Text Luke 24:13-35 NRSVUE
13 Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles[a] from Jerusalem, 14 and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. 15 While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, 16 but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. 17 And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad.[b] 18 Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” 19 He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth,[c] who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, 20 and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. 21 But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.[d] Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. 22 Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, 23 and when they did not find his body there they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. 24 Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see him.” 25 Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! 26 Was it not necessary that the Messiah[e] should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” 27 Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.
28 As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. 29 But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. 30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight. 32 They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us[f] while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” 33 That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem, and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. 34 They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” 35 Then they told what had happened on the road and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
Footnotes
a. 24.13 Gk sixty stadia; other ancient authorities read a hundred sixty stadia
b. 24.17 Other ancient authorities read walk along, looking sad?”
c. 24.19 Other ancient authorities read Jesus the Nazorean
d. 24.21 Or to set Israel free
e. 24.26 Or the Christ
f. 24.32 Other ancient authorities lack within us
Liturgy
Call to Worship (Isaiah 52, 53)
Leader: See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high.
People: He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
Leader: Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases;
People: yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.
Leader: Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge.
People: The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Amen!
Prayer of Confession (Unison)
Jesus, you walk with us along the way, yet we are more focused on ourselves and our concerns to see you. We do not believe the things that you have already done among us, because they did not look like what we expected. We doubt the testimony of others, because we have not seen these things for ourselves. We are foolish and slow of heart to believe what you have told us. Help us to see you in the breaking of bread and the fellowship of your people. Stay with us, Lord; the day is nearly over. Amen.
Last Time on Tales of Faith
This reading is set immediately after the reading for Easter Sunday (which I did not actually do a post about; so, sorry). Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary mother of James, and the other women went to the tomb at first light in order to complete the burial rites for Jesus. When they got there, however, the stone was rolled away and the tomb was empty. Two men in dazzling clothes asked “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” The women go to to tell the eleven and other disciples, but the disciples do not believe them, thinking that it is an “idol tail.”
Peter does investigate the tomb and finds it how the women described, and went home amazed.
This Week’s Themes
Current Events
Two of Jesus’ disciples, Cleopas and the other one, are on a journey to Emmaus, seven miles from Jerusalem. While they are traveling, they are discussing the events of the day. It is a natural enough beginning of a story, just as we might be talking about politics or the most recent television show, they are discussing the topic that they share interest in. These don’t seem to be part of the eleven, but the ‘others’ who have been following Jesus. They are verbally processing the fantastical news that they heard from the women and Peter, that their Rabbi might not be dead after all.
A stranger joins them, and asks what they are talking about, noticing that they look sad. “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know…?” they ask. This strikes me as so very human, to be so focused on something, that it seems a surprise that everyone else is not. Perhaps you have experienced this yourself. I have experienced it in the death of a loved-one, being so caught up in the grief and focus on the tasks that accompany it. I remember going out into the ‘real world’ and wondering how it is that everyone else was just going through their day, not realizing that something so monumental (to me) has happened.
We can easily get in our own heads about so many things, and find surprise that others are not so engrossed, this disconnect can be jarring. Manny of us experienced this disconnect during the COVID pandemic; depending on where you lived and what flavor of news you consumed, you might have vastly different perspectives on what was going on. In the early part of lock-down, we were living in South Carolina and were being fairly cautious (not quite wipe all our groceries down cautious, but certainly wear a mask anytime outside cautious), the rest of the state seemed less so. After the day and a half of lockdown (I joke, almost), the general population went to ‘business as usual.’
This natural tendency is exacerbated by the algorithmically mediated bespoke reality we are served on a daily basis. We may be caught up thinking about the latest topic of discussion on our particular feed, and then be surprised when someone has not even heard about it, or has heard about it but has a completely different take on it.
Karl Barth famously encouraged preachers to have the Bible in one hand, and the newsletter in the other. This is good advice, to a point. We need to be aware of the politics, trending thoughts, and even pop-culture going on around us. However, we also need to have the humility and self-understanding that our focus may not be someone else’s, and assuming that it is can get us into trouble (I also recognize that I am constantly making thinly veiled references to pop-culture and politics, so maybe I am speaking to myself more than anyone).
Their Eyes Were Kept from Recognizing
This verry well may be a literary device, a quick storyteller’s note to head-off the obvious question, “well, if it was Jesus, why didn’t they recognize him?” But again, our focus tends to determine our reality. Taking this story at face value, divine intervention may not be necessary to prevent them from seeing him. These are men who are grieving the friend and Rabbi that they had been following, and had seen die. Even with reports of his resurrection, they are not expecting to meet Jesus walking alongside them on the road, so they simply don’t. It is like the old Selective Attention Test:
If your attention is focused on one thing (like counting passes), you may miss something completely different (the gorilla). Likewise, these disciples are pondering over all the events of the last week, Jesus’s satirical entrance into the city, his non-violent resistance to the Temple leadership, his betrayal by one of the twelve, his quick trial, sentence, and execution, and the ‘idle tails’ of the women. The last thing they are expecting is for Jesus to show up on the road and walk with them.
It is only after he breaks bread and gives it to them that they realize what has happened, this one vital piece of information now makes everything else fall into place. Like the surprise ending of M. Knight Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense, or Signs suddenly all of the pieces fall into place. It is kind of a metaphor for the whole story really, just as Jesus opens the scriptures to them; shows them from Moses to the prophets how the Messiah needed to suffer, so his breaking of bread opens their eyes to what was right in front of them the whole time.
Necessary Suffering?
We should take a moment and consider the assumed necessity of this suffering. It is certainly the interpretation of the author of Luke/Acts that Jesus’ suffering was necessary. Peter will later proclaim that Jesus was “handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23) and the disciples will “raise their voices together to God… ‘Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth… Jesus, whom you anointed, to do whatever your hand and plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:23-31).
This is certainly an acceptable (and even orthodox) interpretation of the events and scriptures. My tradition is one which has doubled-down on the sovereignty and predestination of God. However, we also do have to acknowledge that this interpretation also has some troubling implications for our understanding of God. A Hard-line predestination view, connected to a Penal Substitutionary Atonement model, creates a system in which God is themself bound to the horrific murder of their own son to satisfy a ‘justice’ that seems to be outside of divine control.
Could it be that this perspective on the necessity of Jesus’ death is, at least in part, a self-soothing on the part of his friends and disciples struggling with the brutality of his death? Much like we might have a tendency to assert that ‘it’s all part of God’s plan’ in the face of human suffering, perhaps the early church did the same. Religious folx give the pat answer when there seems to be no answer, when a child suffers and dies from cancer, when a woman in her prime gets in a horrific car accident and dies (or worse, does not), when the young man bucks the status quo and is brutally executed as an enemy of the state. It is significantly more comforting to believe that God sent their son to die vicariously for our sins, then to own up to the idea of incarnate divinity coming to us in love, and our response is to hang him on a tree until he asphyxiates on his own fluids.
Yet God’s shows their love for us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for (and by) us, Christ was willing to take the immense human suffering that we poured out on him. Could it be that he did this not because he had to, because it was all a part of a divine plan set out before time began, but because there is no limit to God’s great love for us.
Perhaps the death of Jesus was not so much ‘necessary’, but ‘inevitable’. Necissary, not as divine decree but “1b) necessity brought on by circumstances or by the conduct of others toward us” (Strong’s). Here, I join with a more Liberationist perspective. Jesus’ counter-cultural message of a divine Kin-dom, a Kin-dom where the poor and downtrodden are lifted up, and where the high and lofty are torn from their thrones, a Kin-dom where there is enough for everyone (and even an abundance), runs into the designs of powerful men who benefit from the status quo. This good news of an upside-down kingdom puts it, and its messenger, on a collision course with those who would use coercion and violence to keep the system by which they are benefiting. As sure as any law of nature, prophets and visionaries will find themselves on the wrong side of Power.
In the Breaking of Bread
It is not an accident that the disciples recognize Jesus when he “took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.” The clear reference to the previously narrated Last Supper is undeniable. As reformers would say, this is a “Visible sign of an invisible grace.” This ‘opens the eyes’ of the disciples, they finally see what they had been missing this whole time (much like his explanation of Messiah).
And then Jesus disappears. Gone.
The disciples start putting two and two together, and realize who they have been with, realize what has happened, and run the seven miles back to the other disciples.
Appeared to Simon
We have a really interesting detail in this gospel account. When the two disciples get back to the eleven, they hear the news that “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” but other than that, we do not get the story. We last saw Simon at the tomb, investigating the women’s report, and then “he went home, amazed at what had happened.” In this, or any of the canonical gospels, there is not a story about Jesus appearing to Simon, just this story of a story (with no details). Why was this story not included, just alluded to?
Conclusion
Jesus’ disciples struggle, like the early church, to understand how it could be that Jesus of Nazareth, who they thought was Messiah, could have died. This struggle was complicated three days after his death by reports of his body not being in its tomb. Two disciples travel with a stranger who opens the scriptures to them, explains why the death of the Messiah was not only a sign of God’s grace, but an inevitable event. The stranger reveals himself to them as Jesus, and disappears. We as the people of God continue to wrestle with the death and resurrection of Jesus, and what it means for us, for who God is, and the cosmos.