Strange Travels

Propers: The Third Sunday of Easter, AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I was baptized and raised in the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, a large and liturgical LCA congregation of mainly German extraction. It was a good place to come of age, a good place to grow, and it remained my spiritual home right up until I got married and we moved to Fargo, some 17 years ago now.

Perhaps that’s why the Road to Emmaus story in Luke’s Gospel has always struck a chord with me. Whenever we went to church, often several times a week, for over a quarter-century, I found myself literally on the road to Emmaus, to meet Jesus.

Andrew Klavan wrote that everything Jesus did was both entirely itself and entirely a sign, for He is the Word made flesh. He really did resurrect, and the resurrection was a sign of the eternal Word of God overcoming and conquering death. Likewise, Baptism symbolizes rebirth and it is rebirth; Communion represents Jesus’ Body and Blood and it is Jesus’ Body and Blood. He really met His disciples on the Road to Emmaus, and the Road to Emmaus is a sign for all the rest of us.

In the story of the Road to Emmaus, two of Jesus’ disciples—which is to say, His followers, His students—are fleeing from the chaos and confusion of Jerusalem on that first Easter Sunday, the Day of Resurrection. One of the two is named Cleopas, a tantalizing detail, given that John’s Gospel identifies one “Mary of Clopas” as sister to Jesus’ mother and present at the Crucifixion. The second disciple remains unidentified, leading some to speculate, not without reason, that this could be Cleopas’s wife.

It is significant, I think, that they are on the road, on the way, given that “the Way” was the earliest name applied to worshippers of the Christ, who after all had called Himself “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” They’re heading to a village named Emmaus, or “warm spring,” again significant, it would seem, insofar as Jesus proclaimed Himself to be living water, a spring from whom to drink that we need never thirst again.

Cleopas and his companion seem both anxious and perplexed. They knew Jesus well, had followed Him, might even be related. They braved the simmering violence of the Passover, witnessed His arrest, trial, torture, and execution. Saturday they dared not move: perhaps hiding, as the Apostles had, within the upper room; or perhaps out of respect for the Sabbath, during which Judeans were not to travel more than three-quarters of a mile, the distance to the Mount of Olives.

Regardless, they stuck around long enough to hear strange things, bizarre things. The women attending His tomb—those Holy Myrrhbearers who doubted that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea had had time for a proper embalming Good Friday—ran back with breathless tales of a missing corpse and visions of angels. Some men of the group ran to investigate, and found it as they’d said: open and empty.

This apparently proved the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Cleopas and his companion light out for the hills. They’re not sure what’s going on, whatever could happen next, but they sure as spit ain’t about to stick around to find out. Either the dead are back from the grave or Rome shall be sure to finish the job. One way or the other, best to get while the getting is good. Things just got too weird.

Even so, they can’t stop talking about it, can’t stop thinking about it. Who could? They had come to Jerusalem following Jesus, full of hope, full of joyful expectation, only to be confronted with terror and violence, suffering and death. It had to be deeply traumatic. It had to be utterly horrifying. And what to make of the missing body, the hysterical claims of the women? Had they lost their minds? Or was the vengeance of God about to descend upon the City of David?

Is this not to us indicative of the human quest for faith? We hope, we learn, we follow, only to be shocked, horrified, perplexed. We don’t know what to make of what we’ve seen, let alone all that we’ve heard. And we try to suss it out together. We walk the way, fretfully, agitatedly, together amazed, together unmoored, searching for meaning, searching for truth, searching for connection. God help us.

Then along comes Jesus.

Of course, they don’t know that it’s Jesus, not yet at any rate. One of the most consistent aspects of resurrection accounts is that at first people do not recognize the risen Christ. Something about Him has changed; everything about Him has changed. But then He reveals Himself in some way, some small gesture—by speaking our name, breaking our bread, placing our hands in His wounds—and recognition strikes like a bolt from the blue. There is no uncertainty then, no mistaking Him then.

Jesus arrives in the story as a stranger, a fellow traveler upon the way. And He asks the companions, “What are you discussing with each other as you walk along?” And with some admixture of grief and disbelief, Cleopas says, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” To them it is unthinkable that the world could so change yet go unnoticed.

Thus they speak to Him of Jesus as their prophet and redeemer, a man mighty in word and deed before the Lord. And they had hoped—they had hoped!—perhaps the saddest words in Scripture. Their loss and despair remain palpable today. These two loved Jesus but don’t know what to make of what happened to Him, let alone the reports of His life after death. They haven’t the whole picture and they know it. Suddenly, and to their shock, the stranger laughs out heartily.

“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” He roars jovially. And then He proceeds to explain to them how all of this had been foretold, how none of it should come to them as any sort of surprise. All of Scripture—the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms—proclaim the life of Jesus Christ. He is the hidden key to sacred writ, who cracks the seals of the scrolls. Your hope has not been lost, He tells them. Your hopes have been fulfilled!

This indeed fills them with wonder and joy and burning zeal, so that as they come to their destination, to the village of living water, they beg Him to stay with them, to come and break their bread. They have found their living water in this stranger. And He blesses it and breaks it, as He had for them at Passover, and suddenly their eyes are opened wide. They see Him now for who and what He truly is: Jesus Christ alive! Yet in that same instant, that moment of clarity, He vanishes from sight.

And then—here’s the kicker—they get up again and head back to Jerusalem. In the evening, in the night, when people do not travel! Here they had fled in the day; now they stumble fearlessly, foolishly through darkness to return. And when they arrive to proclaim the risen Christ, they find that everyone already knows. Jesus has been there as well, among the Eleven as well. And they share together their experience of Him, their encounters with Christ on the way.

Welcome to Church! This is what Church is, after all. We are companions on the Way, full of struggle, full of hope. We fall into despair and we find comfort in each other. We encounter Jesus Christ within the stranger on our path. He reveals Himself to us in the reading of the Scriptures, in the breaking of the bread: Word and Sacrament, the two things that we share here together every Sunday, and have been doing so together since at least the Book of Acts.

And once we see Him—once we encounter the risen Christ for ourselves—there’s no mistaking Him, no denying Him. He is here and He is risen! Alleluia! And then He’s gone again, vanished again, back into plain sight, back into everyday life. Yet the encounter transforms us, doesn’t it? Even if we only catch Him in glimpses, in the shards of a shattered mirror. What can we do with this revelation but share it? To gather with others who’ve seen Him, who’ve doubted, whom He’s changed.

The Road to Emmaus is the life of faith. It tells us where Jesus shall find us: in our doubts, in our neighbors, in our Scriptures, in this Meal. Once we are with Him, we need fear no more: fear no disappointments, fear no darkness, fear no death. For Christ is with us on our Way, and is Himself the Way. We are gathered here to share with others all that we have seen, where we’ve recognized Him, how He’s transformed everything we are; and how we could never be the same again.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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