Jesus himself came near – 2 May 2014, Easter 3

Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him... [Luke 24:15-16]

This story of the encounter on the road to Emmaus is exclusive to Luke, and it remains one of the most tantalizing of the gospel narratives.  Two of the disciples were walking seven miles to Emmaus – that’s just over 11 km, about the distance from Algies Bay to Warkworth (if you don’t divert to Charlies).  Jesus comes and walks with them.  They don’t recognize him.  And yet one of the major points of this story is to convince Jews especially that the risen Jesus is really him, flesh and blood.  After some three years of ministry, they don’t recognize him…?  Then he seems not to know about all the drama of the last few days – Luke astonishingly portrays Jesus as totally disingenuous, pretending, it seems, that he hasn’t heard all this.  But he still takes trouble to explain the Hebrew prophecies to them.  Even when they arrive where they are to stay at Emmaus, the stranger Jesus makes to continue on, and they have to urge him to stay.  It is only when he breaks the bread at the meal that they recognize him.

I don’t know whether anyone at our schools or in this age of cyber-speak is teaching any more what my generation called literary criticism – how to read layered narratives like this, how to spot the different levels of meaning, how to discern what the writer was actually trying to do, to convey, how to assess a literary construction. Perhaps contemporary prose and verse tends to be so two-dimensional that literary criticism is like trying to fish in a puddle.  Luke is telling us here something vital for us to know about the risen Jesus and about resurrection life for all of us.  He comes to us, wrote Albert Schweitzer, as one unknown… 

We encounter Jesus on our journey in often mysterious, unexpected and oblique ways.  Sometimes it may be that, later, in looking back, in retrospect, we wonder if that had been him, in Luke’s words, coming near.  We encounter him along the way – not so much in standing around singing sentimental choruses or in inspiring studies designed to solve our problems, but in weekday life, moving along the road of our daily journey, experiencing life and other people.  He draws near, as Luke tells us.  Perhaps we don’t see it at the time.  Later, it may be in some holy moment such as at the sacrament, it may be many years later, it dawns on us what actually changed us and inspired us, strengthened and empowered us, at that moment. 

Contemplative people become generally slow and reluctant to make dogmatic statements about these things.  We feel very comfortable with reticence, a decent veil thrown over things we experienced and came eventually to understand.  In our kind of prayer, what we are most familiar with is the humble soul and the grateful heart, and all the mysteries that remain, rather more than the tales of triumph and victory. 

But whatever… each of us in our own ways becomes accustomed to the sense that Jesus has drawn near on our road, and made a few things clearer, and perhaps even broken bread with us.