Lost on the road to Emmaus

Mosaic from the Washington National Cathedral.

If this were a normal Sunday, people who gather in many churches would be hearing a story from the Gospel of Luke about two people encountering Jesus on the road to Emmaus. 

Of course, this is not a normal Sunday. People are not gathering in churches - although many may be gathering around a computer screen in their homes. They may still hear or read that same story. It’s a wonderful story for the moment we are in right now.

It’s a story of disorientation. It’s a story of loss, of grief, of discouragement. It’s a story of two people feeling adrift, lost on the road to a village that has no clear historical record of its existence. Yet it’s story of hope that emerges from hospitality.

For those who do not know this story, here it is in brief. Two people - perhaps a man and a woman, perhaps two men - who had been followers of Jesus are walking towards home having left Jerusalem after the execution of Jesus on the previous Friday. They presumably stayed put on Saturday, the Sabbath, and now were making the seven-mile journey home. They encounter a "stranger" on the road who asks them what they were talking about.

They tell him about this Jesus fellow, “a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people” who they had hoped would be the one to redeem Israel - the Messiah - but he was killed through the collusion of the religious and political powers of that day. Then, before they left Jerusalem on that Sunday, some women who were followers of Jesus reported to the group that his body was no longer in the tomb where he had been placed after his death. 

You can feel their anguish as they tell the story. They don’t have any idea that the man walking with them is Jesus - a clue that there was a transformation that had occurred to him through the resurrection.  His transformation and their disorientation dominates the moment. 

I am writing this on about the 45^th day of my sheltering in place. Oh, there have been occasional trips to the grocery store (during senior hours) and for take-out at restaurants. There have been many, many walks through the neighborhood and lots of time in video chats on Zoom. But life as I knew it is totally disoriented - and it’s going to stay that way for quite some while - even if the world arounds me starts to slowly reopen. 

For me, this is a relatively mild disorientation compared to what so many others are experiencing - illness for themselves or the death (alone) of a loved one; economic dislocation; exhausted health care workers; educational setbacks; a home bursting at the seams with frantic children and overstressed parents. Plus there is the shared anxiety for all of us about what life will be like a month from now, a season from now, a year from now. 

All of that makes it pretty easy to identify with these two people on the road. It’s almost like this stranger who is walking with them is wearing a mask and his identity is lost in the midst of the chaos of their lives.

Mosaic from the Washington National Cathedral.

He talks with them, offers new ways they can consider the sacred stories that had guided their lives. Dusk is arriving. In the midst of their grief and confusion, they reach out to the stranger who seemed about to go on into the night that was not far away.

“Stay with us,” they say.

And he did.

They share a meal. A real meal, at a table. No social distancing at that time. The conversation continues. Then the stranger does something they recognized. Here’s how Luke describes that moment: “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.”

Their hospitality offered them a path forward in their grief. His sharing opened their vision to a new way of being. 

On this disorienting path I am now on, one way to stay connected to those beyond the four corners of my dwelling is to be reaching out, to connect, to find ways to offer some form of hospitality, even when it seems to be from a distance. And then the second piece of the story - to watch for ways in the breaking of bread - metaphorically at this point - that I can recognize where God is at work in my life and in our world. 

Even sheltering in place, there are places where light and hope break through. Jesus and his friends arrived where they needed to be before the darkness fell. That’s the path I want to be on.

(If you want to read the actual Gospel story from Luke 24: 13-35, you can read it here.)