Mastodawn

“Signs”

The gospel for the Third Sunday of Easter this year may be a familiar one to some. Not only because it’s the gospel text one out of three years on this Third Sunday of Easter.

Also because it’s widely regarded as presenting a kind of model for how people come to faith in Jesus Christ. The plot of this story really lays out some big important steps in people’s, lots of people’s, journey of faith. So we may have been talked and walked through that sequence more than once.

A couple of points of information to begin with: first, it makes complete sense that these disciples are walking back to their village on a Sunday morning, after having spent Passover in Jerusalem. This would have been their first opportunity to travel, after the events of Friday, and then after the Sabbath, which began Friday at sundown and lasted through sunrise on Sunday morning. Because on the Sabbath, they couldn’t travel any farther than about 1 km, about 2/3 of a mile; any more than that would have been the kind of work that couldn’t be done on the Sabbath. So a 7-mile walk, like the one they’re taking to Emmaus, simply had to wait until after the Sabbath, just like the women who wanted to prepare Jesus’ body properly for burial, with spices, had to wait until the daybreak on Easter morning. That detail reminds us that these disciples, like all of Jesus’ disciples at this point, are faithful, Torah-observant worshippers of the God of Israel.

Second, we don’t know the identity of the other disciple …

Which is brilliant writing on Luke’s part, btw, because that anonymity makes it all the easier for us to picture ourselves as part of this story, on the road, having this conversation.

But … it has become more and more common for people [including people who are kind of famous in Christian circles, like theologian NT Wright, or prayer-movement leader and author Pete Grieg] to suggest that the other disciple would in all likelihood have been Cleopas’ wife … for several reasons, including Greek grammar, and some other textual evidence, in particular John 19:25, which names “Mary, the wife of Clopas” – which sounds a lot like Cleopas – as one of the women who stayed near the cross during Jesus’ crucifixion, supporting Mary, the mother of Jesus through that long, harrowing day.

And actually these new interpreters are not so much inventing this, as they are reviving an idea that was already circulating in the 2nd century.

And if that is what Luke, the author of this gospel, assumed we would think, it adds some extra literary depth to this story, because remember, Luke’s gospel begins with good news coming to the world through the husband and wife couple of Elizabeth and Zechariah, who become the parents of John the Baptist.

Now, with this story, the gospel concludes with good news coming to the world through this husband and wife couple, who meet Jesus together … on their way, at first without even knowing it, but then through the scriptures of Israel, and then in a special shared meal of bread broken by Jesus himself, when they see Jesus for the risen, living Christ he is.

And because that’s such good news, and they’re so overjoyed by this truth that’s been revealed to them, they can’t sleep on it, they turn around and run back to Jerusalem to tell their friends – a lot like those shepherds back in the Christmas story at the beginning of this gospel who went running all over Bethlehem – sharing this fantastic experience and the news that’s behind it: Jesus is alive! We’ve seen him! This changes everything!

That is, there’s a pattern here in this story, that Luke has purposely called to our attention. Which is the kind of thing authors do, on purpose, especially great ones like Luke: work recognizable patterns like this into their stories, to call our attention to the important points, to emphasize the themes they want to make meaningful for us.

And to build meaningful connections with other important stories we know. Because another commentator has pointed out that, assuming Jesus IS speaking with Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas on the road to Emmaus, it links all the way back to the beginning of the Bible, in Genesis, where there’s a story about a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, who have their eyes opened – but tragically, in a way that leads to death! So this conversation with God in the person of Jesus Christ reverses that earlier one, when this couple has their eyes opened in a way that leads to life! Hallelujah!

[It’s almost like someone planned it that way.]

Because the Bible IS literature, and it DOES work, and work on us, the way all great literature works – through the vivid, recognizable images and themes and patterns we find in it.

For that matter, this probably helps us understand how Jesus could have interpreted all the scriptures of ancient Israel as containing things about Jesus. [When there’s no specific mention of Jesus at all in those scriptures, as we may have noticed …] That is, by calling their attention to patterns and meanings, showing them ways to understand their familiar scripture in a new way, in light of this new gospel of resurrection that they’re only now barely beginning to grasp … showing them how what had just happened in Jerusalem could fit right into, and even deepen, the themes and patterns of the sacred scripture that they already knew – but would now be understanding in some new ways.

A lot like the way sometimes we’ll watch a movie, maybe, and we’ll think we know what’s going on, when suddenly right at the end there’s a twist in the plot that makes us reinterpret everything we’ve seen up to that point … we think back and realize … oh … so, when he went there … and then when she said that … they were already planning to … and kapow … we have a whole different picture of what’s been going on this whole time.

Which brings us around to the problem of recognition; of how people – how we – become able to recognize Jesus, the risen and living Lord Jesus Christ, when he is right there with them – with us.

One of the continuing mysteries at the heart of this story is how these disciples, Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas, who have spent so much time with Jesus, don’t recognize him when he meets them on the road.

[Although that might not be a deeper mystery, really, than the one of how we ourselves don’t recognize the presence of the risen Christ more often than we do, when we’re assured and when we trust that God is everywhere, and that Jesus Christ is always here in the midst of us whenever two or three of us are gathered in his name, and that the Holy Spirit accompanies us throughout our Christian lives.]

We read that “their eyes were kept from recognizing him,” and we’re probably inclined to think it was something in them that did that keeping.

One suggestion being, that they were still thinking of Jesus through an image they had in their mind’s eye, of the way they’d seen him last: that dreadful vision of their friend and teacher suffering through the crucifixion. We know even from our own less dramatic everyday experience, say from visiting our friends and relatives in the hospital or the nursing home, that people look different on bad days and good ones. So they had to be led past that image, and into the living present.

Another suggestion, is that their expectations kept them back. Who could expect something as unbelievable as meeting Jesus, alive, to happen? Who can expect to experience something that radically reorganizes their understanding of reality? So, Jesus himself had to lead them to see all that, first as possible, and then as real, and then as actually happening to them …

And what that seems to mean for people like us, that is, for every Christian in every generation after that first one – like us, who never had the benefit those first Christians had, of having at least met Jesus … before, in the usual, material, face-to-face human way – is that if even Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas had to be led, taught, to recognize the presence of the risen Christ, that must be at least as true for us.

And that Luke, in this story, and particularly in the way he’s constructed the plot of this story, has given all later Christians a pattern of telltale signs that can help us recognize an encounter with the risen Christ for what it is.

Because, we think, Luke wants his readers to see how their own road, whatever that particular literal “road” turns out to be, is likely to have a lot in common with that “road to Emmaus.” Wants them to see a pattern, of recognizable experiences, that people have, over and over again, as they come to the point where “their eyes are opened,” and they know for themselves that Jesus is alive and on the move in the very world they themselves are living in. Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas in this story are standing in, in a way, for … all Christians, in every time and place.

Standing in, first of all, when Jesus listens to them, hearing them out, with compassion, coming along side them when they are hopeless, crushed by loss, and defeated, meeting them with a word of hope offered to their hearts. [So that, whenever someone listens, with care and compassion … a best friend, or a relative, whoever it is … that listener starts to look a lot like Jesus.]

And then when they notice the heart-warming effect scripture has on them … an experience we, too, will have shared whenever we’ve been touched deeply by a word or phrase or story. Even, sometimes, one we’ve heard over and over before, but suddenly see from some new place in our lives, or from a new perspective. Whenever we feel the truth, the beauty, the astonishing promise, the depth … scripture shows us …

As Henry and Richard Blackaby and Claude King, the authors of the book Experiencing God, remind us, experiencing scripture is an experience of the presence of God.

And then, they offer hospitality – offer someone they are thinking of as a stranger in need something he needs, a meal, shelter …

And when they do that, it brings them to that moment of crystal clarity … when they recognize that it’s Christ himself, alive, who breaks this bread and shares it … [which we ourselves no doubt recognize as the pattern of our sacrament of communion, in which we recognize the spirit of Christ nourishing his people, and also sending us out to offer that sustenance to others.]

There’s a pattern in all this: a pattern of seeing or sensing something Christ-like … in a moment of love, of care, of kindness, of open-hearted connection … even including when we notice that arising in ourselves … leading to the recognition, and the joyful awareness … oh, yes, Jesus really is alive, we’ve seen …

A pattern we are being led to recognize, over and over again, whenever and wherever we encounter those telltale signs of resurrection life …

Image: “Open book 1,” by Alina Daniker alinadaniker, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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