What Can We Learn On the Road to Emmaus?
Remember
in my last writing, I asked you to consider what we can learn from Luke’s
Gospel story of Cleopas and his companion along the Emmaus Road. I believe,
first, we learn from the story that Emmaus is every person’s town. We’ve all been there in one way or another,
at some time in our lives. Emmaus is
whatever we do or wherever we go to salvage and sort out our feelings, to
summon the courage and the desire to keep going on or to try and forget. Emmaus is whatever we do and wherever we go
to reclaim our sanity when our world goes to pieces, when our ideals and dreams
are violated and distorted, or when love and goodness are rejected and profaned
by selfish persons with almost demonic intent.
It
may happen at the betrayal of one we respect very much, or as the one we love
the most with whom we shared the intimacy of marriage leaves us for another person. It may happen at the death of our spouse, or termination
by a long-time employer without explanation; or when an illness confines us and
there is no respite from pain; or when illness strikes a child and we’re
helpless. We may head for Emmaus when our involvement in the struggle to right
some wrong winds up in utter defeat, and the cause to which we gave our life is
undermined by the greed and deceit of trusted leaders. It may come at a personal moral crisis, when
we wake up to the fact of how miserable we’ve made our own life or the lives of
these who love us. We have to decide whatever we want to change, let go of the
old and turn to God and start all over again, pick up and build a new
life. At the turning points and traumas
of life, like those disciples of old, we head for some Emmaus, to get away from
it all and to wait it out and to seek how to discover to live with it. Emmaus is every person’s town.
I
also think we’ve learned that we have a friend who joins us along the Emmaus
Road. In the midst of, or in the
aftermath of defeat and despair, or suffering and pain, of confusion and doubt,
there is always the friend who joins us.
That’s what happened to Cleopas and his companion. They were walking along in dejection and
defeat, when all of a sudden they became aware of a third person.
Specifically,
there are three things to know about this encounter with “the stranger” who
joined these disciples on the Emmaus Road.
One, they didn’t know who he was.
Now what’s important about that?
It is important to know because Jesus often comes to us incognito. The second thing to note is that this
stranger on the road helped them to make sense out of things. The whole situation seemed to these two men
to have no explanation. Third, notice the courtesy of the stranger on the
road. It is captured in the 28-29th
verse. “So they drew near the village to
which they were going. Jesus 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.” Jesus does not force himself upon
us. He awaited their invitation to come
in. Here is focused for us the greatest
and the most perilous gift God has given us—the gift of free will.
What
more have we learned from this story? I will leave you with this. We have to learn how to live in our fourth
days—away from the ecstasy and excitement and energy of third day resurrection,
and that’s the reason for the Sundays after Easter. Now our clue for living through all the
fourth days is in the way that Jesus was finally known, even on the third
day. In that powerful, simple, straightforward
in verses 30-31 when he was at the table with them, he took bread and blessed
it and broke it and gave it to them.
Their
eyes were opened and they recognized Him.
Look closely at this. Though our understanding of Holy Communion is
grounded in this Emmaus meal, as well as the Passover Supper in the Upper Room,
which was not a ritual or a special occasion that had been prepared for like
the Passover had been. It was an
ordinary meal in an ordinary house at an ordinary time, with an ordinary piece
of bread being shared by two ordinary men and Jesus. So what’s the point?
It
is ordinary days that make up most of our lives. And it is in ordinary ways that the Lord is
made known to us. In the breaking of a common piece of bread and the sharing of
a cup of wine, the resurrected Lord was known to those crushed and despairing
men at Emmaus. As her did for these men,
Jesus will come to us. When your
schedule doesn’t seem to give you even one little break, when you’re involved
in your work, with your family, in a those trying ordeals, in depressing
circumstances, in dull routines, Jesus will come.
Go With God,
Pastor Qualley
