Sermon Third Sunday of Easter

Text: Luke 24:13-35

When I was younger my parents took me to an art exhibit downtown. Part of it were paintings by Beverly Doolittle. She is famous for her western paintings, especially of horses. One of my favorites was a very large painting that when you first look at it seems like a winter scene with snow and birch trees. Then as you look at it further, you see a wolf in the corner. Then as you look more, you see another, and another, all white and hidden among the rocks and trees.

It reminds me a bit of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. For the most part they all involve people not recognizing Jesus at first. The theme in many of them is that they require Jesus to identify himself first in order for him to be recognized. With Mary in the Garden Jesus needs to say her name. For the disciples in the room from last week he shows them his hands and side and says peace be with you, same with Thomas. And then our story from today's lesson. Two disciples are walking on the road to Emmaus, a village about half way between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean. They walk slow. The words we see are going, and when Jesus meets them it says he went with them. There is no sense of urgency, just a slow steady plod. When Jesus asks them a question they stop all together. I have the image of Charlie Brown in his sad walk. Shoulders turned head down, feet barely lifting. You can feel the pain they are going through in their very steps. So you would think that when Jesus shows up they would recognize him and be uplifted. But it seems as if they barely even see him, they don't see him as Jesus certainly. It is not until Jesus stays the evening with them, and breaks the bread with them that the are aware of who he is.

Why is this? It is often times explained as, oh, maybe he looks different. Maybe he no longer looks like the crucified man he was when they saw him last. Bloody and gory, and now clean. Maybe this made him look different enough. Or maybe he just held himself different than before, the weight of what he had gone through lifted. I don't know about all these ideas though. This is all on Jesus hiding himself though.

Pastor Carol Howard Merritt asks on the blog “The Hardest Question” What if it was not Jesus, but the disciples, and us who have the problem. She talks about her friend who killed himself, and still afterwards seeing his face everywhere.

I had been “seeing” Phil everywhere. Even though he had been dead for a month, I didn’t want to believe it. He committed suicide when he was so vital and strong. Phil was at the beating heart of every party, so I couldn’t quite imagine him, still and lifeless, in the bottom of that Jeep. When his life was cut short like that, it was so tragic that my head kept playing games on me. I would recognize him in a crowd moving onto the elevated train, or he would be standing at the back of the bus during rush hour, or he would be waiting in the lobby of our apartment building. Just as quickly as I would recognize him, his face would vanish and morph into another man’s visage.

In our text the two on the road walk slowly, plodding, Mary at the tomb is fearful and grieving, the disciples are hiding in a room grieving and fear for their lives. All of these appearances are to people who are full of grief, they have followed this man they thought to be messiah everywhere. They cannot recognize Jesus, because they cannot see him. They are so full of grief that they cannot recognize Jesus who they love.

Merritt continues with her answer.

… is this passage telling us something about us? Is it showing us the nature of grief and how disorienting it can be? Kathryn Johnston, a pastor at Mechanicsburg Presbyterian Church, explained her answer in a tweet to me this way, “When grief and the dark of the valley engulf you, you cannot even see Jesus in front of your face. He’s there. Just. keep. walking.”

When we need Jesus to reveal himself to us, he will show up, he will take our grief and enlighten our hearts.

At the end of the evening, the two travelers, hearts burning from what Jesus had told them, need him to stay the evening with them. They can not allow him to leave them. The Greek word used, which we see as urged him strongly, there means to "twist someone's arm," to "compel." And Jesus stays. They do not know it is Jesus, but the message he told them was so important they did not want to let it go and Jesus reveals himself in the ordinary breaking of bread. And in that breaking, and in that revelation they are awoken. It took nearly all day to reach Emmaus, they return to Jerusalem in what seems like no time. From plodding, to sprinting, all because of the breaking of bread.

It is such an ordinary thing, the breaking of bread. It is something done at every meal, not noticed as much since the invention of sliced bread, but in eating and sitting with each other.

Martin Luther's call story is one of those masterful, great call story. On 2 July 1505, he was on horseback during a thunderstorm and a lightning bolt struck near him as he was returning to university after a trip home. Later telling his father he was terrified of death and divine judgment, he cried out, "Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!" He came to view his cry for help as a vow he could never break. He left law school, sold his books, and entered a friary.

We want to find Jesus in grand lightening bolts like Martin. We want a grand sign given to us. But Jesus is in the small things. The breaking of bread. The cup of wine. The water of baptism. But, even more ordinary than that. It is in the nourishment we get from a slice of bread, the slacking of thirst from a cup of water, feeling cleansed by a shower. When I worked at camp we had an evening camp fire worship. As we were beginning it started to rain, but we stayed. In the rain I asked those gathered to remember their baptism. Each morning as you shower see the waters of your baptism, the waters touched by Christ wash over you. Luther said that we die daily to sin, and daily we are raised to new life in Christ. We begin each day at Good Friday. We begin at death, and we are given life everyday. Through simple water. It is in that ordinariness of life that Jesus reveals himself to us.

So often we do not recognize Jesus, because we have an image already in mind. We do not let Christ be the image he is. We place so many expectations on who Jesus is, and what he must be like, that we can miss who he really is.

He is the one who walks with us in the midst of our grief, when we find ourselves traveling, expectations dashed, overwhelmed by everything in life. He finds us when find that we are lost. When we are grieving he warms our hearts, and gives us nourishment. When we grasp and twist asking Jesus to come, we find out that he had been there the whole time.