Luke 24:13-35
Last week, we heard the story of Evidence-based Thomas. I chose to focus on the story as it related to questions of canon, what becomes authorized, and what happens to unauthorized voices.
I did this partly because these are questions we should and do ask as progressive adherents to a two-thousand year old religious tradition, one that rests on the shoulders of approximately twelve centuries of yet another tradition.
I also did it because, quite frankly, the post-resurrection stories are a mess, and that is saying something, as the gospels are not exactly a model of clarity and consistency to begin with. It is no wonder that Christians spent centuries in bitter conflict over who Jesus was, what Jesus was, and why he mattered.
Let’s just flash back to last week for a moment. The entire point of the story is that Jesus has been physically resurrected from the dead, that it is the same body that spread mud on the eyes of the man born blind, the same body that was nailed to a cross and pierced in the side. Yet, Jesus appears twice in what we are told is a locked room. What?
Beam me up, Scotty! We have a contradiction.
Earlier, also in John, Jesus appears to Mary on Easter morning, but tells her not to “hold on to him,” because he had not yet ascended. Yet, just a few verses later, he cooks bread and fish on the beach, and presumably has breakfast with his disciples.
But the real pickle comes with today’s story from the Gospel According to Luke. On the day that the resurrection is discovered, the day we have come to call Easter Sunday, two followers are on the road to Emmaus, and are joined by Jesus, who they do not recognize.
Tradition would eventually give us an inconsistent list of twelve male disciples, in accordance with Hebrew numerology and the number of Hebrew tribes, but there were always more people in the inner circle than that, including important women like Mary Magdalene.
Jesus Incognito explains to his fellow travelers on the road to Emmaus how the events of the last week in Jerusalem, the crucifixion and the resurrection, fulfill the scriptures, starting with Moses the Liberator and Covenant Maker, and proceeding through the prophets.
We’ll never have absolute certainty as we have no documents in his own hand, but we can reasonably conclude that there is historic memory here, that Jesus really understood himself as playing a role in a divine plan for his people, and possibly even leaning into the universalist aspects of pre-Rabbinic Judaism, a divine plan for all nations, as the scriptures had promised. Pre-Rabbinic Judaism was universalist, or at least evangelical, actively seeking converts. This only changed decades after Jesus, and under great duress.
Christianity today is often this free-floating cure-all for our existential angst, Jesus as a sort of Harry Houdini emerging from the grave, with most of the story as window-dressing on the modern brand of consumerism, WWJD bracelets and “Footprints in the Sand” plaques, but the tradition gains spiritual depth when we understand it as growing out of a particular historic context, understand the religious innovations that produce someone like Jesus, understand his own religious innovations, for in understanding that religion has always changed, always evolved, always innovated, we make room for our own holy and communal creativity.
There is a lesson in the fact that they preserved uncertainty in the canon, failed to beat out contradiction, though that might be a lesson for another day.
There is a lesson in the fact that Jesus never presents himself as a free-floating cure-all for human anxiety, but understands himself as deeply grounded in Jewish tradition, as in relation to an ultimate other that we call God, that he also called Abba, which is to say “Pappa.”
Jesus is not fabricating a new religion like con man and science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, possibly other religious founders as well.
Jesus is re-weaving an existing story, an ancient tradition, lifting up bright threads that flow throughout the garment of faith and culture. It is a faith of the improbable, a stuttering fugitive in Egypt, the youngest son out in the pastures, an un-credentialed rabbi from the boondocks.
Peter uses the strategy of locating Jesus within the Jewish scripture tradition in the Acts of the Apostles. Philip uses this strategy when the Spirit directs him to meet the Ethiopian eunuch, a court official, on the road. Paul uses this strategy in his authentic letters, for his Gentile audience needs the Jewish context.
Each of these evangelists sees Jesus as playing a pivotal role in God’s plan for the Jewish people, and again, for the nations, which is to say for everyone else. God so loved the world, not God so loved the Jews only.
God’s saving grace is no longer limited to the children of Abraham.
Walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus takes maybe three hours. When they get there, Cleopas and his unnamed Jesus-following companion invite the stranger, who they do not recognize, even after a couple of hours of conversation, to stay with them overnight, for it is nearly dusk. Jesus does so, and when he blesses and breaks the bread at table, they suddenly see who he is.
All the talking in the world did not open their eyes. They did not experience Christ until he actually did something. They experienced him in blessing and breaking bread, “panis” in the Latin that would dominate the Western church for centuries.
Then it gets a little “woo woo” again, Jesus vanishing into thin air. Scotty apparently got the Transporter fixed on the Enterprise. Though the warp drives are still jammed, and if you push it, “She’s gonna blow, Captain.”
Did I mention the whole bodily resurrection is a mess? Its like a choose your own heresy adventure.
But here’s the thing. Real Christianity still locates itself through story. I still stand up here and yap week after week, though the stories I tell don’t stop in Jerusalem in the year we call 30 of the Common Era, or with Paul’s presumed execution in Rome. Our stories don’t stop when the biblical canon is closed with the apocalyptic fever dream of John of Patmos.
Our stories include authorized voices and unauthorized voices, Francis of Assisi and Huldrych Zwingli, John Robinson blessing the departing Pilgrims and offering them wise counsel, rebellious Presbyterians in Elmira, and countless days spent at the Community Kitchen, for Christ is in the doing, in the breaking of the bread, all my talk meaningless unless our Christianity is practical, unless whatever you call your approach to the mysterious and holy moves from your head and heart to your hands.
And maybe, there is yet one final lesson to be learned here on the road to Emmaus, a lesson that shows up way back in Genesis, when Sarah and Abraham offer hospitality to three strangers, as was the custom of that age, strangers who turn out to be divine, whether angels or a foreshadowing of the Trinity. A lesson that shows up in Matthew 25’s Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, when the damned are condemned because they failed to see the Master in the hungry, the poor, the imprisoned, maybe not pantheism, many gods, but panentheism, God who is in the world, heresy or not, God who is the stranger walking beside you, heading off into the dangerous night until you set an extra place at the table, share a meal together, and there she is, for just a moment, God with us.
And now for real heresy… Switching science fiction universes, the Disney series “The Mandalorian,” set in the Star Wars Universe, follows a member of a warrior people as he goes on the run, protecting a child who is sensitive to the Force. In his Mandalorian culture, references to the Law are followed by the same stock phrase: “This is the Way.”
Before the Jesus movement was given the name Christian, it was called “The Way.” May this be our Way: that we are grounded but not imprisoned by a living tradition, a story that stretches from Cleveland to Leiden to Zurich to Jerusalem to Egypt and to Ur, that we live that tradition through love in action, and that we always have eyes to see the holy in unexpected place.
This is the Way. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
O Holy Mystery,
Giver of All Life,
it has been another week of violence,
of hatred masquerading as Your will,
of Pulp Fiction scripture
and mentally ill midnight posts.
It is enough to take our words away.
And while the world focuses on the Strait of Hormuz,
the murder continues
in Gaza and the West Bank,
in Ukraine and Sudan,
in Myanmar and Haiti,
in our own communities
where a gun is easy to find,
while treatment for mental illness and addiction is not.
So we pray.
And then we do.
Fill us with holy hope,
as we organize and mobilize,
as we work to save human lives
and lives not so human,
the living forests and the seas and all that live therein,
the life of the planet itself.
Remind us of your story,
of calling a people from bondage,
of sending upside down prophets
to condemn the powerful
and bless the weak,
of an Empire’s executioners,
and an Easter victory.
They experienced Jesus as still present
in ways we cannot prove
and may never understand
but few can doubt that he is with us still
in every people that gathers in his name
to break bread
to welcome the stranger,
so we pray as he taught us saying:
Our Father…