Carry Water

Lections: The Third Sunday of Easter, AD 2026 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.

The Resurrection doesn’t solve everything.

I wish that it did. And from an eternal perspective, certainly it does. But for us down here in space and time, immersed in the mud and the blood, we still have to get up in the mornings, walk the dog, pay our bills, grow old and sick and die. It’s a bit disorienting, to shift from the miraculous to the mundane. “Christ is risen! Now back to work.” Buddhists have a good proverb for it: “Before enlightenment,” they say, “chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” I like that. That’s what the weeks after Holy Week feel like to me.

What does the Resurrection change? How does it affect our lives in the everyday? Does it raise us from the dead? Or does it just make life messier?

Of all the Resurrection appearances compiled in our Gospel accounts, today’s might be my favorite, because it’s just so very human. We meet two of Jesus’ disciples: Cleopas and a companion, who might well be his wife. They had come to Jerusalem along with Jesus, hoping that He would be the one to redeem Israel, from her captivity to Rome, her captivity to sin. Alas, instead of Jesus’ triumph, these two witnessed His Crucifixion, horrible and traumatic to behold.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, this very day they’d heard rumors, reports, that Jesus’ Tomb was empty and that certain women in their group had encountered angels claiming that Christ had arisen from the dead! And so Cleopas and his companion do what any sensible person in their situation would: they run away. After the arrest, the beatings, the so-called trial, the torture, the excruciating murder, now the dead are getting up in the middle of the night? Whatever this meant, it couldn’t be good. It’s time to get out of Jerusalem while they still can.

Don’t you wish that this is what people would do in horror movies, that as soon as the first grave opened up, they’d get the heck out of town? So the two of them light out for Emmaus, a village some seven miles distant. And while they’re walking hurriedly, anxious and afraid, a stranger joins them on the road. And after listening to their fretful speech for a bit, He asks them: “What are you discussing?”

This stops them dead in their tracks. Standing in the middle of the road, looking sad, they reply: “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know what’s happened there?” To which He answers innocently, “What things?” Thus they unfold to Him the hopes they’d placed in Jesus, and the terrors they had witnessed there instead. They even include the bit about the women’s talk of Resurrection, perhaps to see what He might make of that.

Now, whatever sympathy or horror they’d expected to elicit, the stranger merely shakes His head and smiles. “Oh, how foolish and how slow of heart to believe all that the Prophets have declared!” He admonishes. “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into His glory?” And so He proceeds to interpret for them the entirety of the Scriptures in the light of Jesus Christ, showing them that their hopes have not been dashed but are fulfilled.

And this changes everything for them. The two disciples find themselves fascinated, reinvigorated. As they draw near to Emmaus, and the stranger looks as though He will go on, they ask Him instead to stay with them. Evening has fallen, and it isn’t safe to travel at night. He obliges them, and at their evening meal, as He blesses and breaks the bread, suddenly their eyes are opened and they recognize this stranger for who He really is: Jesus, who has been with them for all of this time.

To their utter astonishment, as soon as they see Him as He is, Jesus vanishes from their sight. And they are left in wonder. “Were not our hearts burning within us while He was talking to us on the road, while He was opening the Scriptures unto us?” And—this is my favorite part—they immediately set back out on the road, back the way that they’d just come, in the middle of the night, rushing another seven miles stumbling through the dark, returning to Jerusalem, returning to Jesus’ disciples.

There they find the Apostles wide awake, and learn that they are far from alone in whom they had encountered. Thus we find the risen Christ in long walks, risky conversations, quiet dinners, and reframed traumas. The catastrophe of Crucifixion has given way to the eucatastrophe—a sudden, miraculous turn from disaster unto joy—of Jesus’ Resurrection. Such is the startling power of Easter.

Please understand that this story of the road to Emmaus is a parable of the Church. Everything that happens to Cleopas and his companion mirrors what we practice every Sunday. You’ll notice in our hymnals, and in our bulletins, that every Christian liturgy consists of four simple parts: the Gathering, the Word, the Meal, and the Sending.

First the Gathering: Jesus promises that wherever two or three are gathered in His name, He is there among them. As the two disciples met Jesus on the road, so He meets us whenever we gather together. As they confessed to Him their hopes and broken hearts, so we confess our failings and our sins, trusting that His presence is our absolution.

We turn then to the Word, reading together no less than four passages selected from the length and breadth of the Scriptures; not to mention all the parts of our liturgy, both spoken and sung, which quote directly from the Bible. These readings we follow with a homily or sermon, whereby the pastor—by the grace of God and inspiration of His Spirit—interprets said readings in light of Jesus’ Resurrection.

Next comes the Meal, as we turn to the Lord’s Table, our Altar, there to speak the words that Jesus spoke, to pray the prayer that Jesus prayed, and to call upon His Holy Spirit to come down and make it so. “This is My Body,” He says and so it is. “This cup is the New Covenant in My Blood, shed for you and all people, for the forgiveness of sin.”

Thus having seen Him, touched Him, tasted Him, in Word and in Sacrament, water and oil, bread and wine, we are then sent back out into the night with His Spirit burning within us, that we might now be Christ for all the world! Life is the road to Emmaus, sorrowful and dark, where Jesus meets us even as we flee from Him, and transforms us in the glory and the shock of Resurrection. He comes to us in humble ways, in a morsel of bread and sip of wine, in promises shared amongst a ragtag band of sainted sinners, and most scandalously within the needs of our neighbors.

Jesus keeps on promising His peace. “Peace be with you. My peace I give to you.” But the Apostles never had external peace. 11 out of 12 of them would suffer violent deaths. Yet they went out joyfully, proclaiming the Gospel, proclaiming Resurrection. Somehow, impossibly, they discovered their joy in sadness, detachment in disaster, comfort in bitterness, peace in sorrow, life in death, and victory within their condemnation. Here we find the paradoxical peace of Jesus Christ: an interior peace, indeed an inside-out peace.

The Resurrection doesn’t make our tribulations disappear. Chop wood, carry water. Rather, it reveals the miraculous within the mundane. To know that Christ is with you, that His Spirit dwells within you, is to become impervious to the chaos and vicissitudes of life. Christ walks calmly upon the stormy sea. Thus He transforms all our trials: for now we know that we have never truly been alone; that evil cannot endure; that life outlives death, even and especially when the only way out is through.

This cup too shall pass, and we shall rise immortal—for in Christ we are already resurrected.

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.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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