Luke 24:13-35

Scholars[i] confidently link an awareness of Christ-Presence to our need to be gathering for worship. We know that God is omnipresent – everywhere, all the time, like the air. But like the air that we need to engage with in order to benefit: open our airways, allow our diaphragms to draw down, fill our lungs, breathe. In order for us to recognize and so be impacted/ changed/ empowered by God’s enlivening, everywhere presence, we understand that we are also given to do certain things, and we glimpse some of those things in this text!

Luke tells of those two disciples walking the 7 or so miles from Jerusalem to their home in Emmaus, and that they were struggling. They’d probably gone to Jerusalem for the Passover and, after witnessing that triumphant entry on Palm Sunday, come to believe that Jesus was their long-awaited Messiah here to fulfil all their hopes for national liberation! But instead, their leaders had felt threatened and managed to get him killed, and with him died all their hopes. Why did he have to die? And what did all these latest resurrection rumors mean?

And then Jesus appeared with them, but they had no idea who he was. They just poured out their hearts to this curious stranger – all their deepest disappointment and disillusionment – exposing what Norval Geldenhuys [ii] called ‘the violent struggle between hope and fear that raged within their hearts’. Jesus’ response was to hear them, and then to reframe their experience in the light of scripture, bringing their perspective into alignment with how God would have them see: Those shocking events of Easter were in fact fulfilling a truth infinitely deeper than any superficial expectations of national liberation! …and they were blown away!

And so, when they arrived at their village, and it seemed that Jesus was to continue without them, they pleaded with him to stay longer. He did. And it was as he broke the bread at suppertime, that they recognized him.

I’m left especially curious about 3 aspects of this narrative.  

We’re told that they were together. It was as they were ‘walking and talking and discussing together that Jesus came near and was with them’ even though they had yet to recognize him. There is something essential about our gathering as opposed to our isolating![iii] Remember how he said it in Mt.18:20: ‘…where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there’. Unless there is something wrong, some mental health issue perhaps like a lurking agoraphobia, we all need community! Even the most profound introverts among us are suffering as a result of our enforced Covid-19 isolation. We need community for our mental, psychological & emotional health, and we need it for our spirituality. As it says in Genesis creation narratives: ‘It is not good for humanity to be alone’. Made in the image of a Trinitarian God who is always in community of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, so we too are most profoundly communal beings that come alive in our awareness of our holy communion with God, and with one another, and all creation – this mystical union of everything.

And so, it’s not a stretch for us to embrace how it’s as they came together in Christ’s name that Christ was with them, even though they may have known nothing of it.

But it’s not just that they were together: We’re told that their whole struggling to make sense of things – was brought into the light of scripture – God’s Word. This gift of God’s Word that we get to host, and to gnaw upon, sometimes to understand, mostly not so much, though always to be stretched and to be challenged by, always blessed by. I know the wisdom[iv] that speaks of ‘the finger that points to the moon is not the moon’, or as we could say here ‘that points to God is not God’, but still, scripture is what we are given as our primary and most powerful pointer!

We know that their encounter must have been life-giving for them, because they didn’t want it to end. As they got to their village and Jesus was about to leave them: “