Sunday 12th April 2015

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, preaches. The reading is from Luke 24: 13-35. 

The Road to Emmaus 

(Draw a modest sized black dot, about 1-2” across in the middle of a large blank sheet of paper)

It’s not immediately obvious what that is but, to start with at least, I want you to think of it as representing the City of Jerusalem. It’s the place where Jesus came to in the last few days of his life and it’s the place where he was arrested and finally killed on the day we remember as Good Friday.

And our story today is about this (draw a shortish black line leaving the dot to the NE).

If this picture is a map, today’s story is about the journey made by two of Jesus’s disciples, on Easter Sunday, three days after Good Friday, from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus.  The story is recorded in both Mark’s gospel and the longer account we have just read in Luke’s gospel. We know one of the disciples was a man called Cleopas, the name of the other is unknown.  It’s often assumed it was another man but as far as I know it could just as easily have been a woman or possibly a child.  They were walking. The journey probably took them about 3 hours. They met another man on the road, they talked and at Emmaus the three of them had something to eat. Then later the two of them went back to Jerusalem.

(Write in “Emmaus”)

It looks quite simple doesn’t it? A city, a walk to a village and a meal. In some respects it could have been just a normal, normal day. We are not told why they were walking. It may well have been just to get away for a while, it may have been to visit friends or family, it might have been to deliver something or pick something up….

Anyway, the distance was 11 kilometres or 7 miles and walking it would have been very common in those days.

Hmmm, 11 kilometres or 7 miles.  I guess for that distance today we might get the bus or go by bike. If we are energetic we might even run it or we might possibly walk.

So, if you are the kind of person who travels a lot by bus, think of Camberwell to Croydon on the 68. That’s about how far it was. If you are a cyclist, think of commuting from Ruskin Park to the Isle of Dogs or perhaps a leisure ride at the weekend from Herne Hill Road to Richmond Park. If you are a keen runner it was just a bit more than a 10k training run. If you want to imagine how far it might be to walk, think of walking from Camberwell Green to the far side of Lewisham. That is the kind of distance it was.

So it was not an easy stroll but this was no three week spiritual pilgrimage into the mountains. You’d probably be quite tired when you got there, but you would have had some good time to think, however you did the journey.  It could so easily have been a normal, normal afternoon…..Like getting the bus from here to Croydon….

In fact, it was not, of course, a normal day at all. It had started, right at the very beginning, probably as badly as any day you or I have ever had or could possibly imagine. Can you imagine what these two must have felt like when they woke up that morning? Whatever their dreams, as they slept, the horrible reality of the last few days would have flooded back into their minds instantly as they woke up.  Just two days before they had seen one of their closest friends, their  teacher and leader, arrested, repeatedly mocked and beaten, unfairly passed around and tried by the authorities and then cruelly tortured to death in public.

Not only that, but he was a good man.  He did not deserve any of this at all. Everything he had said was good. Everything he had done was good. And he seemed to be unusually blessed by God. So much so that they had got to the point of putting all their hopes in him. They had started to build their lives around this hope that Jesus would be the leader who would make their country a great and a peaceful and a free land, a place where their children could have the sort of future every generation dreams about.

So, when he was killed, their whole world had just been cruelly shattered.  And I suspect that they had planned the walk the previous evening just to get out of the city and get away for a while.  

If it was today, it would have been started by a text wouldn’t it:

“Look, I really need to get away. Fancy a walk tomorrow to my place at Emmaus?  I’ve got some food there and a nice bottle of wine from last year..”

Or today, in our situation, we might actually text a friend, for example:  “Fancy a bike ride in the morning to the café in Richmond Park…..I have had a really, really awful week. Everything is falling apart and I just need to get away for a few hours…?”

Having said that, before they actually set out, Cleopas and his un-named companion did at least have a suspicion that something remarkable was going on as some of their friends, some women, had gone to Jesus’ tomb just as it started to get light and came back saying that the tomb was empty and some angels had told them Jesus was alive. Then some of their other friends had gone to the tomb and it was empty. So something was going on…

But I wonder if these two had even started to believe what the women had said? Maybe they were like the others who, just earlier in Luke’s gospel, are recorded as saying that the women were talking nonsense.  How could he possibly be alive? They had seen his battered and broken and pierced and very dead body just two days before. Utterly impossible….

That seems to make sense because when the stranger came alongside them on the road and started walking with them and when he asked them what they were talking about, the gospel says they stood still with sad faces, to tell him about the last few days…

So it is hardly surprising that as the stranger talked to them on the road it did not even occur to them to wonder if it might be Him. There were some stories, but that was the kind of thing you got from time to time when people got really tired or stressed or fanciful, just stories. People do not rise from dreadful death. Let’s get on with life…it is the only way now….let’s go  for a walk to get away, have some fresh air then a meal and a bottle of wine and try to work out how on earth we are going to go on from here…..

I think that would have been their frame of mind.

But as they walk the stranger moves things on a little further because he explains to them how everything in their faith and the history of their people should have prepared them for Jesus’ suffering and death, that it really was all meant to happen like this. And when they get to Emmaus they  are so engaged by what he has to say that they invite him in to the house to eat with them, their hearts already burning inside by this stranger’s explanations of the last few days..

And then, for me, something truly remarkable happens.

The fact is, Jesus had died on the cross and the fact is, this was Him walking with them and he was alive, as alive as if he had never actually been killed. He had died but he had shown himself more powerful even than death itself and he had come back from death and his body was healed. We often say he had defeated death itself, and he could walk those miles and talk and discuss as if death was just nothing at all.

I doubt there is a single event that is more astonishing in the history of the human race. I certainly can’t think of one, can you? Let me know please if you think you can.

But in a way remarkable thing, for me at least, is how those two people, Cleopas and his un-named companion, perhaps a man, possibly a woman or even a child, learned about it..

And here I need a little bit of help please…from three younger members of the congregation……first take one bread roll, ask one of them to break it in two and hand it to the other two….

That was it, no explosions in the sky, no choirs of angels, no voice from heaven this time but simply a man called Jesus, in a village three hours’ walk from Jerusalem, breaking some bread in two and giving it to his friends.  It was then that they realized who he was and then he left them…

[A modern day equivalent might be a stranger on the bus to Croydon sharing a piece of his sandwich with you.  It was just an ordinary event…….]

So, just to help the rest of us take that in for a moment, please would you two (the two playing the parts of Cleopas and his un-named friend) please take the other two small loaves of bread and break a small piece off and hand it out, to the people on the front two rows only, we don’t really have time to do the whole church. But I am going to leave all the remaining bread up here until the end of the service so if anyone else wants to come and take a piece please do so after the service and just think again what it must have been like for those two, to realize that Jesus was alive when all he did was break the bread and hand it to them…

And Cleopas and his friend were so excited and amazed, hardly surprising, they just got up and went back those 11 kilometers immediately to tell the people in Jerusalem what had happened.  Do you reckon they would have run part of the way at least?! I bet it did not take them as long to get back…. And by the time they got back Jesus had already also appeared to Simon Peter and the wonder of it all was just beginning to sink in.

It’s been sinking in ever since. Adults here today please ask yourselves again, what does the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth mean for me and children and young people here today I urge you, as you grow up, never to forget this about what we call Christianity. It is about a man called Jesus who died but that was not the end. He came back to life and he talked to many people when he did so.

There it is.  A city, an afternoon’s walk and the village at the end. But we are not quite finished because now I want to turn over the page and draw a new dot.

Draw……

And I want to think of the dot this time as us, you and me, and just ask ourselves for a few minutes about some of the journeys we and other people have to take in our lives:

Turn the paper and draw a new dot.

Some of the journeys we have to make are easy, some are hard.

Sometimes we or other people we hear about have to travel very difficult roads indeed.

We all one day have to travel the road that leads to our own death, but the resurrection of Jesus gives us great hope that death will not be the end. For me it is why, although I do not want to die, of course I do not, I do not fear death; This week saw the 70^th anniversary of the death of one of the martyrs of the 20^th century a German called Dietrich Bonhoeffer, part of the German resistance to Hitler and the Nazis and his last words are reported as being, “This is the end for me, the beginning of life”;

Men and women sometimes have to stare in the face the possibility of dying, in war for example, but again the fact of the resurrection of Jesus helps many face those risks. I know at least one soldier who took with him to war the words “No guilt in life, no fear in death, this is the power of Christ in me”.

Whole countries sometimes have to face the dreadful consequences of civil war and atrocities. Our Archbishop Justin is reported in the current edition of the Bridge church newspaper, as saying how he has seen God begin to heal deep and bitter divisions between communities caught up in civil war in places like Central Africa, Nigeria and South Sudan. I am sure he would say they do so partly as they understand the power available in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ;

Many, many people have to walk the road to suffering,….This is not an easy thing at all to come to terms with but I do believe that the resurrection of Jesus and his own healed resurrected body give hope that suffering in the end is not the final human experience. Jesus himself of course had to suffer enormously and Sidney Carter writes in that hymn we know so well “It’s hard to dance with the Devil on your back”, but still Jesus danced “as the sky turned black”;

Increasingly perhaps today, at least in some parts of our world, those of us who call ourselves Christians have to journey into a world and into places where our faith in God seems to mean nothing.  Well, the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is probably the most important of many reasons why I think our Christian faith will never die out and will continue to inspire generation after generation;

People often take a journey back into their past and some find it very difficult to come to terms with. But the resurrection of Jesus gives great hope that all that can be dealt with and the past forgiven.  All that pain and sorrow and sin is not the final human experience;

People often look forward on their journey into the future and live in fear of what the future might bring. I think the resurrection of Jesus gives great hope that whatever the future might hold, we should love by hope and not by fear;

And often of course our experience each day is of just making those normal, normal journeys, by bus to Croydon or Lewisham, by bike to Canary Wharf or Richmond Park, the training run or wherever we might go. And the message of the resurrection of Jesus is that he can and will be with us wherever we go, giving us new life each day, alive in us. 

In fact I would suggest that there is no road that we have to walk on where Jesus cannot appear and walk alongside us.

Wherever we have to go this week and in the weeks ahead, may we experience the risen Christ walking with us and recognize him for who he is.

Amen