A live version of this sermon can be found here.
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Psalm 105:1-11
Acts 3:1-10
Luke 24:13-35
After I graduated from college, I was the only Southern Baptist who was studying for a Master’s degree in theology at the local Roman Catholic seminary. I took an unusual course while I was there that was simply titled “Death.” I remember almost nothing from that course, but I do remember an idea that comes from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger claimed that a unique characteristic of human beings is what he called in German Sein zum Tod, or, in English translation “Being Toward Death.” According to Heidegger, one of the things that makes human beings unique is that we alone of all other animals are conscious that we are someday going to die, and this knowledge functions as a kind of background awareness behind everything that we do. To be a human being is to be aware that we are “being toward death.” Paradoxically, the ultimate outcome of our living is that someday we are no longer going to be alive. We do not know when or how it will happen, but we know that death is inevitable. In the end, all life ends in death.
One of the most characteristic ways of dealing with this awareness of death is self-deception – to find some way of ignoring death, of attempting to stave it off, of pretending that death only happens to other people. Perhaps the three most typical characteristics of American culture today are money, sex, and power. If we think about it, each one of these is in its own way an attempt to deny the reality of death. If you have enough money, you can avoid all those things that might threaten you or cause you to fear for your safety – to fear death. In a culture in which people do not believe in much of anything beyond their immediate awareness, sexuality is the one thing that provides the closest thing to a kind of transcendent experience, something that can at least distract us from our eventual mortality. Power has lots of equivalents. If we don’t seek power over others, perhaps we seek status or a sense of identity as part of some larger group. But power, status and identity are all ways of saying “I matter. I’m important.” For now, at least, I can ignore the inevitability that some day I won’t matter. Some day I’ll just be one more headstone in the cemetery. Despite all of our attempts at denial, the one thing that we can be absolutely certain of is that all life ends in death – that death is the ultimate outcome of life.
And that is why the message of Easter is so radical. Easter is completely contrary to the one thing that we know with certainty is absolutely true. As we read the story this morning of Jesus’ appearance to two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus, we hear a radical claim, a claim that goes directly contrary to something we all know to be true. In what follows, I am going to look at three themes in this morning’s Gospel reading.
The first theme is that if there is a God who created the entire universe, a universe in which it is indeed true that all living things eventually die, nonetheless, it is also true that in this universe where death prevails, the God who has created this universe has also raised his Son Jesus from the dead. What that means is that it is not the case that all life simply ends in death. The Christian claim is not that life ends in death, but that life comes out of death.
The story of the resurrection appearance of Jesus to two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus begins with these two disciples going on a journey about seven miles from Jerusalem. Luke’s Gospel is full of stories of people walking, of taking journeys, but these two disciples are going the wrong way. They are walking away from Jerusalem. They are walking away from where Jesus had just been crucified. And they are walking away from where the rest of Jesus’ disciples can be found. The story is about a conversation these two have with a stranger, and in that conversation, it becomes clear why they are walking away from Jerusalem. In verse 17, we are told that they were “looking sad.” When the stranger asks them what they were talking about, they are flabbergasted: “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened?” Finally, they make it clear why they are sad, and what they were talking about: “About Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in word and deed.” They “had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” But that is not at all what happened, they go on to say. Instead, “our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death and be crucified” (Luke 24:19-21). We had hoped, they say. But those hopes have been disappointed. We had hoped. But now he is dead. We had hoped. But now it is all over.
We are so familiar with how the gospel story ends that we might be temped not to sympathize with their situation. But who can really blame them? They had placed great hopes in Jesus. He had done amazing things. He was the leader of a popular movement that had lots of followers among the ordinary people. But then the people with the real power – the chief priests and the Roman authorities – had done what those in power too often do. And now Jesus was dead. And dead in an utterly humiliating and definitive way. The Romans killed their enemies by crucifixion because it was such a horrific and humiliating way to die. Crucifixion was public because it sent a message that those in power had power, and those without power never would. The Romans used crucifixion to make clear that they had power over life and death, and death was the final answer to the question of who was in charge. What made things even worse was that the Jewish leaders themselves had collaborated with the Romans – the pagan occupiers – to do away with a leader of their own people, a Jewish prophet who was loved by their own people. The Jewish leaders worked with their Roman enemies to stamp out this popular movement among their own people.
So the two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem because their hopes have been dashed, and they do what people do when they lose hope. They pack it all in. They give up. The good guys lose. The bad guys win. And that’s just how the story always ends.
But that’s not how this story ends. Luke describes the appearance of Jesus to the two walkers in a casual almost off-the-cuff kind of way. “While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them” (Luke 24:15). Jesus is not dead after all. Jesus is alive! And he joins in this walk away from Jerusalem as if it is just a normal Sunday afternoon stroll. If these two are going to walk away, then Jesus is going to walk away with them!
So the first point of the story is that life does not end in death, but that death leads to life, and that hope does not end in despair, but that despair leads to hope. And the reason for this hope is that the God whom Jesus called Father is the Author of life, the Creator of the universe. If there is a God who created the entire universe, including a universe in which, yes, it is true that all living things die, this is also the God who can defeat death through a new creation! The fundamental gospel affirmation is not that Christians have a better or more coherent worldview or philosophy about the universe than unbelievers, but that Jesus of Nazareth has risen from the dead, and Jesus is alive today! That means there is a genuine alternative to the predictable human tendency to deny death – to pretend that it will never happen to us. That says something about each one of us who are followers of Jesus as well. If Jesus is alive today, then our own lives will not simply end in death. As God raised Jesus from the dead, so our own deaths will lead to new life.
That leads to the second of point of the Emmaus story: the theme of remembrance. The God who is the Father of Jesus is the God who raised Jesus from the dead because this is the way that God always works. This is just the kind of thing that God does!
When Jesus appeared to the two disciples, he could have just announced who he was: “Hey guys! Snap out of it! It’s me!” But that is not what Jesus does. Instead, he begins to refresh their memories, and to ask them some questions: “O foolish ones, and slow to heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into glory?” The next verse states: “Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27-28).
What kind of things did Jesus talk about? We can only speculate, but we can imagine because the entire New Testament is full of passages that point to Old Testament types that were fulfilled in Jesus. In Luke’s similar story in the book of Acts about the deacon Philip talking to an Ethiopian eunuch whom he meets while he was also traveling along a road, the two of them discuss the passage in Isaiah 53 about the “Suffering Servant.” We’re told that just like Jesus on the road to Emmaus, Philip opened up the Old Testament Scriptures to tell the Ethiopian eunuch about Jesus (Acts 8:26-40).
There are of course other passages in the Old Testament that talk about God bringing life out of death: God’s promise to give Abraham and Sarah a son in their old age (Gen. 17), God’s deliverance of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt (Exodus 12), Ezekiel’s prophecy that God would give life to the dead bones of Israel (Ezekiel 37), Jeremiah’s promise of a New Covenant (Jer. 31:31), Isaiah’s message of hope to Israel that their exile in Babylon was at an end (Is. 40), the promise of a future Son of David who would rule not only over Israel, but would bring peace to all the world (Jeremiah 33:14-26), the promise of a wolf living peacefully with a lamb, and a small child will lead them (Is. 11:6).
We can also look to the Psalm in this morning’s lectionary: “Oh give thanks to the Lord; call upon his name; make known his deeds among the peoples!” (Psalm 105:1). As Jesus told the two disciples on the Emmaus road to remember, so the Psalm calls God’s people to remember: “Remember the wondrous works that he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he uttered, O offspring of Abraham, his servant, children of Jacob, his chosen ones!” (v. 5-6).
We can know that God will act in our our present because God has acted in Israel’s past, and God has acted to raise Jesus from the dead. Jesus scolds the two on the Road to Emmaus for their short memories: “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” But Jesus also gently reminds them of what they have forgotten, and they say afterwards: “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to u on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24:25,, 27).
This is the second theme of our passage. When it seems that death has conquered, we need to remember. Bringing life out of death is the kind of thing that God does. We know this because he has done it before, and he will do it again. In our anxiety and despair at the inevitability of of death, and our temptations to hopelessness, we must not forget that!
That brings us to the third theme of the passage: the theme of seeing and not seeing. The theme of seeing and not seeing is a common theme in Luke’s Gospel, as in other New Testament books. In Mark’s Gospel, we are told that Jesus spoke in parables so that those those outside the kingdom would see, but not understand (Mark 4:12). In John’s Gospel, after Jesus heals a blind man, he says that he came into the world so that “those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind” (John 9:39). In Luke’s Gospel, each time Jesus predicts that he would die in Jerusalem, we are told that the disciples do not understand (Luke 9:43-45; 18:31-34). At Jesus’ crucifixion, bystanders and rulers mock him: “He saved others, let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, his chosen One” (23:35). Only the centurion recognizes what others do not see: “Certainly this man was innocent” (23:47).
The story of Jesus and the two disciples on the Emmaus Road is a story of seeing and not seeing. We are told that when Jesus meets the two, they do not know him “because their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (Luke 24:16). The disciples ask Jesus if he is the only stranger in Jerusalem who has not know the things that have happened in these days. But, of course, Jesus is the one person who not only knows the things that have happened, but understands what they mean.
The problem with these two disciples is not simply that in some miraculous way they were kept from recognizing Jesus. Rather, their behavior is contrasted with the women who were followers of Jesus. The story begins with the disciples walking away from Jerusalem. In the previous passage, we are told that it was the women who did not walk away, but stayed with Jesus after he died, and followed him to the tomb where his body was buried. It was the women who took spices to anoint Jesus’ body, and who found the tomb empty (Luke 23:55-24:10).
When the two disciples on the road explain to the stranger who Jesus was, their description is the same summary of the kerygma that Peter will later preach at Pentecost: “Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people,” that the chief priests and rulers delivered him to death. That it is now the third day since this has happened (Luke 24:19-21; cf. Acts 2:22-24). Everything the two recited had been predicted by Jesus, but like those who earlier had heard Jesus’ prediction of his own death, these two do not understand either: “We had hoped that he was the one who would redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). The two Emmaus disciples presume that Jesus does not know the meaning of these things. “Are you the only stranger who does not know?,” they ask (v. 18). Yet Jesus is the only one who does know.
Their disappointment and walking away, their inability to recognize Jesus, contrasts with their own account of the women who went to the tomb, who saw a vision of angels, and who said that Jesus was alive. But note how the two continue. Others went to the tomb, they say, and found it empty just as the women had claimed, but then the two continue “him they did not see.” The irony of course is that these two disciples are now seeing the very Jesus whom the women did not see!
Of course, the story does not end there. The rest of the story is about how the two come finally to see the one they could not see when he was right in front of them – to recognize that this stranger was the risen Jesus walking with them. How did they come to recognize Jesus? How did they come to see what they had not seen before?
First, their eyes were opened by the reading of the Scriptures. Jesus reminds them of what God has done in the past. Jesus’ life and death were the fulfillment of Old Testament promise. By exalting his prophet, God has reversed the usual story. It is not that life leads to death, but that life comes out of death.
Second, the two come to see, to know and to recognize Jesus, because they exercised hospitality. By opening their home to a stranger, they moved beyond their own sadness and their occupation with their own misery to look beyond themselves and their own cares. It is not through exercising power over others, but through becoming servants of one another that we come to know God’s presence in Jesus Christ. As Jesus said, “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40).
In offering hospitality to a stranger, the two come to recognize Jesus when he gave thanks and broke bread with them. Luke writes:.”When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them. and their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight.” At the conclusion of the story, the two tell those in Jerusalem “how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:30, 35).
There is certainly a foreshadowing of the Eucharist here, but there is also a remembering of Jesus’ fellowship meals not only with his immediate disciples, but also with strangers like Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10). By inviting a stranger into their home, the two were supposed to be the hosts who were offering hospitality to a stranger. Instead, Jesus becomes their host, and they become his guests. At his last supper meal, Jesus said that he would not share food with his disciples again until his kingdom came (Luke 22:16). Now the kingdom is present in Jesus’ resurrection, and he shares that first meal with two of his disciples. In allowing themselves to become his guests, the two recognize Jesus in a moment of transcendence that allows them to escape from their absorption with their own disappointment.
Third, the disciples come to know and recognize Jesus through returning to the community of disciples of Jesus. Through their sharing a meal with a stranger, the two have shared a meal with the risen Jesus himself, and their disappointment and doubt is turned from foolishness and discouragement to joy and hope. At this point, they return to Jerusalem to rejoin the community of Jesus’ followers. The seven-mile walk back is covered in one sentence: “And they rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem” (Luke 24: 33). When the two return to rejoin the other followers of Jesus, they hear “The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!” (v. 34). The lectionary reading ends at this point, but in Luke’s Gospel, the very next verse reads: “As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them, and said “Peace to you!” (Iv. 36).
This is one of those amazing Gospel stories that has just about everything we could want: it begins with discouragement and ends in hope. It begins with defeat and ends with a reminder of God’s faithfulness in the past. It begins with two who who were alone and isolated, and ends with an encounter with Jesus that returns them to the community. I could just end here, but I think I should at least offer a few final moments of reflection, which I will summarize with four short-word reminders:
First, Resurrection! The resurrection of Jesus is the alternative word that the church can offer to the pessimism of a contemporary culture that wants to pretend that death does not happen. If Jesus is alive, then the purpose of our lives cannot be to attempt to avoid death by the distractions of money, sex, and power or status. Rather, the resurrection of Jesus means not that death will not happen to every single one of us, but that death does not have the final say. Life does not end in death. Rather, because Jesus is alive, death leads to resurrection and eternal life.
Second, Remember! The church has the tools of the Scriptures to remind us of God’s past redemption, not only the Old Testament, but also, for Christians, the New Testament writings that remind us of how God has fulfilled his Old Testament promise in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that Jesus will return to renew all creation. What God has done in the past, he will do again because that is just the kind of God that he is! In moments of discouragement, we can also look back on moments in our own lives in which God has brought glimpses of resurrection out of death and disappointment.
Third, Transcendence! Resurrection looks to the future, and memory reminds of the past, but Transcendence speaks to the presence of Jesus’ resurrection in our own lives now. Through worship, through the sacraments, through prayer, the church has a space in which the transcendent regularly breaks through. As did the two disciples in Emmaus, we come to recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread.
Last is actually two words: Community and hospitality! In our moments of deepest despair, when it seems as if death will have the final word after all, we often have a tendency to hide away, to isolate ourselves, to walk away from Jerusalem, where the bad thing happened, to our own version of Emmaus. The community of the church provides an alternative and a corrective to our temptation to run away, to shut ourselves off from the threatening world. As the disciples returned from Emmaus to Jerusalem, so in returning to the church, we can find a community of hope that recognizes that life triumphs over death. If Jesus is truly risen and truly alive, then the church is his body, and we come to know and experience the risen life of Jesus through our fellow Christians who are his body.
Finally, one of the church’s most important callings is not to hide the light of resurrection life under a bushel, but to share the good news of Jesus’ resurrection with those who have no hope beyond death. The church has a mission to offer hospitality to strangers, to proclaim to those who believe only in the finality of death the good news that Jesus is alive, to speak with our words and live out in our own lives the message that our discouraged culture needs to hear above anything else. Life does not end in death. Death leads to resurrection!
Alleluia! Christ has risen!
He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
