On Easter Sunday morning we often focus on the Gospel stories surrounding the empty tomb and that is understandable. But that also means that we often neglect the other stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. I want to correct that deficiency this morning by reading to you one of my favorite resurrection stories from Luke 24:13-35. Listen for God’s word to you…
Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, 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.” Then he said to them, “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?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.
As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
I believe this account has at least four things to tell us about the risen Jesus and at least one thing to tell us about sojourners with the risen Christ. I have called the two disciples on the road to Emmaus sojourners because a sojourner is one who resides temporarily in a place. All of us who are followers of Jesus are sojourners. We reside in this world only temporarily. This world is not our home. And Jesus is leading us on to something better.
The first thing I see about Jesus in this story is that Jesus makes sense of things.
Here were these two lonely followers of Jesus. They had hoped that he was going to redeem Israel. But all their hopes were dashed when Jesus was crucified. That was the end. They might as well return to normal life and try to forget about Jesus.
Now a stranger meets them on the road of life. They are kept from recognizing him as Jesus. This is a common feature of the Gospel accounts of the resurrected Christ. There was a continuity, yet also a discontinuity, between the body of the resurrected Christ and the body of Jesus prior to the resurrection. At any rate, this stranger invites the disciples to pour out their hearts’ discontent in his presence. Once all their feelings are out on the table, the stranger begins to turn that table on them. He begins to show them how they have viewed the events of the last few days from the wrong end of the telescope. He shows them from the Hebrew Scriptures why the Messiah had to suffer these things before entering his glory.
Suddenly, things are beginning to make sense to these two dejected followers. Life was all a puzzle before this stranger came along. But now this stranger has provided some missing pieces to the puzzle that make sense of all the other disconnected pieces.
Lovers in the movies sometimes say to one another something like: “I never knew what life meant until I saw it in your eyes.” What is true in some small way between earthly lovers is supremely true of the relationship each of us can have with Jesus. In the risen Christ, even in the bewildering times, we can learn what life means.
C. S. Lewis once said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” (1)
On another occasion, Lewis modified that to say, “We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else.” (2)
That second statement corresponds to our relationship with Jesus. We don’t see him now, but by him we see everything else. Jesus makes sense out of life. In him we find satisfying answers to the deepest questions of life: Where have I come from? Why am I here? What has gone wrong with the world? Where am I going?
A second thing we see about Jesus in this passage is that he awaits our invitation. As the sojourners approached their home village, Jesus acted as if he was going farther. But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So, he went into the house with them.
At another time, Jesus awaited the invitation of some of his followers before he would enter into deeper fellowship with them. To the Church in Laodicea Jesus said, “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” (Revelation 3:20)
These two passages convey the twin truths that Jesus is the one who takes the initiative to seek a relationship with us, but once having taken the initiative he awaits our response. Like the Prince asking Cinderella to dance with him at the Ball, Jesus invites us to be partners in the Great Dance. But the dance does not begin for us until we have taken his hand.
Have you taken Jesus’ hand? Have you entered into the joy of the Great Dance?
A third thing we see about Jesus in this passage is that he is made known in the breaking of the bread. When Jesus entered into the home of these two sojourners, he sat at table with them and he played the host. He took bread, gave thanks for it, broke it and began to give it to them. Then the Scripture says that the eyes of these two disciples were opened. In other words, God gave them spiritual sight and they recognized Jesus.
Perhaps these two disciples had been there when Jesus broke the bread and fed over five thousand people. Maybe they remembered previous meals they had shared with Jesus, and suddenly, there was something about how Jesus broke the bread that caused them to recognize him.
This term, the breaking of the bread, becomes a technical term for Luke designating the Lord’s Supper, or what some call Holy Communion, or the Eucharist, or the Mass. I think Luke is trying to tell us that Jesus can still be recognized today in the breaking of the bread.
I had a professor in seminary whose name was Joel Marcus. He grew up in the Chicago area, knowing little about God and not caring for what he didn’t know. When he graduated from high school, he bought himself a motorcycle and traveled from the Midwest all the way out to Berkeley, California where he attended the University of California. As it happened, Joel’s roommate was always talking to him about Jesus and inviting him to come to church. Finally, Joel gave in. He went to church with his roommate one Sunday night. The church was serving Communion and as the elements of bread and wine were passed around, suddenly Jesus became real to Joel, and Joel committed his life to follow Christ.
Every time we come to the Lord’s Table it is an opportunity to recognize and truly commune with Jesus. In fact, every time we come to worship it is an opportunity to do that.
A mother was driving to church on Easter Sunday and telling her children the Easter story. “This is the day we celebrate Jesus coming back to life,” she explained. Right away, her young son piped up from the back seat, “Will Jesus be in church today?”
The answer is yes! Jesus is in church every Sunday whether we realize it or not. He promised, “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.” (Matthew 18:20)
A fourth thing we see about Jesus in this story is that he offers forgiveness. After the sojourners recognized Jesus and he had disappeared, they immediately went back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples about their encounter with the risen Lord. But upon their arrival they found that the other disciples knew about the resurrection of Jesus, for he had appeared to Simon.
Now Simon was Peter’s original name. And the reason I say that Jesus offers forgiveness is because Simon Peter had denied three times even knowing Jesus on the night of Jesus’ arrest and trial. Can you imagine Jesus appearing, after his resurrection, to the one disciple who had categorically denied knowing him in his hour of deepest darkness? Can you imagine how Simon Peter must have felt? In John 21 we learn of the opportunity that Jesus later gave to Simon Peter to reverse his triple denial and make it into a triple confession of love for his Lord.
I know we have all thought much this week about the fire at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. One of the amazing things to me about that fire was what survived. In one of the first, haunting, photos of the burned-out interior of the cathedral we saw the cross still hanging over the altar amidst the smoke of the still burning embers. Later, authorities revealed that the copper rooster from the top of the spire had survived.
Do you know why there was a rooster atop the spire? Many churches have the same symbol atop their spires. It is a reminder of the rooster that crowed on the night when Peter denied Jesus three times.
I find it striking, perhaps a message from God, that two of the key symbols that survived the Notre Dame fire were the rooster and the cross—a reminder of our sin and the forgiveness available through Christ.
I wonder: do you feel as though you have done something that God could never forgive? It is not true. If Jesus could forgive Simon Peter, then he can forgive anyone who comes to him in humble confession of sin. If Jesus could pray while he was on the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” then I think Jesus can forgive us too.
In A Forgiving God in an Unforgiving World, Ron Lee Davis retells the true story of a priest in the Philippines, a much-loved man of God who carried the burden of a secret sin he had committed many years before. He had turned away from his sin, but still he had no peace, no sense of God’s forgiveness.
In that priest’s parish was a woman who deeply loved God and who claimed to have visions in which she spoke with Christ and he with her. The priest, however, was skeptical. To test her he said, “The next time you speak with Christ, I want you to ask him what sin your priest committed while he was in seminary.” The woman agreed.
A few days later the priest asked, “Well, did Christ visit you in your dreams?”
“Yes, he did,” she replied.
“And did you ask him what sin I committed in seminary?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“He said, ‘I don’t remember.’”
Jesus died on a cruel cross so that we can be forgiven. God took our sin and suffering upon himself in Jesus on that cross. But the good news is even better than that: God promises never to bring our sin up against us ever again. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” (Jeremiah 31:34)
Now, not only do we learn a lot about the risen Jesus from this story, but we also learn something about sojourners with the risen Christ. Let me share this one final thought with you: sojourners with the risen Jesus walk toward the sunrise.
The village of Emmaus, to which these two disciples were traveling, was probably about seven miles to the west of Jerusalem. We know that it was nearly evening as they walked toward Emmaus because they made a remark to that affect to Jesus. So, these two disciples of Jesus were walking toward the sunset. How appropriate this was since they thought the sun had set on all their hopes and dreams!
But as Jesus made sense of the events of the last few days, the sojourners’ sunset road turned to dawn. As these sojourners walked east to Jerusalem to tell their friends what they had experienced of the risen Jesus, they were literally walking toward the sunrise.
It was said of the Israelites of long ago that they journeyed in the wilderness toward the sun rising. (Numbers 21:11) In the same way, the follower of Jesus is a person who walks not toward the sunset but toward the sunrise.
Catherine Marshall tells in her book, A Man Called Peter, of the death of her beloved husband Peter Marshall, former Chaplain of the United States Senate. She says that the words which gave her hope through all her ordeal of grief were her last words with her husband. She writes, “The scene was etched forever on my mind—Peter lying on the stretcher where the two orderlies had put him down for a moment, while the ambulance waited just outside the front door. Peter had looked up at me and smiled through his pain, his eyes full of tenderness, and I had leaned close to him and said, “Darling, I’ll see you in the morning.”
The summer after her husband’s death, Catherine Marshall returned to their cottage on Cape Cod. She said that as she stood looking out toward the far horizon, she knew that those words would go singing in her heart down all the years… See you, Darling, see you in the Morning…
That is the hope of every follower of Jesus. That is the hope that the risen Lord Jesus Christ can give. It is the conviction of every Christ-follower that we are not walking toward the sunset of life, but toward the sunrise. And in the dawn of that eternal morning we shall see again all of our loved ones who have died in Christ. Because Jesus conquered death, he will one day enable us to conquer death and he will give to us glorious resurrected bodies like his own. Sojourners with the risen Jesus walk toward the sunrise…
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