Οn the road to Emmaus

 19/4/26                          1 Peter 1:17-23                             Luke 24:13-35                             Easter 3

Normally when I read this passage the question that niggles at me is how did Cleopas and Mrs Cleopas (perhaps) not realise it was Jesus they were talking to? It’s a mystery and a lot of the substance of the passage is about grappling with mystery - the mystery of the incarnation, the mystery of the crucifixion, the mystery of the resurrection - and looking forward to the mystery of the ascension - the mystery of God’s nature.

At the beginning of his confessions St Augustine is overwhelmed as he tries to describe God

Then what are you, my God? What are you, I ask, except God, the Master? Who is a master except - the Master? Or who is a god except our God? The highest, the most excellent, the most powerful, all-powerful beyond all-powerful, most merciful and most just, most remote and most present, most beautiful and most powerful, unmoving but ungraspable, unchangeable but changing everything, never new, never old but making all things new...You are always active and always at rest, gathering in but not in need, carrying and filling and protecting, creating and nurturing and bringing to fulfilment, searching though you lack nothing….he continues. In the hierarchy of things beyond our understanding the Cleopas problem is quite small beer.

So let’s look at what is happening in the reading. We’re going to follow the Cleopases on the way  to Emmaus on the first Easter Day - a seven mile journey - about as far as St Peter’s is from Burscough - and eavesdrop as much as we can. All we know about them is what we’ve just heard - they’re followers of Jesus, probably not of his inner circle - but nonetheless they are people who had heard him preach and have seen him deal with pressing crowds, with intractable illnesses, with aggressive questioning and because of what they know of him  they have trusted themselves to him. So despite the crucifixion they still hold he ‘was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people.’ but how then has it gone so badly wrong. 

From the passage it sounds as though after Good Friday a core of those who loved Jesus had gathered together to give each other support - what do we do now? - They couldn’t unknow what Jesus had taught them but neither could they make sense of it without him. 

So Saturday had been dreadful, but on that Sunday morning into that confused grief-stricken company news had come. ‘Some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.’  

Of course, we know what comes next in the story but none of Jesus’s followers did. For them everything was still up for grabs. The Cleopas’s haven’t seen Jesus, if Jesus has somehow survived - hooray - but what does it mean. ‘People we trust have told us something extraordinary,  something hard to believe something impossible to understand.’

 They have no idea what is going on. Which is why even though this is the the first Easter day and you might have expected them to be cheerful they’re not. It’s why ‘when Jesus asks them ‘What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad.’

Now we can eavesdrop “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. I have always thought it would be wonderful to have heard this. Jesus taking the Old testament prophecies, and explaining them.

It only occurred to me as I prepared this sermon that perhaps we do have hints. Luke’s gospel begins by telling his readers he has taken a great deal of trouble to check with eyewitnesses, and the most reliable people he could find that his account was as accurate as possible and in his first few chapters there are explanations of how OT prophecies point to Jesus.

Mary’s magnificat, Zechariah’s prophecy, Simeon’s  Nunc dimittis ‘for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles   and for glory to your people Israel.’Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.’

Jesus took words and ideas they knew intimately and reworked them. From now on they wouldn’t go to scripture to work out what the Messiah would look like they would go to Jesus and then see what the scripture looked like when lived out in flesh and blood. 

If we had been just a little behind them on the Emmaus road we would have seen  Mr and Mrs Cleopas transformed from the gloomy ‘Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?’ to renewed hope as the stranger spoke to them, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ We would have seen the spring come back into their step. 

But the penny didn’t finally drop till at the meal table he took the bread and blessed it. Then their eyes were opened ‘and they recognised him; and he vanished from their sight.  The unhappy confusion they had been left with that morning had been blown away. 

Jesus showed them that what happened to him had been the only way to bring about not just Israel’s redemption but ours too. Resurrection is the.  introduction of a Kingdom that starts by changing our hearts. Confusion became wonder. God in Jesus had gone far beyond anything they expected so That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

The important mystery this passage addresses is not why they they didn’t recognise him, it’s what Jesus resurrection means for us.

It isn’t just about one man miraculously cheating death. Jesus’s appearances aren’t just the demonstration of a successful escape act ‘Look the grave couldn’t hold me.’ Jesus had to explain God’s plan to to them before the Cleopases could know him 

The resurrected Jesus is our first sight of God’s pattern for all his people. The Jesus the Cleopases meet on the Emmaus road is God’s new order in flesh and blood - this new resurrection life is his promise to us. 

Resurrection and Ascension are the other side of the Nativity coin. At Christmas Jesus is born and all of God inhabits human form - now Jesus is raised and will ascend to God, and when he goes back to the father he doesn’t shrug off his humanity like an old set of clothes, he takes his full human identity with him ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.’  Jesus ascended is our man in heaven.

There is no escaping the mystery of our faith - God must be beyond our understanding, but in Jesus, his birth, his life, his death, his resurrection we discover that though God is beyond our understanding, he is not beyond our knowing and we are not beyond his loving and in that is our comfort, consolation and hope.   

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, ‘For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.’ We don’t need to understand the hows of God’s actions to receive his grace.

Fruitfulness at work

 18/1/26                  St Peter’s                                    Epiphany 2     

 Colossians 3:12-17                                                 John 1:29-42

The section of the Fruitfulness course we’ve come to this morning is ‘Making Good Work’. The author reminds us that work is part of creation, it’s part of who we are, and  although we live in a frustrating and fallen world and this affects everything we are involved in, we still can work in a way that brings glory to God.

That is true even for those of us who are no longer in paid employment. In our Gospel reading we see Jesus beginning to call his disciples - follow me - get to know me - learn from me - there’s no sense here or anywhere in scripture that this is a call that comes with a retirement age.

But what is our work - how are we to bring glory to God? In John’s gospel glory often means seeing the truth about who Jesus is. Our work then is to show as much of the truth about Jesus as we can by the way we live, it is to point to Jesus - it’s to show something of what the kingdom on earth looks like. 

This is not an easy work - Dorothy Sayers wrote ‘God underwent three great humiliations in his efforts to rescue the human race. The first was the incarnation, when he took on the confines of a human body. The second was the Cross, when he suffered the ignominy of public execution. The third humiliation is the church. In an awesome act of self-denial, God entrusted his reputation to ordinary people.’

And of course sometimes the church, made up of ordinary people, gets things disastrously wrong.

One of my first clergy jobs was as Chaplain to Birmingham Markets - based at St. Martin’s in the Bullring. Every year the Trader’s had a conference in Blackpool - and because it was quite unusual for a market to have a chaplain they used to take me along as a kind of mascot. One year I was chatting to someone who was very friendly who said he could never contemplate believing in God - he’d been to a church school - and had been regularly severely beaten - he wasn’t alone in this, it was what the priests running the place did. And of course he was right not to believe in a Jesus of brutality - for Jesus to be portrayed in this way is identity theft - if he had believed in that Jesus he would have been believing in a false God. What he had seen was the opposite of grace and compassion.

People look at the church and what they see there shapes their understanding of the nature of God.

I’m sure that what that trader went through would now be illegal, but that’s no help to him recovering a true sense of God’s love and care for him

The Greek myth of Procrustes is about an inn keeper who insisted that his guests fitted into his bed exactly - if someone was too short he stretched them on the rack till they fitted, if they were too tall he lopped off the extra bits and so he acquired their belongings. It didn’t end well for Procrustes, the hero Theseus was too much for him. 

None of us think the intentions we set out with are bad or unreasonable, nobody intends to be the villain. I imagine that the school the trader went to thought it was doing the best for its pupils  - they had an idea of the proper shape for a good christian child and believed if they weren’t quite right they could be beaten until they were a better fit. A version of Procrustes bed.

Of course their methods were wrong but so was the end they had in view. Beware of the idea that our faith is one size fits all. God meets us all differently and the response of each of us to God will differ. How could it be otherwise? No friendships are exactly the same, no marriages are exactly the same, each of the disciples had an individual relationship with Jesus - this variety is part of the glory of our faith. God has made each of us as individuals with potential to grow into a unique element in the mosaic which is the people of God.   

When I was at university the Christian Union had a network of prayer groups for different Missionary Societies which all tended to be rather niche and rather small. The one I went to was for Wycliffe Bible translators and there were three of us - one cold, wet evening - it was in Manchester - I hadn’t had a particularly good day and I was late for the start and arrived feeling particularly flat. The other two had started but when I got in they stopped for a moment to welcome me in and for some reason, that evening it was transformative for me. A trivial incident but fifty years later - though I have forgotten some details and I bet my friends don’t remember it at all, for me it is still  a moment of grace. God’s grace meets us at our particular point of need and enables us to see him more clearly. It nourishes our growth into the people he intends us to be - and the more we become those people the greater  the possibility that those outside the church will see something of the actual truth about who Jesus is.    

 Making good work Our job description then is to live and work in such a way that God is glorified, that the truth of what he is like, his grace, can be seen and known.

How do we fulfil this as individuals and as a church.  We aren’t just given a job description, In Colossians we also get a dress code Of course, God’s clothing is bespoke so not only is the way we clothe ourselves in the virtues tailor made to us, so too it will fit the person on the receiving end. 

Paul writes ‘As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, we have a high calling how can we live in a way appropriate to it

clothe yourselves with compassion, Compassion is a love that takes the initiative. It seeks to meet the need of another so they will thrive. How can we as a church put on compassion? 

kindness, what I received from my friends - how kind are we?

humility, does not mean  pretending to be rubbish, it means having a proper estimate of our own strengths and weaknesses. It means meeting others knowing they are as much the beloved creation of our Heavenly Father as we are.  

meekness, does not mean being a push over, it does mean listening to others and easing off on the assertiveness 

and patience. To quote the Psalm ‘Our times are in your hand’

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience

But we are not perfect and it is difficult - we are all equally important but uniquely made. If the church is to show God’s glory each of the facets that we all bring needs to have its place. Easy to say hard to do. Difference makes makes occasional misunderstanding inevitable

Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 

When the church is a community of forgiveness and reconciliation it is a powerful witness to what God is like. How can we make that an active part of church life.

Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.  

And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. 

And be thankful. 

 If we take these things seriously it won’t guarantee those moments of grace when we know God has touched us, but they will mean that they happen more often - that understanding that so much more has gone on in a conversation, or a casual meeting that we can only account for it by God’s active presence.

The course calls us to live and work in a way that brings glory to God.And that is 

as much about the relationships we build as the projects we accomplish.

It won’t always feel like work; often living a godly life - enjoying what God has given us, exercising the gifts we have in a way that is constructive will mean doing what we find most satisfying. And so His glory is seen.