Emmaus Is the Place
The place they were heading seems to have vanished and
left no trace. No one has been able to definitively identify the place. There
are some guesses, but the fact is that so little is known about Emmaus that it
may as well have not existed at all. It only rates a single mention in all of scripture,
and this passage is it. Luke says it is a village, but Strong’s concordance of
the bible says it “was not worth the trouble of having come out of the way to
see it.”
“Two of them were headed to a place called Emmaus.”
In Mark, the only other gospel that mentions this story about
the two travelers, we are simply told that Jesus appeared to two of them as
they were walking in the country. Luke may be sending them to a nondescript
place, but Mark makes it seem like they weren’t heading anywhere.
A pair of disciples, heading nowhere. Emmaus is the place
you go when you have nowhere worth going.
They’re walking, and as they walk they rehash the awful
events of the last couple of days. What else is there to talk about but the
unbelievable arrest, the excuse for a trial, the torture and finally, the
execution of Jesus?
Perhaps in the aftermath of all that horror, they thought
that they would get away to Emmaus as quickly as possible and keep their story
to themselves. To let themselves be swallowed by the silent obscurity of some
no-place where they didn’t have to talk about it or think about it anymore.
When a stranger approaches and asks them about their
conversation, they stop and just kick at the dirt a little bit, looking at the
ground with long faces. They don’t want to tell this man anything. Who knows
why. Maybe they don’t want to give this stranger the bad news that they’re
carrying with them. Or perhaps it was one thing to talk about it to each other,
but re-engaging the awful truth in order to share it with a stranger may have
been more than they were prepared to do.
Emmaus is the place you go when you’ve got nothing worth
saying.
The stranger presses them for the information that they’d
rather not share. Has this guy been living under a stone! How does he not know
what has happened! Even if he hasn’t been in Jerusalem recently, he certainly should have
heard at the very least that Jesus had been arrested!
So, reluctantly, they begin to share their broken-hearted
tale with the stranger. How Jesus WAS a prophet mighty in word in deed but how
the religious authorities had proved mightier. They had done unspeakable things
to him.
At last they get around to it. Not the admission of Jesus’
failure but their own. Without even realizing it, they confess that they’ve
simply given up. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel…” they
say. HAD hoped. They’re not hoping anymore.
Emmaus is where you go when all your hope is in the past.
Actually, they’re hope is worse than that. They’re hope
isn’t just in the past, it’s passed away.
We know this because they can’t recognize Jesus. Even if the
stranger looked like him, they knew that it absolutely for certain could not be
Jesus.
Not that long ago I was sitting in one of my favorite coffee
shops when a woman walked in who looked just like a member of First UMC of
Pottstown that I had known. I almost greeted her before I realized that she was
dead. So, there’s no way that woman I was looking at could be her. Almost her
twin, yes, but not her.
The two travelers could not recognize the familiar stranger
because they knew for a fact that Jesus was dead. It was perhaps the largest
and most inescapable fact in the world for them at that time.
They demonstrate that they know the story of Jesus very well.
They recite it to the stranger almost as if it were a creed. “Jesus of Nazareth
who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and
how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and
crucified him….”
They know the facts. But facts aren’t enough to restore
their faith.
And here’s an even more amazing thing. They’ve also heard
the account of the women, the news about the empty tomb! They know of the
rolled away stone, of the angels saying ‘he has risen!’
And here at the end of the day, in the face of the facts and
of the evidence, they still cannot recognize the truth when it, quite literally
stands before them. So here they are on the road to nowhere, with nothing to
say and their hope buried in the ground miles behind. Talking to a stranger.
The stranger intrudes on the silence of their newborn exile.
He wants to chat! They want to hide away and say nothing.
The chatty stranger is Jesus. We know that. We know that
because Luke tells us. But would we know if he hadn’t? Would we recognize Jesus? Do we recognize
Jesus when we’re en route to our own private Emmaus?
A few years ago, I went to Emmaus. There was a nearly two
year period when it seemed that my ministry career would end with a pfft, that
perhaps I had lost the ability to do this ministry thing at all, even as a
volunteer. I prayed harder than I ever
had in my life but there was silence at the other end of the holy hotline, if
you know what I’m sayin’.
I tried to envision a future that included ministry as a
vocation and every day it got a little bit harder to do.
What began as a simple crisis of confidence spiraled into something far worse. I
began to see myself as nearly worth less. I became depressed. A doctor used that
word on me, which made me more depressed. I felt like I was getting smaller,
diminishing, receding into obscurity. One of my many desperate prayers at that
time was this short verse of scripture from James chapter 4 – ‘draw near to God
and he will draw near to you.’ It didn’t seem to be working.
Have you ever been to Emmaus? I don’t mean the little town
25 miles north of here where there is a half decent coffeehouse with free
wireless internet! Not that place.
I mean the place those two travelers went. The place you go
when you’ve lost your way, when your hope’s been crushed, and when neither your
creed nor the evidence that is right in front of your eyes, convinces you that
hope is not dead. The place where you wrap yourself in obscurity and hopelessness
and really would rather not have anyone try to talk you out of it, thank you
very much.
Have you been to Emmaus?
Not everyone goes there. Some can endure and stay in Jerusalem. They never start
walking down the road away from hope, not even when all seems lost. But others
of us have been there, maybe more than once.
Well, if you’ve been to Emmaus or if you’re on your way
there, or if you’re there right now, I’ve got news for you. Good news.
Jesus has been to Emmaus too. In fact, though you may not
have recognized him, he walked with you the whole way.
And yeah, he may have had to speak truth to you once or
twice… “How foolish you are and slow of heart to believe,”… but that’s because
he wants to take those blinders off of your eyes. He wants you to realize that
he goes with you to even to Emmaus. All the way to Emmaus.
The two travelers didn’t recognize him, Luke tells us. They
walked that whole way together but didn’t recognize him. Maybe not, but they
felt something. They knew, even in their hopelessness, that this was no
ordinary conversation. They felt something that they had only felt when… nah,
it couldn’t be. Could it?
Interesting, isn’t it, that their eyes were finally opened
after they had invited this stranger in, even urged him to join them. When,
even in the shadow of their despair, they treated the stranger as a friend and
invited him to break bread with them, that’s when their eyes were opened.
Their eyes were opened when they stepped out of themselves
and their closeted, claustrophobic fear long enough to share their bread with a
stranger. After the frenzied activity was done, after the bible study from the
road was completed, they welcomed the outsider and realized that he was none
other than Jesus.
Emmaus is the place where Jesus himself meets you in the
midst of the deepest isolation and hopelessness, and breaks bread with you.
When I went to my Emmaus, I was stuck worrying about my own
future. That I would leave ministry, that I’d have to go back to work in the
marketplace that I had left behind so many years before, that I’d have to leave
the place I knew and had come to love, uprooting my family in the process.
Funny, all of those things I was worried about… they all did
happen eventually. I left a career in ministry. My family and I had to move
from our beloved Ohio
home and all our friends who had become so dear to us. Eventually I went back
to work in the public sector, and as you well know, I’m still there.
And Jesus somehow managed to meet me in all of those
situations. Somehow he convinced me to take my gaze off of myself, and when I
did I realized that he had been with me every step of the way. And he is with
me still.
I went to Emmaus and found Jesus there. Or rather, he found
me. This was the one hopeful ray of light in that darkness, but it was enough.
He will seek you and find you too as you head for your
Emmaus.
Whether you are one of the faithful, persistent souls who
keep on waiting in Jerusalem,
or one of those whose spiritual experience pushes you down the road toward a
shadowy no-place of disbelief and disillusion, the risen Jesus seeks you out,
finds you and walks with you.
He may, ever so gently, smack you upside the head. This is
only because you need it; you need to have your gaze redirected, you need to
see with eyes of faith again; to remember that your faith is not just for you
but for others, even for the helpful stranger who asks to share your darkness,
and most importantly, you need to remember that as long as Jesus has been
raised to life, then hope is still alive too.
Emmaus is the place where hope lives.
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