Third Sunday of Easter
April 26, 2020
1 Peter 1:17-23 …Love one another deeply from the heart.
Luke 24:13-35 Were not our hearts burning within us?
But before I go further down this Road to Emmaus, I must go back to our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Those of you who are trained to mind the gaps in our appointed readings might have noticed that the lectionary calls for only the first half of verse 14 from chapter two, and then skips to verse 36. Those of you who were listening last week might have noticed that the Acts reading called for verse 14a and then skipped to verse 22. Those of you who are trained to notice slander against Jews in our Second Testament might wonder, couldn’t our lectionary just have skipped all the way to verse 38? I wish it had. So I asked Luke Abdow to read it so that the lesson would begin with, “Repent and be baptized, for the promise of the Holy Spirit is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away.” Why include the libelous and offensive verses addressed to the entire House of Israel? In the first century, “The House of Israel” consisted of millions of Jewish people spread all around the lands occupied by the Roman Empire and beyond, in Northern Africa, Western Asia and Southern Europe – millions who certainly had never heard of Jesus. (By contrast, at the time Luke and Acts were written, there might have been a few thousand Jewish and Gentile Jesus followers dispersed between Palestine and Rome in small groups that became known as churches.) These Jesus followers were the fringe of the fringe.Why was Peter accusing his audience of being complicit in the crucifixion of Jesus, the gentle Rabbi from Nazareth? In this scene in the book of Acts, Peter was addressing his own people, and we are his own people, so we must hear the preaching of Peter being directed not at other people but at us. Peter was trying to shock people into waking up to complacent participation in the government’s execution of Jesus, and to resist the corrupting occupying power of the empire. This is a message as pertinent today as it was then. Notice, Peter is not saying, “you could have done it.” He’s saying, “you did it.” Now, I know that when I read stories or watch movies that have good guys and bad guys, I generally identify with the good guys. Even if I can manage an empathic response to the bad guys, I like to keep my distance. I do know that I am capable of doing bad things – by accident and occasionally on purpose, but never without a good reason of course, and my bad things are usually not really that big of a deal, you know? But then I think of that line in our prayer of confession (that we don’t customarily pray during Eastertide Eucharists) “We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” It’s that last part that stops me in my tracks and it apparently stopped Peter’s listeners in their tracks as well, because the story says that they were cut to the heart and asked what they should do. “Repent,” he said, and become completely immersed in the name of Jesus, (which is what baptism means) because a spirit of holiness is being offered to you as a gift – for you, for your children and for those who are far away. Peter knew something about the benefits of repenting. He was preaching about what he knew, testifying from his own experience.“Repent” is not something that is customarily shouted from the pulpit in Eastertide; it’s usually reserved for Advent and Lent. But when (or whenever) we wake up to the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf, it’s the right thing to do. And to my ears, the story of the Road to Emmaus is a story of repentance, of turning around, of taking a step in a different direction, toward God, toward Love, toward recognizing the risen Lord in the sharing of a meal made sacred. Biblical scholar Alan Streett explains that, like a Passover Seder, the Lord’s Supper in the first century was an anti-imperial, non-violent act against the Roman Empire. The form of early Christian weekly meals didn’t look any different from the outside when compared with the political and social function of wider meal practice in the Roman Empire. But on the inside they were acts of resistance in which they read letters and other words of encouragement, sang protest songs, shared a full meal (not just bread), and raised “a toast to a man whom Rome deemed worthy of a criminal’s death,” because of his radical teachings and behaviors. Streett says that, “by failing to recognize the anti-imperial nature of first-century Christian meals, the modern church has eviscerated the Lord’s Supper of its political significance…[doing] little to contest the policies of modern-day tyrants who rule their empires for the benefit of the few and to the detriment of the oppressed masses.”[1] When we prayed in the opening collect, open the eyes of our faith, I thought of our blindness with regard to our practice of the Lord’s Supper.The Gospels tell us that Jesus’ friends were terrified when he was arrested and sentenced. They fled the Garden of Gethsemane and found safe places in or near Jerusalem in which to hide out, with the doors locked because they were so afraid. According to some accounts, the disciples hid there for at least several weeks. (In Luke, the angels at the tomb said to stay in Jerusalem.) But on the third day after Jesus’ death, Cleopas and another disciple decided to leave Jerusalem and head to a village called Emmaus. Biblical scholars have gone to great lengths to locate a place that might have been the Emmaus to which Cleopas and his companion were traveling on that third day. Arguing on behalf of at least six different possible locations, scholars lay out possible time tables and distances, traditional sites and evidence of shrines, extra-biblical citations, archaeological evidence, etymological hypotheses, human walking speeds, even the possibility of (and I am not making this up) “responsive donkeys.” The argument goes that responsive donkeys could have helped the two on the road to Emmaus travel faster, get to Emmaus, share a meal, when it was almost evening, and get back to Jerusalem.
The arguments all focus on what a plausible distance would have been always remind me of Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail – you know, where the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is being debated throughout the movie. It’s funny that the plausibility of the literal existence of Emmaus is debated as if the geographical distance is the hardest thing to comprehend about this story. The word Emmaus is derived from the Hebrew word that means both “earnest longing” and “warm springs.” In other words, they were headed for earnest longing and immersion in healing water (otherwise known as a hot bath). Their repentance, I believe, was walking away from the locked room — the incubator of fear and shame and getting some fresh air. There’s also a literary reference to the place where Jacob awoke from sleeping in what he’d taken for a godforsaken place and exclaimed, “God was in this place and I, i did not know.”[2] I think Luke’s Emmaus reference is a literary one. He wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about the geography of Palestine anyway.
What is completely implausible in this story is not the physical distance that Cleopas and his companion could travel in one afternoon and after supper, with or without a responsive donkey. It is the spiritual distance they had to go to imagine that someone who had been crucified could be the savior they had been earnestly longing for. What is entirely unrealistic is that new life could come from a shocking and most humiliating execution. What is utterly senseless is any divine meaning coming from Jesus’ death. Cleopas and his companion’s journey through military and political oppression, through government and religious corruption, through grief and hopelessness, into offering hospitality to a stranger. They were grief-struck travelers who needed hospitality and comfort. And yet they risked offering hospitality, welcome, comfort and food and wine to a stranger and fellow traveler.
What is even more implausible in this story is that sharing a little bread and a little wine with the risen Lord could rekindle the flame in the hearts of two who were in desperate need of courage and compassion, and that with hearts set on fire, they could go back out to change the world. The next step of their repentance was, having recognized the Divine reality in sharing a meal, they returned to the scene of the crime – to Jerusalem — to tell the others. They were inspired to live into what one of my teachers called “obedience to our Lord’s perverse ethic of vulnerability and gain through loss.”[3]
Courage and compassion are what we need to return over and over again to a discipline of openness and exposure, especially when the stakes are high. And when we are truly following Jesus the stakes are always high and it is never safe, because the moral choices we make are on behalf of the most vulnerable. Living out discipleship of Jesus is costly. It’s demanding to relentlessly advocate on behalf of those who are lost, and least, and left out, and to acknowledge our own participation in evil, intended and unintended. It is expensive to forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive. It is costly to repent of our sins, to redistribute our wealth and dominance, to restore what is lost, to reconcile what has been shattered. And it is so worth it. It is how sorrow turns to joy. It’s how we know (and show) that the Risen Lord, the mighty power of Love, is among us even today. As Jan Richardson writes,
In the leaving,
in the letting go,
let there be this
to hold onto
at the last:
the enduring of love,
the persisting of hope
the remembering of joy,
the offering of gratitude,
the receiving of grace,
the blessing of peace.[4]