The Rev. Ann R. Lougee
April 6, 2008
Breaking bread in Emmaus
Luke 24:13-35

The two disciples in today's gospel story were getting out of town, out of Jerusalem where they had just experienced such a terrible loss -- the loss of their friend and teacher to a horrible death at the hands of the Roman Empire. They may have been fleeing to avoid suffering the same fate.

But they were also going to Emmaus to try to make sense of what had happened to Jesus, to try to ease the painful memory of the great failure of his life, and to grieve deeply over lost possibility. There is not one of us who hasn't been to Emmaus. Emmaus is always our destination after a time of pain and loss. Emmaus is wherever each of us tries to go when we've suffered the loss of a loved one or of a relationship.

Emmaus is wherever we head when we've suffered the loss of a job or a skill or ability that we felt gave us worth or identity or independence. Emmaus is our destination when we feel betrayed and have lost trust in a person or persons, in a belief or an ideal, in an institution, or even in ourselves.

Emmaus is wherever we go or whatever we do to try to make ourselves forget that the world often places very little value on much that we hold dear and sacred; that the world often twists the noblest and bravest and wisest and loveliest lives, and wounds them deeply. Sometimes it destroys them.

So the two disciples were on the way to Emmaus after their tragic loss. Then they met an unknown person on the road and experienced a dramatic vision, an encounter with Christ, with divine Mystery.

I think of other great mystical visions in the Bible. There's Moses at the burning bush; there's Isaiah in the temple; there's Elijah hiding in the cleft of a mountain. You can probably think of many others: Eli, Gideon; Mary; many more.

In such biblical visions or encounters with the divine, I find two characteristic elements. One is the "appearance"of God; that is, ultimate reality becomes manifest with a special intensity in a different way than we have perceived it before. God seems more present than God has seemed before.

Most of the time, this revelation of God is where we put our attention in these stories. But there is a second important element in the religious encounters in the Bible.

There is usually an internal conflict going on in the one to whom God appears. A person with conflict going on inside is not sure which way to turn, not sure of one's own identity or what one is called to be. And out of their interior struggle comes a revelation of that ultimate reality that we name God.

So too with the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They are divided within themselves, conflicted inside; they are discussing; they are debating. Back and forth, back and forth: how to make sense out of their experience. Then a stranger on the road appears.

The unknown one asks them to describe their conflict to him. They explain that Jesus had been a prophet powerful in speech and action. It had seemed clear that God had been with him, and they had hoped he was God's chosen one, God's anointed liberator and savior, the Messiah -- in Greek, the Christ. And yet he had been crucified.

That was a contradiction to them. God's chosen one, if really chosen, they thought, could not have come to such an end. The manner of his death had seemed to declare a great "No" from God.

If God let this happen to Jesus, they reasoned, it must mean that Jesus was not the one they hoped for after all. Persons in conflict, you see, are not just unsure about who they are or what they are called to do, but they are uncertain about the nature of God too. God seems to be on all sides and on no side. On which side is God going to come down?

The conflict is typically resolved by a decision in which the person in conflict comes to know something new. This new knowledge is both about him- or herself and also about who God is for that time. The new knowledge is not the result of a process of logic, but of a revelation that shows which side God is on, a new realization of reality so that God is now understood in a way that God was never understood before.

It is clear in Luke's gospel that the prevalent way of thinking was that the good prospered and the bad were punished. It was hard to continue to believe in the goodness of one crucified as a criminal, let alone believe that in him they had truly seen God reflected. Yet they couldn't give Jesus up either, so they were conflicted.

If their conflict was going to be resolved, it had to be resolved on the basis of their religious tradition. If there was any way to make sense out of this paradox, they would have to find it in their scriptures. Everything they knew about God was there, and so far it all seemed to point away from Jesus as God's chosen one. Everything they had known or thought about God up to that time had been revealed to them in stories of creation and life and beauty and success and triumph. That is a true enough way of knowing God, but as they thought about Jesus, they had to break out of that way of thinking as the only way.

For if the only way to know God is through the happy things -- spring flowers, mighty mountains, great human characters -- then whenever you are sick or sad or in trouble, you must be on God's wrong side. Your God is over there with all the prosperous people and the healthy people, the successful people, the popular and good-looking people. And here you are alone in your trouble, and God isn't with you in your trouble any more than those successful, healthy, trouble-free people are.

That's what you're left with if you believe that only success and prosperity are signs of God's presence, and that failure, disgrace, grief, illness or poverty are signs of God's absence. So the stranger took the disciples back through their scriptures again.

Biblical scholars say that Luke is presenting here a compressed summary of the actual process that followers of Jesus went through in the years after his death. They searched the scriptures to make sense of what had happened to the one they loved and followed.

Two of the texts to which the disciples turned most often were the so-called Suffering Servant passages in Isaiah, like "He was despised and rejected of humanity," and Psalm 22 which opens with the words the Gospel of Mark attributes to Jesus on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And as they searched they began to see the suffering of God's chosen one showing up everywhere in scripture.

It was a tremendous turning point for the early Christians. Now when they talked about Jesus as the crucified Christ they could say, "Look, it's all there in the Holy Book." So the texts that early Christians wrote, which we call the New Testament, are full of scriptural references meant to prove that a crucified Messiah not only makes sense but was God's intention all along. Gradually these early followers came to believe that, in Jesus' death, they could hear God saying, "For me to reveal myself completely, I have to use not only strength, growth, victory, honor, power, and health. I also have to use brokenness, weakness, disgrace, despair, and sorrow, for I am in all of life."

People who had not been able to conceive of the idea of a crucified Christ began to see it, first as possibility, and then as certainty. That new certainty forever changed their ideas of God and of Jesus. They could never again think of God without including the suffering heart they saw revealed on the cross. When they saw Jesus and the cross as included in God, they saw God as included in Jesus, and could never again think of Jesus without recognizing that God had been there all along.

They had recognized Jesus as a great "prophet, mighty in deed and word before God and the people." Now they recognized him as "God with us." God was included in the meaning of Jesus. Jesus was included in the meaning of God. They saw that God had been there all the time, and at no time more certainly than during Jesus' suffering and death.

However, just a new insight into scripture was not enough. They still did not recognize the presence of the Christ with them in their own lives, in the midst of their grief and pain, until they offered hospitality to a stranger, and their eyes were opened in the breaking of the bread.

They knew the Christ risen and with them when they shared the loaf and cup with one another and with a stranger, as Jesus had done with them. In that action, the truth of Jesus was restored, and it was as though God pronounced the ultimate Yes over what had seemed a final No.

We, of course, do not read the story of the Resurrection as merely objective observers. We read it as those who believe that we are always dealing with God, however hidden that ultimate reality may sometimes seem. We read it as members of a community that finds in it a clue to God's nature and purposes for us in our own time and place.

The early disciples were empowered to face the "No"s of life because they had experienced the deepest "Yes." Those who had walked with Jesus through the valley of death, those who had suffered painful grief, discovered even there the presence of God, the power of life. And so can we.

Though time will soon take us on separate paths, and though some of us are indeed grieving that parting, as long as we are walking on together we need to keep on sharing the stories of our faith and keep on welcoming strangers. And even after we part, we will still be together in a sense, as Christ is known to us in the breaking of the bread.

We usually call this Eucharistic meal Communion, because as we share it, we are in communion with each other, with God, and with those with whom we are no longer together. And Christ is known to us in the breaking of the bread. Alleluia! Amen.