Opening Our Eyes to the Ordinary—Luke 24, Easter 2-A, 5/4/14
Why didn’t they recognize him? When you the read today’s story of Jesus encounter with Cleopas and the other disciples on the road to Emmaus, thatquestion immediately comes to mind. They clearly care enough about Jesus to be distraught over his Friday fate, but when he’s walking beside them they do not know him. There are some plausible explanations for their blindness.
Maybe they didn’t know Jesus by sight. This was not the age of Facebook and Headline News; it was quite possible for someone to be influential and important without being immediately recognizable. Just as you can love a poet’s work without knowing what she looks like, maybe Cleopas had never met the one who had excited his heart.
Perhaps it’s a case of seeing someone out of context. We’ve all had the experience of saying, “That person looks so familiar, but I can’t place her.” Only later does it dawn on us that the woman sitting in front of us at the symphony is the bank teller who’s handled our deposits every week for a year. We don’t necessarily expect to see our banker at a concert and the road to Emmaus is not where they expected to see Jesus.More than that those bedraggled disciples had no reason to expect that they would see Jesus at all. He was dead and buried. The odds of Jesus showing up on that road were about as good finding Frank Beamer leading cheers at a UVA pep rally. We could forgive them for not recognizing him.
Another possibility is that Jesus simply did not want to be known until later. Our text has this tantalizing statement that “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” Who kept them? Why? God? Jesus himself? Perhaps Jesus was disguised. Maybe, like a prince pretending to be a peasantin a fairy tale, Jesus wanted to get a sense of how his death and rumored resurrection had affected those walking that road.
One final possibility is that they were blinded by grief. Anyone who has experienced the agony of intense, sudden mourning knows that an anesthetic fog descends upon you in those first days following a death, a numbness which dulls the searing pain, but leaves you only half aware of the world around you. Days later folks tell you of conversations you’ve had, but you have no remembrance of the encounters. It’s as though you went to sleep on one day and woke up a week later.
The truth is we don’t know which of these explanations, if any, is right. What we do know is that the disciples were crushed and despairing. Their lament says it all, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” You can hear their voices fade away into resignation. “We had hoped…” All their dreams of a better day, all their hopes of breaking the cycle of suffering, all their expectations that things could be better because of this special teacher are like so much dust blowing across the hot Judean landscape.
“We had hoped…” We can relate can’t we? We had hoped that this was going to be the marriage that would last forever. We had hoped that this job would be the one to give us a sense of fulfillment. We had hoped this therapy would make the pain go away. We had hoped that this time he would stay clean or sober. We had hoped that the SAT scores would be a little higher or the tenure portfolio a little stronger. We had hoped….but somehow hope is in short supply and God seems far away. Yet, as they walked that hot road, Jesus was right beside them. So the question we might ask of this text is this, “How do we recognize Jesus and receive his power in those moments when he seems far away?”
One thing this story suggests is that we pay attention, specifically that we pay attention to the ordinary. Part of the reason the disciples don’t see Jesus is that they could not believe God would come to them in something as ordinary as a roadway conversation. When we are in pain its only normal to be focused on what’s causing our suffering. When I smash my finger with a hammer, it’s hard to think about anything except mythrobbinghand. But my body is more than one finger and our lives are more than the things which cause us pain. As we cultivate the capacity to notice the blessings which come to us daily in the small things of life, we begin to see God’s presence in where it seemed absent. We begin to discern hope where there was none.
The church father Gregory of Nyssa, in commenting on the Lord’s Prayer wrote, “Let us remember that the life in which we ought to be interested is ‘daily life.’ We can, eachof us, only call the present time our own…Our Lord tells us to pray for today, and so he prevents us from tormenting ourselves about tomorrow. It is as if God were to say to us, ‘[It is] I who gives you this day [and] will also give you what you need for this day. [It is I] who makes the sun to rise. [It is I] who scatters the darkness of night and reveals to you the rays of the sun”
In our pain we may not hear an audible voice of god, but we may well hear the voice of a friend if we dare to reach out and ask for help. We may never find our dream job, but any task can be the source of blessing if we seek a way to do it in a spirit of service. When we assume everything which is truly necessary will be given, we begin to greet each day with the expectation that God will fill even the most mundane moments with holiness.
So, the first place to look for God when she seems absent is in the ordinary things of life. The other great insight of this text is that God is often found where God has promised to be, in the scriptures and in the sacraments. When Cleopas and the others look back on their experience with Jesus they realize that the great moments of insight came when Jesus was explaining the scriptures and when he took the bread and shared it with them at table.
Many of you have done some hiking. You know that when you get lost in the woods you should never just thrash about with no particular plan. No, you try to slowly backtrack until you see some sign of the trail, some blaze on a tree which tells you how others other have found the way before you. That’s what scripture is, not so much an answer book as a journal of how others have traveled the way of faith before you. In its pages you find stories of people who felt afraid and abandoned—but also discovered God’s care in their trials. When you feel lost it just makes sense to go to the trail which others have blazed before you.
We don’t know which texts Jesus discussed with those Emmaus travelers, but he must have helped them see that they were not the first to struggle with despair. He must have shown how even the Messiah had to go through periods of fear and confusion. He must have helped them see that there is light beyond any darkness. In short, he must have put their present struggle into the bigger context of God’s ability to sustain in the midst of crisis. So on those days when we struggle to find hope and direction we do well to return to the trail; that is where God promises to meet us.
Yet, it is no accident that the great “ah ha” moment in this story occurs as Jesus takes bread and shares it with them. In your introduction to worship class at seminary one of the first things you are taught is that presiding at the Eucharist involves 4 distinct actions: taking, blessing, breaking, and sharing. In using those words Luke is clearly evoking the scene in the upper room and suggesting to us that Jesus is found in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper.
Humans are sensory creatures, we experience things most fully when we can taste, feel, see, touch, and hear them. I can tell you that God loves you and is with you in all circumstances. But it is much more powerful when you come to this table and literally taste the presence of Christ on your lips. Our hearts grow faint and our faith may weaken; but at the altar God is as present as bread and wine. The Eucharist is not magic; it is a multi-level experience which makes the invisible visible. The Supper is the community of Christ made concrete, as children and seniors share a place at the table.
That is why we take communion to our sick and shut-it. Bread and wine become a tangible sign that God has not forgotten about those who are beyond these walls and neither has this community. In the same way, God comes to us who gather today. If God seems distant to you this morning, I encourage you to linger a just a little longer than normal at the altar. Allow yourself to taste and savor the presence of God.
In her book, Take This Bread, Sara Miles tells about her journey from skeptical atheist to Christian disciple. Drawn in by the soaringworship of an Episcopal congregation she found herself compelled to create a feeding ministry for the hungry in San Francisco. Looking back on her experiences she writes,
Religion for me wasn’t believing God struggled to communicate a preordained plan in clumsy symbols or…finely crafted sentences written down dutifully by the apostles. Instead religion was learning how to see. I was trying make meaning from things I hadn’t previously paid attention to—the events I hadn’t bothered to see and the people I didn’t want to.”
“Religion was learning to see.” On those days when Jesus seems absent, perhaps our challenge is not so much to try a little harder, but to learn to see. In the ordinary things of life, God comes to us. In bread and wine, God comes to us. In the challenge of giving ourselves to others, God comes to us. In scripture, in the sacraments, in service—God comes and if we are attentive our eyes will be opened and our hearts filled with the hope we may have feared was gone forever.