May 8, 2011

Glynn Cardy

Easter 3     Luke 24-13-35

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The journey to Emmaus is a story of two of Jesus followers being transformed. Like other Biblical stories it was not the intention that it be understood as history. It was rather an archetypal account of how ordinary followers, people we haven’t heard of before, nobodies, could experience resurrection, and through that experience become somebodies.

Most religious traditions teach that God is encountered only when everything one thought one knew about the Divine has been doubted. As Mark Vernon says, this is why idolatry is such a heinous crime in monotheism. [i] It locks up faith in the cage of certainty. The evidence of texts, if evidence is what they provide, takes you only so far. What matters more is the personal experience of divine encounter.

The deus ex machina [the plot device] in this Emmaus tale is a materialising and dematerialising Risen Christ who is unrecognisable until the end. But the focus is not on this elusive being but on the transformation of the two travellers. The story suggests that we too can experience such transformation.

The fable begins with the two followers out on the road walking away from Jerusalem concerned – nay traumatized – by the crucifixion of their spiritual mentor, Jesus. Like us when faced with a crisis they are walking their grief and confusion somewhere, anywhere, away. 

They are not in a synagogue or a temple or a church, nor are they with a priest or counsellor or leader, they are simply together – two nobodies going nowhere, physically moving while trying to process and make sense of what has happened. This way of dealing with trauma is happening on a beach or park near you today. It is very ordinary.

They are joined by the Risen Christ disguised as a nobody. The Gospel, as succinctly summarised by Kurt Vonnegut, is about a nobody who was a pain in the neck to a lot of people who had better connections than he had. Those people dealt with this nobody by nailing him to a cross. But boy were they wrong about his connections! [ii] 

I think Vonnegut in his amusing style was saying that nobodies need to be treated like somebodies because in the end we are all somebodies and we all matter, even pains in the neck.

The travellers tell their new companion what’s happened and how they feel about it. Their hopes for messianic liberation have gone down the drain. The stranger though doesn’t rip open his shirt and say, ‘De dah! Here I am guys, with the scars to prove it!’ No, he steers them to their common spiritual resource, what we know as the Hebrew Scriptures. From that source they discuss and create interpretations that reshape how they understand their experience. 

The mistake is to assume that the Bible delivers certainties. Rather, at its best, it is a collection of imaginative stories for discerning the mystery of God. What it offers is like a window that opens out to another way of looking at the world.

Today we have a number of spiritual resources to help us in times of trauma. There are the texts of the major religions but there are also many other wellsprings, some that don’t even recognise themselves as such. Most resources aren’t written to address our specific needs, which are both common and unique. Many resources are redundant, filled with assumptions from a bygone age. Yet even ancient spiritual writings can be creatively taken out of their context and moulded to fit ours. This is what happened on the way to Emmaus.

We are later told that this process of appropriating and applying the ancient writings to their trauma evoked a burning in the hearts of the two travellers. There was something going on that was more than head knowledge. A healing flame had been blown to life within.

Part two of the Emmaus tale is arriving at an inn. Like with his pretence of ignorance on the road, the mystery Jesus man acts as if he is moving on. But as is the custom of the East they entreat him to accept their hospitality. In the Hebrew ritual of blessing food the travellers recognise who it is. At which point the author kicks the deus ex machina into life once more, and the stranger-come-Risen-One is no more. Poof! Gone.

Never underestimate hospitality, sharing food, grace and gratitude - for through such things can flow the power of life-changing godness. This story, written some 40 years after the crucifixion, is saying that it was the experience of the early Church that when they met to share hospitality and extend grace to each other the transforming God was in their midst. When they gathered as nobodies – men, women and children on the fringes of both religion and often society – in the presence of that accepting and relationship-changing grace they became somebodies to each other.

Likewise today when we gather in a service of worship, or for a potluck meal, or to protest against injustice, and the mix of giving, receiving, and mutuality are present, then so too is the possibility of rekindling the fires of one’s soul and the soul of our community.

I think Christians can be over-reliant on Jesus. People want to deify him, and extol his extraordinary unique characteristics. Certainly he is the front door through which I go looking for God. Yet here in this fable of two travellers is a reminder that the Church in the absence of the physical presence of Jesus continues on without him. 

Emmaus is about empowerment. The two dejected nobodies are not only cheered up but through the examination of spiritual texts and reflective doubting dialogue with each other, as well as sharing in hospitality, they are empowered to live as disciples. They become somebodies. This empowerment/resurrection thing can happen anywhere, with anyone, when experience is shared and grace is present. 

So, in our context, what does such empowerment look like today?

Will we dare to make comment this week that not only decries murder and its celebration but also murderous vengeance and its celebration? As our archbishops said, quoting Martin Luther King, “Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

Will we dare to criticise prioritising the bailing out of large companies [corporate welfare] over the necessary financial, educational, and social interventions to stem the tide of child poverty? As the Scripture says where your treasure is there will be your heart also. [iii] As a society we treasure the powerful not the powerless.

In our enjoyment of the royal wedding with its lovely hats, magnificent copes, fashionable frocks, young love, and antiquated liturgy let us remember that if His Royal Highness Prince William was gay and in love none of this would be possible in an Anglican church, let alone be presided over by a cleric. This is deeply and offensively unjust. Religion continues in sin.

Will we dare to question why New Zealand has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the developed world? Our prisons are populated by large numbers of young men and women who are mentally ill, are addicted to some drug and have limited life, education and work skills. We invest in building retributive cages to contain nobodies rather than building restorative communities to rehabilitate somebodies.

Will we dare to doubt the spin of the powerful and privileged?

Jesus was a nobody who after his death was made by the community of his followers into a special somebody. Yet his life story is that of a nobody who sought to treat everyone as a somebody. He dared to make a difference. At heart we are nobodies-made-somebodies who are commissioned to strive to make a world where every nobody is somebody. Will we dare to make a difference?

[i] Dr Mark Vernon has written and presented a two-part BBC series called ‘In Doubt We Trust’.

[ii] Vonnegut, K. Slaughterhouse 5, London : Vintage, 1991, p.89

[iii] Matthew 6:21