Emmaus

The lectionary text for this coming Sunday is the story of the disciples walking with Jesus on the Emmaus Road. My friend Bryan has helped me to see how this story encapsulates the myriad ways we seek and are found by Jesus within our Christian Communities, the ways that Jesus becomes visible to us ... Discussing together, struggling with Scripture, struggling with recent events, hearing the story, breaking of bread. My friend Dave preached a sermon at NPTS that asked the listener to be curious about what was manifest when Jesus broke the bread, perhaps his wounded hands. 

It is also of course a story about the hiddenness of Christ:

As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him. 

As soon as the disciples recognize Jesus, Jesus disappears.

The elusiveness of the resurrected Christ makes it hard for me at times to figure out what it means when we Christians confess that we are an Easter people. There is something conceptually simple in “following Jesus” even if it is existentially difficult. Yet, this vision of having Jesus with us, but often hidden, seems more ambiguous and complex. More searingly, Jesus didn’t make an appearance to everyone discussing the strange things that happened in Jerusalem, to every downcast or confused pilgrim on the road.

The story of Jesus appearing to them holds with my own experience: revelation as a kind of peek-a-boo. Look! Jesus is here! Clearly, fully. Look again and poof he is gone.

Today is the third anniversary of my Dad’s death. At times in the weeks and months after his passing his presence with me seemed palpable. I am not meaning to import this into these stories of the post-resurrection appearances as Marilyn Robinson does at the end of her book Housekeeping. There is no Christianity without the reality of the resurrection, or, at least it isn’t a Christianity that I am interested in—there isn’t enough joy to account for the suffering. I don’t believe in any calculations that tell us there is. The people that do these calculations count their own blessing more fully in the ledger than other people’s unmitigated sorrows.

And yet, Robinson is trying to account for the very existence of longings, longing so universal in our grief, so universal in our reception of the Easter promise .... Might not there be hidden in these longings a promise ? A promise of fulfillment and restitution and restoration. Jesus ever so present in absence....

But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.