breaking of the bread, that they realise it is Jesus – in that simple action of thanksgiving, of offering, above all of hospitality, that the truth of God’s presence and purposes is revealed to them.  It is here that they realise the meaning of the scriptures and of their own salvation.   It is from here that they go out in joy and in confidence, to share their story and to offer to their friends the truths they have received.  Somehow, in this encounter, the disciples’ knowledge and their puzzled bewilderment has become faith, it has become a new sense of God and of themselves, a new sense of past, present, and future.

For, as Jesus breaks bread with the disciples, they find the landmarks of their world have shifted, their old ideas have been shaken and challenged, new possibilities are emerging.  Only a few hours earlier these men were frightened and terrified; in fear and exhaustion they, like almost all the disciples, had abandoned Jesus, they had left him to be crucified almost alone, with only his most devoted followers near him.   The bonds of relationship had been broken, the ties of support and friendship and hospitality ruptured by the might of an imperial power that seemed to have defeated frail humanity.   Yet now, those same disciples find themselves open once more to new relationship. Forgetting their fear, they insist that this curious stranger must eat with them, must stay with them, and share with them his teaching and his presence.  The people and the community that had been broken are being knitted together again once more, and now more fully and deeply, for the death that had seemed to shatter them has now been overcome.  As bread is shared, in the presence of the risen Christ, those mangled fragments of the disciples’ past, of their community’s past, are being joined afresh – drawn into a new body whose spirit is love.  Now as they look back on their stories of their lives, of the struggles of their people, they come to see in them the true purposes of God, and to see how what once seemed lost and broken, is now being reconciled.
What the disciples learn at Emmaus, Luke wants to share with his readers, with Christians through the ages.  When he begins his gospel story, he promises the reader an ‘orderly’ account of what has happened, based on his own thorough investigation.  This might sound like an introduction to a historical work, the kind of principles I might teach my undergraduates.  But for Luke it is different, and in his story of the road to Emmaus, Luke reveals what true order means to him and the Christian community.  This, he suggests, can only be found in the light of the cross and resurrection; everything that was and is and is to come must be viewed in this light and gains meaning from this source.  From Easter comes the possibility of redemption and reconciliation, because the past looks different when we see it from this side of the resurrection.  And from Easter comes the possibility of new community, held together by the risen Christ and by the love whose bonds are eternal.  

And that new community is one which we too are invited to share in.  Just as Cleophas and the disciples knew the presence of Christ when he blessed and broke bread with them, so we too are brought into the story of Easter through bread and wine, through the telling of scripture, through friendship and love.  Here too the scattered fragments of our own pasts can be gathered anew, our own hurt and guilt, our joys and hopes and shattered expectations can be taken up and given new meaning, in the light that shines from the Easter morning.   And in the beauty and power of God’s redeeming love, we can perhaps find the true centre and order of our own lives and our own relationships.