Easter Evening
Curiously, Luke’s account of Emmaus only occurs in the Lectionary for Easter Sunday in the Second Service in the Year of Mark. If I could have only one Desert Island Service it would be one specially designed for the evening of Easter Day, telling the story of the journey to Emmaus and what happened on arrival.
For all the cinematic qualities in Mark, the structural coherence of Matthew and the expansive style of John, it is Luke's storytelling that I find most persuasive, beginning with the gripping opening dual births of John and Jesus and ending with Emmaus and the Ascension. In our Reading, with supreme artistry, Luke gathers all that we have heard and seen from the moment Jesus descended into Jerusalem on the donkey into what we would call a Service of Word and Sacrament.
It is a pity that Luke cannot be more specific about the apparently extensive teaching - beginning with Moses and all the Prophets (v17) - which Jesus gave on the Emmaus Road: the Evangelists frequently refer to Jesus teaching from the Scriptures but the only really sustained passage is John 5-7, and so although we hear quite a lot of snippets from Isaiah and other prophets we lack the sense, which Jesus surely conveyed, of Messianic trajectory beginning with Daniel and Second Isaiah and culminating first in John the Baptist and then in Jesus himself; he might, too, have enlarged on the wider theme of liberation first set out in Exodus and finally realised in his own broken body; and, surely, as well as explaining the Scriptural root of his mission of salvation for the Jews he might also have explained the extension of the Old Testament promise to include Gentiles and to encompass not only the forgiveness of Sin but also encompass earthly liberation from tyranny and want.
As Easter children we do not have the disadvantage of the surprise attack, of being scripturally ambushed as were Cleopas and his companion, rather we have our Scriptures and 2000 years of interpretative tradition both to travel our Emmaus Road and to sit at the Emmaus table. We cannot know what the travellers knew before but they certainly cannot have been afforded the vast library of materials which has, in various ways, integrated the Old Testament, their Scriptures, with the New Testament, whose content they only knew in part from witness and conversation. Clearly what they lacked in structural appreciation was more than compensated for by excitement. Nonetheless, we should appreciate the novelty of their situation and, conversely, the danger of our situation becoming too staid, lacking Easter excitement.
And then came the house Eucharist which presents us with an interesting question: if these two people recognised Jesus "in the breaking of the bread" did that mean that they had witnessed him breaking bread in a special way before his final meal or were they at his final meal? If the first, then his followers at the Last Supper should have been more ready for what he was saying and doing, if the second, then all the traditional pictures of Jesus and the Twelve round a table need to be re-considered. I have long thought that the second option is more than speculative because of the way in which Jews have always celebrated Passover as families and that the artistic tradition relies far too much on Christian patriarchal practice which developed once the Eucharist migrated from private houses to public buildings. Either way, the action of Jesus in breaking the bread was as revelatory as his teaching.
Never was there a better time than now, and never a more necessary time, to draw nearer to Jesus in prayer and study and, at the same time, to put our fragile lives into perspective, for we are not just put on hold, we are holding on; and as we cannot enjoy our customary - sadly, often routine - Eucharistic access, we need to re-ground our physical and spiritual experience in Evangelistic soil. I should not say for a moment that we should not be frightened, for survival is in our DNA but I do say that in our best moments we resist the genetic impulse to compete for resources and to defend our hoard. In our best moments we know both that the earth as we experience it is superficial and that we are capable of striving to know better the purposes of creation. In our different ways we see that our existence as children of God can be seen as a fruit: on the outside there is the shiny and enticing outer layer of our experience which generates great joy but which is also subject to hurtful bruising; inside there is the fleshy, firm but pressurable, elastic-like layer of Scripture and doctrine; and, finally, at the centre is the paradoxically solid kernel of salvific and Sacramental mystery.
A community which revolves around the shiny surface will always be subject to massive mood swings from exultation to despair. A community which evolves around Scripture and doctrine will always be restless and subject to self-delusion. But a community that revolves around mystery will always preserve a sense of proportion and humility. All three on their own are not enough because we were made to experience the joy and despair of human living, to do our best to understand God's will through the Scriptures and to labour in the area of doctrine; but, most of all, we were made to worship and love, neither of which requires complex justification. Our cultural and religious fault is that we have taken on too many of the trappings of the scientific method in which we now know we have placed false hope and have wrongly thought that the words we reduce can tame God to be in our image. If we are to retain any sense of balance between the three layers of our existence we have to cede dominance to the seed.
Paradoxically, in a time when we are forced to live apart, we need to think about the ways in which we realise community, less in similarity of taste and outlook, or even of doctrine, and more as people who hold in common their reverence in the face of the divine mystery. It is our different but deeply intense reverences which make us what we are not an adherence to any kind of social or doctrinal code, community because none of us is strong enough to stand alone in the face of divine mystery as it is too incomprehensible for us to support in isolation. We need each other to provide the mutual support which any relationship with the incommensurate requires. Community is, if you like, our way of pooling necessary inadequacy.
This is the time to study and pray so that we will be more vigorous and loving members of the community of incompleteness when we are able to meet once again in the House of God.