Easter 3

April 6, 2008

Year A - RCL

The Rev'd Lloyd Prator

New York City

Since the Bible is a collection of stories about human life, it is not surprising that there are a number of stories about eating meals in scripture. Think, for a moment of the first meal in the Bible. It is a rich moment. The writer of Genesis tells us “The woman took some of the fruit and ate it; she gave it to her husband and he ate it; then the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked. This story was told over and over again to illustrate the beginning of the problems that plague humanity. It is seen as the root of the problem of death that lies in disobedience. The whole creation was, thereafter, subject to deterioration and death.

Now, in today's gospel, we read the story of the first meal of the new creation. “He took the bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them; then the eyes of them both were opened and they recognized Jesus. And they experience something cosmic and deep. The long burden of humanity has been broken. Death has been defeated. There is a new possibility.

The focal point, the apex of this new set of possibilities is Jesus. He is alive again. Not like the other people in the New Testament who came back from death, not like Lazarus or Jairus' daughter. These folks would have to endure death again at the end of their lives in due course. But Jesus seems to have gone through death and out the other side into a new world.

That world is something like this world—Jesus can still eat with his friends and take the pages of the Bible and lead them through the scriptures. But he is somehow transformed. He can pass through doors, sometimes we know him; sometimes we don't.

We, the people of God, have been given a story to tell and a story upon which to meditate. We call that story the Bible. Like those first disciples, we are invited to listen to the exposition of the Bible and to have its story burn within us as the truth emerges.

The Bible is meant to draw the pieces of our lives together, head and heart, understanding and eager enthusiasm. Only when we read the story and understand it from God's perspective do we really get the picture. The picture of a story which begins with the call of Abraham, continues with the emergence of Israel from slavery in Egypt, the giving of the law, the insight of the prophets, the pithy words of wisdom and the restorative call of God which calls us back from Exile in Babylon. Only when we grasp the flow of the story do we come to know the one to whom all history points, Jesus who is today risen from the dead.

And we have been given a meal to share. Like those first disciples, Mary and Cleopas, we come to know Jesus in the breaking of the bread. In today's story, the way in which Jesus shared the simple meal with his friends is meant to take our minds, and theirs, back to the upper room and to many other meals they had shared with Jesus. But Luke the evangelist also intends that we should look forward, and see, in this simple meal, the breaking of bread which became the central act of Christian fellowship in the newborn church.

So, Jesus, today, at his resurrection tells us about the two ways we are to know him, in scripture and in the breaking of the bread. Word and sacrament, sacreament and word. Together forever as the ways of knowing the Lord. Neither acts without the other. Take scripture away, and the sacrament becomes a bit of magic. Take the sacrament away, and scripture becomes an arid intellectual exercise. Put together, you have the center of Christian living.

This story almost completes the gospel of Luke, and we are invited, I think, to consider its elegant artistry. Luke tells this story about the journey to Emmaus in order to complete his framework for the gospel. Remember that at the beginning of the gospel, Mary and Joseph went a days journey away from Jerusalem and then, realizing that they had got away without the kid, looked for him for three days before discovering him in the Temple with the local scholars.

And, here, today, there is a different couple, Mary and Cleopas, at the end of three days agony of grief, disappointment and loss. And at the end of both journeys, Jesus is found, doing his father's work. The entire story is framed between these two scenes of warm, loving human concern. Luke invites his readers, including us, to take the journey with him, a journey through anxiety and pain and loss, a journey that ends in finding Jesus who has done the Father's work, and longs to tell us the secret. That there never need be any anxiety or pain or loss which claims ultimate power. The last word has been spoken by God and that last word, like the second meal, is the word of life.

I told you at the beginning that there were two meals, one at the beginning and one at the end of the story. I lied. There is another. It is the one who waits for us now, the one that we move now to celebrate. Let's get about doing it, because in that bread broken, like the bread broken at Emmaus, we will know the risen Lord.