“Now on that same day, two of them were going to a village called Emmaus.”
Another road story. Another reminder that we are a pilgrim people. It feels like I’m always telling road stories.
I shared the story of the road to Emmaus yesterday, and it felt a bit awkward. Once a month, our congregation shares an afternoon service at the seniors’ residence down the road, and yesterday it was my turn to lead worship. I was a little unsure what to say – the story fits well after Easter, and this week’s lectionary reading follows on from the encounter of the road to Emmaus, so it felt like the right story to tell. But the pilgrim nature of the text worried me. You see, the seniors residence is a settled place. Sometimes people do move away when they require more or different care than can be provided there. But many come to the residence to see out their days. How do you tell a road story there?
But there’s another way of looking at it, too. The seniors at the afternoon service all have far more experience of this pilgrim faith than I do. They are people of the road and have been for years. And the road continues to stretch on before them. It doesn’t stop just because they are coming closer to the end of their lives. It’s just harder for to know what might be coming next. Their road can be a daily example of walking by faith not by sight.
Sometimes the best map can not guide you.
You can’t see what’s round the bend.
Sometimes the road leads through dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend.
Bruce Cockburn, Pacing the Cage
I wonder if the Emmaus road felt dark to the disciples or if they just thought that they were going home. They were certainly leaving Jerusalem behind them, although we can tell from their conversation that they still held tightly to the grief of Good Friday and the confusion of Easter Sunday. Everything they had hoped for in Jesus had fallen to dust. So they turned away and found another road to walk. Maybe they just hoped to return to normal life. But, as Bruce Cockburn sings it, the trouble with normal is it only gets worse.
Normal becomes mundane, grinding, blind. Normal spirals down. Normal loses focus. We need more than normal on this winding road. We need to be met.
And that’s the heart of this story. The story of the Emmaus road is the story of our accompanying God. We are met on the road. We may be blind and confused, even running away, but the Risen Christ comes to us, walks with us, redirects us, transforms our lives. That is the beautiful Gospel. That’s the story we can spend our lives telling.
Coming home to the family yesterday afternoon, the house smelled of roasting chicken and potatoes. The kids were playing a card game on the living room carpet. The Spouse handed me a glass of cold white wine. Home.
Then I realized that I’d missed a note. I forgot to mention in my telling of the story that the disciples never made it to Emmaus. This road story isn’t about getting home. It wasn’t about the destination. It isn’t even about being redirected or pointed back to Jerusalem towards a new understanding of home among the other disciples. It might be about the longing for home or for new direction. And it might be about hunger and weariness. The disciples longed for a different sort of place from Jerusalem and took to the road. They grew weary and stopped for the evening to rest and to sit down to dinner with a stranger. That was when they found that Christ was with them all along. They recognised him in the breaking of the bread, but looking back they came to see that Christ was already with them in all their longing and their weariness on the road.
You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,
you, the song we sang in every silence,
you dark net threading through us…
Ranier Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 25
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Thanks to Andrew Johnston for ‘the trouble with normal’ quotation from Bruce Cockburn. You can read his thoughts on the road to Emmaus on the website for St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Kingston, Ontario.
I found the Rilke poem in a book that the Spouse gave me on our second wedding anniversary – a book that has been (like the Spouse) a very good companion along the way.
