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.
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