Luke 24:13-35
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Where is Karl Rove when you need him? Reading the stories of Jesus’ post resurrection appearances during this year of presidential campaigns makes one wonder who Jesus had for chief political advisor and press secretary. Why weren’t they working on Easter Sunday afternoon to keep Jesus from making such huge mistakes? What, you mean he ran his campaign without professional staff? You mean he tried to defend himself in the court of public opinion by himself? I guess that explains why he failed to bus-in crowds with camera crews, and how he could have chosen two nobodies going nowhere for his debut as risen Lord. How is it even possible that two people – supposedly disciples – who spent all those years with Jesus didn’t even recognize him when he looked at them at such close range? Maybe they were the ones who always sat on the edge at meals, near the door where they could slip outside for a smoke when the discussions got long-winded. Maybe they always walked at a distance from the group, making jokes, muffling their laughter.
What a curious choice for Jesus to appear to such an unlikely pair. But maybe it’s only curious if we assume that the purpose of Jesus’ resurrection was to simply say, “See, I was right. I won.” Jesus had been stripped naked, humiliated, mocked and tortured to death at the hands of a military regime in collusion with corrupt religious authorities. This might seem like an appropriate time for a resurrected revolutionary leader victim to bring the bastards to justice – something a little more along the lines of direct action. Surely that’s what Jesus’ followers would have wanted – to take down the machine, to let the good people win over the bad people.
But that’s not what Jesus was about. Instead he tried to get the two people on the road to see that that whole way of looking at things had to be undone. The mechanisms of division, the self-deceptive and ferocious need to make ourselves out as innocent, the fear of a violent god who demands blood – all of that had to be undone. The One who had loved them so much has come back, not to make his enemies pay, but to love them more. The disciples eventually got it, but only after Jesus broke bread with them. Only then did they realize that as Jesus spoke to them, the truth was burning through and melting their hardened hearts. Jesus spoke the word to them and broke bread with them both so that they could be healed & so that they could be agents of healing for others.
In order for our lives to be healing journeys we need to experience the events of our lives in three distinct moments: in rehearsal and expectation leading up to the event; in present experience at the time of the event; and in remembrance after the event. In the first two moments our understanding is limited by certain factors. In rehearsal, understanding is hindered by an inability to believe that the event will really occur or that it will be so important. At the time of the event, understanding is hindered by the clutter and confusion of so much so fast. But when we experience the event in remembrance, the non seriousness of rehearsal and the busyness of the event give way to recognition, realization, and understanding.
In Luke’s Gospel the disciples experienced communion in all three time zones. Initially Jesus presented it as a foretaste of the Messianic banquet, though that went completely over the heads of the disciples in the moment. Jesus said to them: “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you I will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the reign of God… I tell you I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes & I confer on you a kingdom, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom.” (Lk. 22:15-16, 18, 29) Instead of pausing to wonder at the image Jesus shared about the future, they argued about which of them was the greatest.
The two disciples also experienced the breaking of bread as a present experience. Despite the clutter and confusion of everything going on in the moment, the two men reach out in hospitality, although their hearts are breaking, spirits flagging, and bodies worn. As Jesus prepares to walk on to his next destination, they invite him to supper. And, in this interplay of call and response, they know him in the breaking of the bread. But they can’t hold on to the Jesus they knew. As soon as they recognize him, he vanishes from their sight. They returned to Jerusalem, the place where the suffering they were trying to avoid was still taking place.
Mystical experiences come and go. Moments of assurance are fleeting. Inspiration is transitory. Health is temporary. But, God is in each detail, filling it with holiness and then moving on the next and inviting us to follow. Faithfulness is in the remembering but also in present movements that create new memories and new possibilities. As the Emmaus story notes, hospitality is the open door to creative transformation and an expanded vision of possibilities.
Finally, the disciples experienced the breaking of bread as remembrance: They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, opening the scriptures to us?” What did they remember? In addition to remembering Jesus’ teaching them from the scriptures earlier that afternoon, they were remembering the meal they had shared with Jesus 3 nights earlier in the upper room. Luke’s version of that story puts the argument about “which disciple was to be regarded as the greatest” right smack dab in the middle of the institution of the Supper.
What Cleopas and his partner remembered and maybe understood for the first time when Jesus broke bread with them in Emmaus was that the role of leaders in Jesus’ movement is was that of the servant. Jesus had said, “the leader [must become] like one who serves.” Disciples need to live in a way that subverts the normal order of things. The fact that the moment of recognition that induced memory happened at the breaking of the bread recalls that dispute about greatness. Jesus shouldn’t have been the host at the meal with the disciples. They had invited him to stay. Yet he broke the bread. The communion meal is meant to nourish disciples for this subverted manner of living – to continually feed them with the substance of the One who came to serve.
Communion is an event in three time zones for us as well. We remember “the night in which Jesus was betrayed.” Hopefully we are engaged enough in that memorial moment of worship to allow the Spirit to lead us into some new understanding of God, some new recognition of Jesus’ presence in our world, and some new realization about the way life works. We are also invited to experience the spiritual presence of Jesus at the moment in which we receive the bread and the cup. Chances are, our lives will be cluttered in that moment by worries that we will do something wrong in front of all these people, or spill the juice, or by the distraction of some thing we have to do this afternoon. Yet God can still break through. Finally, we’re reminded in the word proclaimed that this meal is a foretaste of a world in which everyone will be included at the table; in which no one will be treated as a second class citizen in any setting of their lives. But it’s hard to make the connection between something as routine as Holy Communion and something as radical and elusive as universal inclusion.
Yet it is exactly that alternative version of the story that we need to believe and hope for in order to be healed. Cleopas asked Jesus, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” The irony is palpable only to the reader. Luke is showing us how healing takes place. On the road to Emmaus, two disciples are fleeing the pain of Jesus' execution and the city in which it happened. A stranger approaches and accompanies them along the way. A dialogue ensues over the afternoon and evening that transposes an oppressive story into a liberative one. Far from being the only one who doesn’t know, Jesus was the one who did know exactly how to bring healing alongside the grief of the two disciples.
Healing occurs when those who are oppressed by some power that dominates them find someone to listen to their stories of oppression. When Cleopas called Jesus an ignorant stranger, Jesus didn’t defend himself from the label. Instead he temporarily accepted it in order to evoke their story. First he listened; then he helped them reframe their experience in a way that started to burn through all the layers of grief that were covering their hearts. He showed them that what happened was not a failure – neither theirs nor Jesus’ – but was actually a path of redemption.
At Immanuel we see many people who suffer from that same sense of being beaten down by failure, rejection, low self esteem, loneliness, bitterness and hopelessness. What grieves me as I listen to people is that so many add guilt on top of all that. They feel like they’ve brought it all on themselves. The burden is overwhelming. But as people have a chance to share their version of the story – even when it might be distorted – something begins to shift for them. They become open to hearing another way of looking at their experience, which can be liberating. Over time, and with patient waiting for grace's in-breaking, narratives of oppression, when shared over and over, are often transposed from darkness to light. The purpose is not to talk ourselves & others beyond pain and brokenness, but to understand them in a new way. As one writer put it, “In holy conversation that is convivial and collaborative, the particularity of our oppression stories come to be held in the chalice of a universal story, the sacred story of God's redemptive presence among us.”
This approach to healing is the biblical version of what is known in psychological circles as narrative therapy. It is the way Juan and Gloria work with people in Immanuel’s El Camino counseling center. The narrative therapy movement in which they have received their training was founded by a man named Michael White, who gave a conference in San Diego last week attended by Elizabeth, Judy, Juan, Gloria and Immanuel’s friend, David Marsten. Unfortunately, Michael White got very sick and had to cut the conference short. I learned just yesterday that he actually died this weekend, leaving his followers in shock like Jesus’ followers were so many years ago. But Michael White left a legacy of healing that resonates deeply with Jesus’ own approach to healing; and I am confident that his followers will carry his approach to healing forward just as Jesus’ did.
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