On the Road --- Again
Reflections on Luke 24.13-35
RCL Easter 3A
26 April 2020
Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral
New Westminster BC
If you take the modern four-lane highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, you will pass the pace that some Christians, centuries before the Crusades, venerated as Emmaus. Nearby this ancient pilgrimage site is a community of Jews and Christians who, decades ago, committed themselves to inter-faith dialogue and shared witness to religious reconciliation among all three Abrahamic faiths.
From this place you drive up into the steep hills that rise between the Mediterranean coast and the city of Jerusalem. Even today the road requires careful driving and traffic accidents are not infrequent.
When I think back on my own trip from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem some eight years ago, I marvel at the journey undertaken by the two disciples. In their day the journey down from Jerusalem would have been more difficult. The many twists and turns of the road as well as the many gullies and rock outcroppings would have given thieves and brigands ample cover. What prompted them to leave the relative security of Jerusalem for this risky trek to Emmaus?
Frederick Buechner, an American writer of fiction and religious essays, offers one of the best interpretations for this trip that I’ve found. He writes
[Emmaus is] the place we go to in order to escape --- a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole damned thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.” . . . Emmaus may be buying a new suit or a new car or smoking more cigarettes than you really want, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one. Emmaus may be going to church on Sunday. Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that [people] have had --- ideas about love and freedom and justice --- have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish [people] for selfish ends. [i]
Cleopas and his unnamed companion were running away. They had to escape the pressure cooker that Jerusalem had become over the last week. They could not bear to believe what the women had told the apostles that Sunday morning. To believe it would make such a claim on their lives that they would never be the same. So they threw up their hands, gathered their belongings and skedaddled down the road to Emmaus.
But Jesus would not let them run away without giving them a choice. Though their hearts were troubled and their hopes crushed by the rock that had sealed his tomb on Friday afternoon, Jesus comes alongside them on the road and begins a conversation that will put before them the choice to run away or to become witnesses to the risen life God reveals in Christ and offers freely to every human being.
Right now I feel that every Christian and especially those of us who have chosen to follow Christ as practised in the Anglican tradition are on the road to Emmaus. As difficult as this pandemic is for us and as unclear the future that lies before us is, Jesus comes beside us in many familiar and unfamiliar guises. Sometimes Jesus comes beside us in the guise of those people who reach out to help their families, their friends and their neighbours in unspectacular but essential ways. Sometimes Jesus comes beside us when a familiar passage of Scripture is read and we suddenly hear the words in a new way that sets our hearts on fire. Sometimes Jesus comes beside us in this familiar ritual of the breaking of the bread of life and the pouring of the cup of blessing, especially at this time when we are so conscious of our unity in Christ and of our physical separation from one another. Jesus never allows us to travel the road to our Emmaus alone, wherever or whatever it may be.
And when he walks beside us, the conversation we have with him on the road brings us face to face with a choice. We can continue our escape, our flight from the realization of how costly and life-changing the life of discipleship is. Or, we can acknowledge that our hearts are on fire and that we are ready to set out into the night and back up the hill to Jerusalem with the news that we have seen the Lord.
Lord knows, and we all know, how tempting it is to hang around in Emmaus. Being a disciple of Jesus is hard work. We all need times and places for refuge. But such times and places are not for concealment or avoidance; they are places for renewal and recommitment. The road back up the hill to Jerusalem beckons us all and we will not travel it alone.
[i] Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat (New York, New York: Seabury Press, 1966), pp. 85-86.
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