Sermon 29 May 2011, 10am

Paul arrived in Athens, one of the oldest cities in the world – already 5,000 years old – when Paul waltzed in,[1] singing the song he thought everyone else should sing.  It was such a catchy tune – if it wasn’t already on the charts, it should be very soon

“Jesus is the saviour whom I love to know..

heaven is the haven that I’m going to ..

Jesus is the captain who now leads my life ..

unworthy as I am, I know he came to save

a sinner such as me, a sinner such as you,

he came to save, from the grave.” 

It was a song that had gone down well in some of the towns he’d already been in – the people of Lystra and Antioch loved it - and even in that ‘prison ministry’ thing he’d stumbled into at Philippi.  It was a sure thing.  He had his song – and he was going to sing it.  After all, we all know how converts can be a little fanatical – and this one certainly was:  the greatest persecutor of the church became its greatest propagator, travelling some 10,000 miles to spread the good news of Jesus.   But, as he waltzed into Athens, his confidence wavered as he began to have second thoughts.  Would his song play well here?   If he’d been on the reality music show, American Idol, entering Athens might have been like getting through the auditions and going to Hollywood.  A major hurdle had been overcome; but here, in Athens, would his music be as popular?   The first signs were not very encouraging.

While Paul was waiting in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.[2]

But these were not American Idols – no sign of Scotty and Lauren[3]  fighting it out for the title.  These were idols of a quite different type – statues of gods.  As a highly respected, well educated Jew, Paul knew the commandments well – the first two was bouncing around in his head: “You shall have no other Gods before me – you shall not make for yourself an idol”.  Oops, this is real alien territory;  this visit to Athens was not going to be as easy as he had thought. 

So, deciding to start with an audience that was at least a little familiar with his tune, he headed off to the synagogue, where he could have a sing along with his own kind – Jews, who at least knew some of the notes.

He reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there.

Singing with the Jews – and those devout Greeks, known as ‘God-fearers’ – gave him confidence to head to the market place – where everyone hung out[4] - singing to anyone who turned up, as they went about their business.  And that’s where he ran into a crowd who knew an entirely different set of songs.

A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him.  Some of them asked, ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’ Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’ (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.)

The stoics were playing some sophisticated stuff – a bit of classical and a bit of jazz.  But the Epicureans – all they wanted to do was dance!  Soul, funk, hip-hop – there was always some sort of party going on.  And that wasn’t all – Athens was buzzing with every other musical style.  Heavy metal, blues, punk, rock.   It was all there.  I guess it depends on your taste, but really some of it was very ‘out there’ – you’d have to stretch your imagination to call it music.[5]

So they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?  It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.’  Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.

And there, in the Athenian equivalent of “The Beehive”, the High Court and the University Council, all rolled into one,[6] Paul really wanted to sing his song.  But it occurred to him that it might be helpful for his audience to know that he understood and appreciated their stuff, too.  So he took a chance and launched into a tune that had echoes of gospel, but a bit of what turned them on, as well.

‘People of Athens!’ he said.  ‘I see that in every way you are very religious.  For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: To an unknown God.

They liked the song.  They really did.  The Athenians were tapping their toes and nodding their heads.  Some of them were even mouthing the words. So, Paul decided to shift gears and work a little of his own tune into the mix.

What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.
The God who made the world and everything in it, the one who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is God served by human hands, as though God needed anything, since God’s very self gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.
From one ancestor God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search, and perhaps reach out for God and find God--though indeed God is not far from each one of us.

Most of the crowd was still swaying, still moving to Paul’s tune.  But some on the fringes were losing interest – chatting with their friends, checking their phones for messages and updates on Idol.  So, Paul decided to switch gears again.  He took a chance – a big chance for a rich boy from the posh end of Tarsus – he broke into a rap.   He was clever was our Paul.  He lifted his lyrics from some of Athens’ best – Dirty Ol’ Epimenedes the Cretan and DJ Dizzy Aratus[7].

“For in him

We live – and move and have our being.”

As some of your poets have said

“We are – his offspring – his children, we are”

The crowd was with him again, so Paul decided to segue back into his original tune.  He took a deep breath and gave it everything he had.  He was back in American Idol territory.  He was Haley doing an amazing rendition of Lady Gaga’s latest; he was James bringing respectability to his particular rocking style – not to mention Tourettes and Aspergers syndromes[8].  He was Lauren and Scotty, rolled into one – stirring with his magnificent country music.

Since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.  While God has, in the past, overlooked the times of human ignorance, now God commands all people everywhere to repent.

“Jesus is the saviour whom I love to know..

heaven is the haven that I’m going to .. “

But all of a sudden, the crowd turned on him.  Some sneered – some booed and most of them just walked away from the show.  But there were a few, just a few, who came up to him after the show was over, their autograph books in their hands.

We want to hear you again on this subject’, they said.

And there were others, who even started singing Paul’s song.

A few men became followers of Paul and believed.  Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris and a number of others.

So Paul waltzed out of Athens, still humming his tune – but perhaps with a little broader understanding that God was more – more than he imagined – certainly more than one style – a little of rap, a little more jazz, a little more classical…..And Paul heard the words of Jesus as told by John “they who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.”  Hmmm – perhaps it’s more simple – and more complex – than I realised, Paul mused.

Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church:        Thanks be to God.

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[1] Most of this sermon is taken (with some adaptations) from “Paul Waltzed into Athens” from Telling the Bible 2 Bob Hartman, 2005, p.142-146.  Background to Paul and Athens comes from Paul at Athens: "A Few People Believed" Daniel B. Clendenin journeywithjesus.net for Sunday May 29, 2011. Information about television show “American Idol” results comes from “How Scotty McCreery won 'American Idol'” http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110526/ap_en_ot/us_tv_american_idol

[2] Acts 17:16-32

[3] Scotty McCreery, a 17-year-old high school student from Garner, N.C., won the "American Idol" title last Wednesday night over 16-year-old fellow country singer Lauren Alaina of Rossville, Ga.

[4] “Five hundred years before Paul, the Athenian agora was the center of civic life. In addition to residences, it contained religious temples, law courts, government magistrates, the city council, and economic commerce. In Paul's day it would have included small shop-keepers.” Clendinin.

[5] In the agora Paul engaged a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers who ridiculed him as a spermologos or seed-picker. Translators struggle to make sense of this slang word: "A word originally used of birds picking up grain, then of scrap collectors searching for junk, then extended to those who snapped up ideas of others and peddled them as their own without understanding them, and finally to any ne'er-do-well" (EBC). The slur seems to have derided Paul as a bum, a plagiarist, or a poser. Whatever the meaning, Paul's audience was unimpressed when he "preached about Jesus and resurrection" Clendinin.

[6] The Areopagus was both a place and a group. It's a small rocky hill northwest of the Acropolis in Athens. More importantly, the Areopagus was the most prestigious council of elders in the history of Athens, so-named because it met on that site. Dating back to the 5th-6th centuries BCE, the Areopagus consisted of nine archons or chief magistrates who guided the city-state away from rule by a king to rule by an oligarchy, which in turn laid the foundations for Greece's eventual democracy. Across the centuries the Areopagus changed, so that by Paul's day it was a place where matters of the criminal courts, law, philosophy and politics were adjudicated. Clendinin.

[7] Paul met them on their own ground, quoting two poets: the Cretan Epimenides (600 BCE), that "in him we live and move and have our being," and then the opening lines of the Phaenomena by Aratus (315-240 BCE), a Greek poet and Stoic of Cilicia, that "we are his children." Daniel B. Clendenin.

[8] American Idol final four: 20-year-old vocalist Haley Reinhart of Wheeling Ill and 22-year-old rocker James Durbin of Santa Cruz, CA along with Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina.

Sunday 8 May 2011: Guest Preacher Jason Goroncy

Living Easter Faith (Luke 24.13–35)[1]

Easter is always a surprise. Whether Easter meets us in the bustle of busy-ness, or in the deep surges of grace overturning tragedy in our lives, or in the celebration of the eucharist, or in the world with its tsunamis, earthquakes, assassinations, tornadoes, and wars, Easter is always a surprise. And it’s the kind of surprise – thank God – that invites, even shocks, us into waking up, to having our eyes pried open, to recognising that the world in which we fell asleep no longer exists.[2]

And our waking up births new questions: How will we learn to walk in the new reality that Easter’s dawn has opened up? And how shall we proclaim the reality that in the raising of the dead Jesus God is inaugurating the re-creation of all things, and that a new politic is at work in the world? And how shall we avoid being stuck at Good Friday as custodians of the crucifixion, or on Holy Saturday with decimated hopes sealed in a sarcophagus?[3] And what does it mean for us to join Cleopas and his unnamed partner on the road of broken dreams when the very embodiment of our expectations for liberation is walking right beside us … and when – in spite of his imminence – our eyes are kept from recognising the incognito God?[4] In other words, how might we live with both familiarity and mystery, with recognition and doubt? And what might it mean that in the absence of Jesus, it is the presence of the Spirit who makes life meaningful?

Luke tells the story of those who have bet their lives on the wrong messiah. And so, confused as much as anything about the recent events birthed in Jerusalem’s corridors of power but played out on a cross outside of Jerusalem’s walls and around Joseph of Arimathea’s ‘rock-hewn tomb’ (Luke 23.53), these two hit one of the ancient city’s outbound roads and head to Emmaus, a village about 11 kilometers from Jerusalem. Like the others, these two sorry disciples are heading back to fishing nets, back to tax offices, back to missed appointments, back to familiar territory, back to how things were before Jesus interrupted their lives. Carrying their bag of unanswered questions with them, they are on the road that will return them to what T.S. Eliot called ‘the human condition’, a condition marked by the maintenance of a ‘common routine’ and an avoidance of ‘excessive expectation’.[5]

They confess in v. 21: ‘But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel’. That hope is now gone. It is hope in the past tense. This story is about those who have held on to Jesus’ message, but whose lives are now in limbo because God’s plan seems to have run out of steam. It’s about those of us who can’t quite get our minds around Easter. And it’s about those who mourn in post-Christendom bewilderment, wondering how God’s promises relate to the relentlessness of institutional decline.

And as we read this text together, we’re tempted to keep our eyes on the two disciples, tracing their movement towards hope and faith. But Luke turns the spotlight onto Jesus. It is Jesus’ actions which provide the impetus for the narrative. And Jesus’ first action is simple but profound. We read in v. 15 that Jesus simply ‘came near and went with them’. It’s an unremarkable sentence, until we remember that this is just 10 verses after the resurrection. Here is Jesus, fresh from the domain of death, out on a dusty road, still seeking and saving the lost. Frederick Buechner says of this text:

You’d have expected a little more post-resurrection fanfare – an angel choir filling the sky with a Hallelujah chorus perhaps. But instead, Jesus is pursuing two sad pilgrims on a dusty road to a little village out back of beyond. He comes in the middle of all their questions. It’s the sheer ordinariness of it all that is so striking.

What a stunning reminder that God is both closer and stranger than we think. As Buechner put it,

Jesus is apt to come, into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon, not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but … at supper time, or walking along a road. This is the element that all the stories about Christ’s return to life have in common: Mary waiting at the empty tomb and suddenly turning around to see somebody standing there – someone she thought at first was the gardener; all the disciples except Thomas hiding out in a locked house, and then his coming and standing in the midst; and later, when Thomas was there, his coming again and standing in the midst; Peter taking his boat back after a night at sea, and there on the shore, near a little fire of coals, a familiar figure asking, “Children, have you any fish?”; the two [people] at Emmaus who knew him in the breaking of the bread. He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and the questions that real life asks.[6]

Luke places Jesus with us on the road of our confusion, and tiredness, and frustration, and discouragement, and cynicism – when every ounce of hope has been wrung out of us, and his presence alone is all we have left. And even though we don’t really know who he is, we let him talk, and his words begin to peel away the calluses on our unbelieving hearts.

‘Oh, how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!’, Jesus said. ‘Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ In other words: ‘Where have you been all your life? You go to synagogue every week. What Bible have you been reading? Don’t you know your own story? Don’t you remember how, in the economy of God, that even death is no obstacle to God’s determination to bring life to every citadel where death reigns? Maybe those women spouting stories about an empty tomb aren’t so crazy after all’.[7]

But the rebuke is only the beginning! Jesus then walks these pilgrims through Moses and all the prophets. Just as he had done in his hometown synagogue, and just as Philip would do a few years later with an Ethiopian seeker, Jesus directs them to the Scriptures. Why? Because Scripture is the cradle in which we hear the living voice of God.[8] And to hear that voice is to know something of what the two Emmaus pilgrims experienced – our hearts burning within with the very life of God.

And their response? From v. 28:

As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. 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. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. (vv. 28–31). 

The disciples on the road fail to recognise him, even in the Bible study. And when they do finally recognise him at the cracking of bread crust, Luke tells us that he ‘vanished from their sight’.[9] It’s easy to miss these few words. The moment of recognition lasts just long enough to surprise, to remind, to reassure, and to release vision and energy enough for a lifetime. Like those first disciples, we too wish he would stay longer, we long for more permanence. Yet, whatever else faith is, it cannot be chronic certainty.[10] Jesus refuses to be contained by us. Even when he makes himself known, he remains strangely elusive, free of our attempts to constrain him, to shape him into our image, to enlist his support for our own cultural, theological and political agendas. And he rejects all our attempts to create an image of an unbroken, impartial and unambiguous God. Jesus will not have us live by sight. The constituents of Easter faith are wonder and surprise, risk and trust, voluntary vulnerability, and contentment with hints of truth and glimpses of glory. That walk to Emmaus could have left the disciples where they were – bewildered, resentful, and at a loose end. But a stranger drew near, and he walked with them, and won confidence enough to not only speak, but to be listened to, and on being asked to stay longer he welcomed their welcome, and shared their meal.[11]

And this brings us to another thing to notice: Recall the first meal in the Bible.[12] ‘The woman took some of the fruit, and ate it; she gave it to her husband, and he ate it; then the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked’ (Gen 3.6–7). And now Luke is describing the first meal of the new creation: ‘When [Jesus] was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognised him; and he vanished from their sight’. The resemblances here are startling. But what is more astonishing is that the couple at Emmaus discover – through the breaking open of Scripture and in the breaking open of bread[13] – that in Jesus the Christ, the long curse has been broken, that God’s new creation, brimming with life and joy and unforeseen possibility, has burst in upon the world of decay and death and sorrow.

But this table fellowship does not erase the memory of the past, so much as recall the way that in Jesus Christ the entirety of our history – with its shame, betrayal and failure – is gathered up in the reconciling love of God made concrete in Jesus Christ. So Rowan Williams notes how, for both St John and St Luke, the resurrection meals

echo specific occasions of crisis, misunderstanding, illusion and disaster. They “recover” not only the memory of   table-fellowship, but the memory of false hope, betrayal and desertion, of a past in which ignorance and pride and the rejection of Jesus' account of his destiny in favour of power-fantasies of their own led the disciples into their most tragic failure, their indirect but real share in the ruin of their Lord. Yet Jesus, even as he sees their rejection taking shape, nonetheless gives himself to his betrayers in the breaking of bread. The resurrection meals restore precisely that poignant juxtaposition of his unfailing grace and their rejection, distortion and betrayal of it.[14]

Here, Word and Sacrament redefine life for us, challenging our assumptions about Jesus, and about his message of radical love rather than revenge for our enemies, because it is only as we love that we see the nature of the God who is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked (Luke 6.35).[15] ‘Oh, how foolish … and how slow of heart’ the world has been this week to hear this message. To claim Easter faith is to claim the great alternative to the way of death. Easter faith recognises God’s passion for the life of every person threatened by death. And Easter faith participates in love’s process by getting up out of the apathy of misery and out of the cynicism of prosperity, and fighting against death’s accomplices – the economic death of the person we allow to starve; the political death of those who are oppressed; the social death of the handicapped and the refugee; the noisy death that strikes through tomahawk missiles and torture chambers; and the soundless death of the apathetic soul. This is the protest for life that the Word and Table call us to, and equip us for, and keep us from turning to death’s tools to accomplish, and from losing heart.[16]

The promise of this text in Luke is that Jesus will meet his beloved through the opening up of Scripture and ‘in the breaking of the bread’. There is no hocus pocus here, as if Scripture and Holy Communion are some magical elements by which we can manipulate God. Rather, there is only the promise of the God who in the freedom of love confronts us again and again and again in Jesus Christ, leading us into God’s future, and joining us wherever we read the Bible and share bread and wine together.

I finish with a poem:

We walked into the sunset

   brooding our deep loss,

sure that the best days of our lives

   lay dead behind us.

We talked around the rumours

   spread by our small group,

but feared to embrace the good news

   lest it be false hope.

A stranger then overtook us,

   travelling our road,

he unfolded the truths and loves

   our grief had betrayed.

Our hearts trembled within us

   for the faith we’d lost,

we reached an inn at sundown

   wanting to break fast.

We sat at table together

   to share cheese and bread,

he took up the loaf and broke it

   and out danced the dead![17]

References

Bartlett, David L. and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year A, Volume 2. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.

Brueggemann, Walter. Living the Word: How Do We Practice an Easter Life? nd [cited 30 April 2011]. Online: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj1105&article=how-do-we-practice-an-easter-life.

Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1978.

Buechner, Frederick. Now and Then. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983.

Buechner, Frederick. A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces. San Francisco: Harper, 1992.

Dawn, Marva J. '"Behold! It Came to Pass," Luke 24:13–35 – The Third Sunday of Easter'. Journal for Preachers 28, no. 3 (2005): 15–9.

Eddy, Corbin. Who Knows the Reach of God?: Homilies and Reflections for Year A. Toronto: Novalis, 2001.

Eliot, T.S. The Cocktail Party. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1950.

Evans, Christopher F. Saint Luke. London: SCM Press, 2008.

Girard, René. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.

Gordon, Jim. Emmaus and the journey towards a new wholeness 2011 [cited 31 March 2011]. Online: http://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/03/the-walk-to-emmaus-is-one-of-the-high-points-of-gospel-narrative-the-journey-the-lonely-road-two-bewildered-travellers-th.html.

Green, Joel B. The Gospel of Luke. Edited by Ned B. Stonehouse, F.F. Bruce and Gordon D. Fee, The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997.

Leith, John H. Basic Christian Doctrine. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Power of the Powerless: The Word of Liberation for Today. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983.

Prewer, Bruce. 'Emmaus', Pages 62 in Beyond Words: Reflections on the Gospel of Luke.   Melbourne: The Joint Board of Christian Education, 1995.

Resseguie, James L. Spiritual Landscape: Images of the Spiritual Life in the Gospel of Luke. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004.

Williams, Rowan. Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982.

Wright, N.T. Luke for Everyone. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

Yoder, John Howard. Nonviolence: A Brief History. The Warsaw Lectures. Edited by Paul Martens, Matthew Porter and Myles Werntz. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010.

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[1] Preached at Knox Church, Dunedin, 8 May 2011.

[2] The eruption of newness in which we find ourselves is itself birthed by an event entirely original and unpredictable and even inconceivable. The resurrection of the dead Jesus is an event which so shatters all of our explanatory categories that no one story, no one account, can adequately capture what it means. Whether we think of the story in John’s gospel about the resurrected Jesus penetrating locked doors, or of Matthew’s description of earthquakes and of frightened soldiers, of resurrected bodies coming out of the tombs and entering Jerusalem en masse, or this account in Luke’s Gospel. In contrast to Matthew and John, Luke has no resurrection appearance at the sight of the tomb. See Christopher F. Evans, Saint Luke (London: SCM Press, 2008), 901–4. The NT communities are straining to find words to adequately bear witness to an event about which words betray their limit. So Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1978), 107: ‘There is not any way to explain the resurrection out of the previously existing reality. The resurrection can only be received and affirmed and celebrated as the new action of God whose province it is to create new futures for people and to let them be amazed in the midst of despair’. But of the fact that the early disciples are amazed and eager to bear witness to the things that they had seen and heard concerning Jesus there can be no question. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the themes of perception and response play such a central role throughout Luke’s Gospel. And even in this chapter, we see that despite the clarity of Jesus’ prophecies, the empty tomb leads to mixed evaluations. It seems that it is only with the direct intervention of Jesus in the Emmaus scene that the possibility of truly seeing who Jesus is is strengthened. See Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke (ed. Ned B. Stonehouse, et al.; The New International Commentary on the New Testament; Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997), 841.

[3] David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, ed., Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year A, Volume 2 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 418. The French philosopher Simone Weil once said that ‘if the gospel omitted all mention of Christ’s resurrection, faith would be easier for me’. I think that Weil was challenging the common but shallow assumption that the resurrection makes life easier for those who believe. It doesn’t. For one of the realties that the NT paints is that the reaction to the news that ‘Christ is risen!’ suggests not confirmation and relief but disturbance and disorientation. Those first disciples were like the walking wounded after an explosion, and their subsequent witness was as overwhelmed as it was overwhelming. That’s why those courtroom-inspired ‘proofs’ of the resurrection are so misconceived and insipid. They not only fail to resolve the insurmountable literary and historical problems of the Gospel texts, but they turn the irreducibly mysterious into the demonstrable and manageable, as if the resurrection were under our control and for our consolation. See Marva J. Dawn, '"Behold! It Came to Pass," Luke 24:13–35 – The Third Sunday of Easter', Journal for Preachers 28, no. 3 (2005).

[4] On the journey metaphor in Luke see James L. Resseguie, Spiritual Landscape: Images of the Spiritual Life in the Gospel of Luke (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004).

[5] T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1950), 139: ‘The condition to which some who have gone as far as you/Have succeeded in returning. They may remember/The vision they have had, but they cease to regret it,/Maintain themselves by the common routine,/Learn to avoid excessive expectation’.

[6] Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), 77; cf. Frederick Buechner, Now and Then (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 86–7: ‘There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not recognize him … See [your life] for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, and smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace’.

[7] Corbin Eddy, Who Knows the Reach of God?: Homilies and Reflections for Year A (Toronto: Novalis, 2001), 142. Modified.

[8] To be sure, Scripture, like every gift of God, can be misused – whether to claim the superiority of one race or ethnic group over another, or to propagate anti-Semitism, or to sanction horrendous acts of violence and ethnic cleansing, or to justify the subordination of women to men and related acts of domestic violence. But received rightly, it is in Scripture that we hear the very voice of love. See René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 278: ‘Western culture as a whole, whether Christian or post-Christian, … is moving further and further away from Christ … It is struggling to rid itself of Christ for good. But at the very point when it is under the impression of moving in quite a different direction, Christ is to be found beside it, as he has been for a long time, “opening the Scriptures”’.

[9] See Buechner, A Room Called Remember 7–8: ‘[Christ] is our shepherd, but the chances are we will never feel his touch except as we are touched by the joy and pain and holiness of our own life and each other’s lives. He is our pilot, our guide, our true, fast, final friend and judge, but often when we need him most, he seems farthest away because he will always have gone on ahead, leaving only the faint print of his feet on the path to follow. And the world blows leaves across the path. And branches fall. And darkness falls. We are, all of us, Mary Magdalene, who reached out to him at the end only to embrace the empty air. We are the ones who stopped for a bite to eat that evening at Emmaus and, as soon as they saw who it was that was sitting there at the table with them, found him vanished from their sight’.

[10] Here I draw from Jim Gordon, Emmaus and the journey towards a new wholeness [2011 (cited 31 March 2011)]; Online: http://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/03/the-walk-to-emmaus-is-one-of-the-high-points-of-gospel-narrative-the-journey-the-lonely-road-two-bewildered-travellers-th.html.

[11] That Jesus longs to share his hospitality – the hospitality of the Triune God – with us there can be no doubt. That he does so through Scripture and Holy Communion is the testimony of a Church two millennia old. That the hospitality of God might be the hospitality of travelling strangers becomes the doorway to grace. And here in Luke’s telling, the willingness of this stranger on the road to enter the space of another – our space, our history, our limitation – recalls a level of trust and hope almost entirely foreign to us. That Cleopas and his companion welcome this stranger into their home expresses a deep vulnerability. And yet it is precisely in this moment of encounter, this moment of tangible love that embraces the brokenness of betrayal and the fragility of human hope, that the rays of Easter sunlight come burning away the frost that has rotted the human mind and made cold the human heart. And weary travellers are revived, and their hearts renewed.

[12] See N.T. Wright, Luke for Everyone (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 296–8.

[13] A key word here is ‘revelation’. ‘Revelation is’, as one writer put it, ‘the clue that enables one to put together the disparate experiences of life into a meaningful, coherent whole, to see a pattern and purpose in human history, to overcome the incongruities between what life is and what life ought to be’. John H. Leith, Basic Christian Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 30.

[14] Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982), 39–40.

[15] This point is well made in John Howard Yoder, Nonviolence: A Brief History. The Warsaw Lectures (ed. Paul Martens, et al.; Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 89.

[16] Jürgen Moltmann, The Power of the Powerless: The Word of Liberation for Today (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 123–6. For all kinds of reasons Luke’s Emmaus narrative of that troubled journey and its resolution, touches into those deep places of our human experience, those parts of our journey that are also troubled, from which we don’t emerge unscathed or unchanged. But in the breaking of bread, the Guest becomes the Host, our eyes see, and our souls are fed – and life is nourished again towards wholeness. So Walter Brueggemann, Living the Word: How Do We Practice an Easter Life? [nd (cited 30 April 2011)]; Online: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj1105&article=how-do-we-practice-an-easter-life: ‘The walk with the risen Christ is an ongoing process of having our anxiety transformed in faith, and our despair transformed in hope. While our anxious, despairing world is inevitably self-destructive, the church alternatively lives in buoyant faith and daring hope that issues forth in an emancipated life in the world’.

[17] Bruce Prewer, 'Emmaus' in Beyond Words: Reflections on the Gospel of Luke (Melbourne: The Joint Board of Christian Education, 1995), 62.