If the Emmaus road in Luke 24 isn’t my favourite Bible story, it’s in the top one. Partly, it’s because it appears cheerfully haphazard. No one knows where Emmaus is, or was. One of the two travellers doesn’t even get a name. As ever, the disciples haven’t covered themselves in glory. They have dismissed reports of the resurrection, and are headed away from Jerusalem, presumably to go back to their old lives. Jesus, unrecognised, appears beside them, walks, listens, explains, talks, stays at their request, and is finally revealed as he blesses their food.
But I love it because, far from being a random coda to Luke’s gospel, it summarises the Christian life. In fact, it summarises what we do every week and what we’re doing this Sunday.
Our calling is to proclaim the empty tomb with joy. But, like the travellers on the Emmaus road, we’ve fled with fear from the place of new life. We’ve ignored the voices of the marginalised such as the Holy Women who preach good news to us, and instead we’ve ploughed on in precisely the wrong direction. God, as always, takes the initiative and draws near, but we fail to recognise Jesus even when he’s staring us in the face. Jesus asks what things are burdening us and others, and hears our intercessions and prayers. The Word himself opens the words of scripture as we hear them read and preached. In sacraments like the breaking of bread, we glimpse God’s abundance and he nourishes the part of us that is for ever. We cry to the Lord when it seems darkness is closing in, and he tarries with us. Finally, our hearts burn with the fire of his Spirit, and we repent and change course.
Fear to joy; blindness to sight; unheard to understood; ignorance to enlightenment; despair to inspiration; hungry to filled with good things; disunity to community; lost to found. We need not put our hands in his wounds to believe: these things are the marks of the risen Lord, in whose company we walk, in these days of Easter, and forever. Alleluia.
Chris Braganza
