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Speaking on the Road to Emmaus

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My next official preaching date at church was due to be 21st April but I got asked to fill in at short notice for today’s service so I wrote up my notes on Sunday evening. The pictures I refer to are Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (that’s the 1601 version, which now lives in London, but I prefer his 1606 rendering) and a painting of my own. The message is based on a reading from Luke 24:13-35.

[Caravaggio image] Have you seen this painting before? You might well recognise it as Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, painted over 400 years ago in 1601 and now part of the collection of The National Gallery in London. I appreciate why it is so often used in art history lectures. It is a dramatic moment and shows off the artist’s skill with light, shade and perspective. For those with a modern taste for realism, it is a step forward from much of the other work of that period.

Let me confess though that I don’t particularly like it. I appreciate many of the details, like the scallop shell worn by the man on the right which, albeit anachronistically, suggests he might be a pilgrim, but I’m not convinced by the size of his hand in the background. More importantly, I don’t like the way he has shown Jesus – over-fed, beardless and, crucially, with no sign of the scars on his hands. I’ll talk more about those in couple of weeks when I look at the story of Thomas but please indulge me as I swap the picture to one of my own.

Emmaus Windows

This might not be to your taste and is certainly both much more modern and much less skilfully executed. I painted it on a creative afternoon at my previous church, when we were reflecting on and responding to the same passage we are considering today. As I round things up later, I’ll tell you a little more about it, including where I see Jesus in it, but first let us get our feet onto that Emmaus road.

Roads to Travel

I’m not going to cover the same ground as Vanessa, even though I’m standing in for her. You can find her talk through our website or our YouTube channel and that would certainly be worth doing if you want to walk with the passage a bit more. However, I will shamelessly borrow a little, particularly the idea that grabbed me most. That is the concept that Luke’s contributions to the New Testament, both his gospel and the book of Acts, make such frequent use of journeying stories that it has to be deliberate.

I’m not sure if I had come across that before but it only took a little searching to find some detailed articles fleshing out that idea more fully[1][2]. The nativity story has it’s own journey but, in Luke 3, John the Baptist draws on the words of Isaiah to mark out where Jesus begins his ministry: “A voice of one calling in the wilderness, Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.”[3]. Jesus moves from place to place in his ministry and a significant part of Luke’s gospel, roughly from chapter 9- 19, is taken up with ‘the journey to Jerusalem’ which culminated in the events of Holy Week and Easter.

Even the stories Jesus tell often involve travels. Probably two of the most famous are the “Good Samaritan” in Luke 10 and the “Prodigal Son” in Luke 15. Then, of course, the book of Acts is full of moving around – the faith moving out from Jerusalem both in the power of the Spirit and under the pressure of persecution, Paul meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus and many subsequent missionary journeys in which he is a prominent character but not the only person involved. Also in Acts, Luke several times describes the faith of the early believers not as Christianity but as “The Way”.

I’m sharing this with you as an idea I’m still exploring. I need to read back through Luke and Acts to weigh it up and consider the other gospel accounts. They all talk about Jesus moving from place to place so it may not be fair to think about Luke as being the ‘road movie’ gospel. However, the overall concept seems well-founded and we still use the metaphor when we talk about our faith – I expect some of you remember the tract Journey Into Life by Norman Warren, which was widely used when I was a teenager and is still in print today.

A Hard Road

Back to our passage, I don’t think Cleopas and his companion felt much like they were on a journey into life as they headed out of Jerusalem that Sunday afternoon on the road leading to Emmaus. I think Vanessa was a little hard on the pair of them – again, go and listen back to her talk and see if you agree – but they weren’t in a happy place. A couple of weeks before Easter, I got word that Andy, a dear friend of mine, had passed away in much less awful circumstances than the unjust trial, brutal execution and the mystery of where the body of Jesus was and I was deeply moved. I told a few people about it and found myself welling up. Even as I wrote up my sermon notes I found myself stirred and I’ve taken the precaution of having a hanky in my pocket this morning. Pray for me next Tuesday, when Jane and I go down to Oxford for his funeral.

Cleopas and his friend were downcast and I think I have an inkling of how they felt. We know from the Bible that was how their faces looked and we know they had been discussing ‘everything that had happened’. I think they were trying to make sense of it all and not getting very far. I think they would remember something wonderful Jesus had said or done and the floodgates would open. I expect they recalled a few things they regretted that they had done or left undone and feel broken again. And there is that crucial line Vanessa picked out in the middle of their response to this ‘ignorant stranger’: “we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel”.

Note the past perfect tense: we had hoped. Perhaps there is a possibility that they might hope again in the future? They were amazed by what the women had told them about angels saying Jesus was alive and they didn’t dismiss it out of hand. However, I expect they didn’t dare reach out and pick that faint flower, fearing that it too might die in their hands.

A Gentle Rebuke

Have you ever thought Jesus was a bit rude or unkind in how he replied to them? “How foolish are you and slow to believe…” Remember what you know though and what those two disciples are yet to realise. This is Jesus speaking, risen with healing in his wings (as Malachi described him[4]): in the words given to Isaiah, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out”[5]. I think his words are a necessary rebuke but also a gentle one and he didn’t leave them squirming on the hook. Instead, he carries on, “…slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” He wraps them straight up in the comfort of God’s plan over the span of history and the fulfilment that has happened – what a privilege it would have been to be part of that lesson.

If you’ve ever had a stranger join you on a journey, you sometimes find yourself looking for an opportunity to politely ditch them. Not here though. By the time they reached Emmaus they were urging Jesus to stay with him longer. I think Jesus often has that effect on people who love him!

Let me make a point of application here. If you are a friend of Jesus and find yourself upset, disappointed or completely broken, don’t be surprised if he joins you on the road. You might feel like your faith has withered away but he loves you: God chose you long before you loved him – even when you were dead in your transgressions and sins, as Paul reminded the Ephesian believers[6]. You might find his first words to you sound like a rebuke but hold just a moment before you respond in anger. Jesus might need to clean your wound with stinging antiseptic, like a mother tending a toddler with a grazed knee but, like that mother, he longs to sweep you up and hold you and restore you.

I hope you know that – it is the privilege of being a child of God – and I hope you can find ways of bringing your friends and neighbours into discovering that too. I’m pretty sure that Cleopas and friend were part of that early wave of mission, filled with the Spirit at Pentecost and going out in the power of the Spirit as part of the Way. Why else would Luke choose to tell their story rather than that of someone else if it ended “and then they just went back to their old lives”? If you want prayer because you feel broken or prayer because you want to be empowered to reach others then do stay around after the service.

The Picture

Let me just come back for a moment to this picture. It is based on one of the windows inside St Clement’s, Oxford, where I’ll be sitting about this time next Tuesday morning. The window is much less colourful but more architecturally sound than my painting suggests. I was thinking of Cleopas and his friend being deep in their blues, like the pane on the right. Jesus, if you haven’t guessed yet, is the bright yellow pane, coming up alongside them from behind. And the green pane in the middle? If you shine yellow light through blue glass, it will glow with green, a colour we associate with life springing up and which, in this precious season, we see more of every day. I believe that, even as Jesus approached his two dear friends, he saw not just their sorrow and confusion but also the restored hope he was bringing them. May his light shine through you and me too. Amen.


[1] https://www.affinity.org.uk/foundations/issue-67/issue-67-article-4-following-the-way/

[2] https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/2011/08/the-motif-of-way-in-luke-and-acts-part-2

[3] Luke 3:4

[4] Mal 4:2

[5] Isa 42:3

[6] Eph 2:1

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