Resurrection on the road to Emmaus

 

Sermon for Easter III, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY

Text: Luke 24:13-35

If you haven’t  caught on by now, Easter is about resurrection and new life in Jesus, and we spend a fair amount of time working on what that means for us. But Jesus’ resurrection was not the first time that resurrection had happened. The world was resurrected from the great flood, as told in Noah’s story of building and saving animals on the ark. The Hebrews were resurrected from slavery to a free people that they were when Joseph gave his family land in Egypt to escape a famine. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, after Lazarus’ sisters begged Jesus to come save their brother from death. Now, these examples don't make Jesus’ own resurrection any less important or lessen its impact on the world. It does mean that God has shown the world God’s power, and that life is not linear, where we mark a birth, experience life following birth, and finally death following life. The resurrection reminds us that life is cyclical, where new life follows death, and we see and experience the power of resurrection throughout history. It is a powerful experience when we live it, and when we recognize it in our lives, and in the life of this and other communities. 

The resurrection examples I just gave may not be obvious at first glance because we think in terms of our time, linear and finite. But God’s time moves differently, and not at our pace, or in a straight line. The Hebrews fleeing Egypt struggled to see their history in God’s time, and Mary and Martha had only a hint of what God’s time was like when Jesus raised their brother from the dead. The resurrection remains a holy mystery to us as we work hard to see it as God sees it, part of a much larger story of life. I touched on this time of resurrection this past weekend, when I was at my mother’ house for the last time, removing what I wanted to keep from her home of 30 years. I stepped out of that house for the last time early Sunday afternoon, and it was difficult to do. It was difficult because I am still grieving her death, and I struggle with what comes next. Her house was the center of our family, where we all gathered, mostly at Christmas. That center is no longer there, and has to reform somewhere else if we are to stay together as a family. In my linear way of thinking, something must happen next. But in God’s time, that something has already happened, as it has in the past, and God is waiting for me, for us to discover it. We have to know where to look in order to see it, and I am still searching. It is a hard thing to do, and may have to wait until I am ready to see it.

Sometimes we see resurrection in hindsight because ultimately we look at the present through the eyes of the past. In reality, the past doesn’t dictate the present, or the future. This, I think, is what is going on in Luke’s Gospel reading this morning. Cleopas and the second disciple are still struggling with the events of the past three days: a sham trial, a wrongful conviction, death by torture, and then discovery of an empty tomb. Everything is different for them because of what had just happened. And then suddenly here is Jesus, out of context of his death, on the road with them to Emmaus. Unrecognized, he shows them how everything that was written in the past has led them to this moment, putting it all in perspective for them in the present. Then Jesus does something very ordinary, very familiar that happens every day, and in this small daily cycle of breaking bread, the two disciples see the larger cycle of life, and death, and life again as they recognize Jesus. They understand that Jesus’ death three days ago did not lead to death forever. They understand that a new center of the family of disciples and apostles was going to be reformed after Jesus was gone. From that one simple act came a dramatic shift in how they understood how God was moving in the world, and now they had hope for the future. 

 

The disciples seemed to be ready to see what God had done, and appeared to be ready to move forward in their lives. The news they brought to the other disciples in Jerusalem was a confirmation of what Simon had experienced, and there was clarity to the question I’m sure they were asking: “Now what?” I’m sure that they had been, and would be walking around Jerusalem, saying to one another, “He was standing right here when he healed that blind man. Do you remember? And he was right here at this place when he told a lame man to get up and walk. Do you remember?” I doubt that the gathered faithful followers had moved through their grief already and welcomed the news that Jesus was, in fact, still alive only three days after his death. We don't move through grief that quickly. That would have been too hard for them to hear, so I think Luke compressed the time in this part of his Gospel to help us understand what the resurrection means to us today.

When we break bread at the altar during the Eucharist, we have an opportunity to experience what the apostles experienced at Emmaus. I’m not aware that anyone has seen Jesus when they come up to receive the host; at least I haven’t. But that simple act, in God’s time during worship, that we experience week after week has in it the potential to encounter the risen Christ and an opportunity to have our lives changed by that encounter. We can be resurrected again and again as God acts in us through the Advocate, the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised us before he was crucified. That means, though, that we have to see our lives as God sees them, that is circular and cyclical, where we have more than one chance to grab onto the power of the Spirit. We have to see ourselves as God sees us, that is with endless patience and love, waiting for us to understand how we have been resurrected. When we think we have lost everything and life as we knew it has ended and when we have emerged from the grief of loss, we discover life again. We find it unexpectedly as we walk away from our former life. Christ has risen. So will we.