THE THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER - 2011
THE ROAD TO EMMAUS . . . GETS COMPLICATED
A couple of disciples are walking the road to Liverpool. Their conversation is about recent happenings in Syracuse. I mean Emmaus and Jerusalem, but you get the size and distance intended. A charismatic personality has been executed. Exciting expectations have gone unfulfilled. Yet now, after this bloody weekend, there are strange goings on. Our two friends are trying to sort things out. It’s nothing different from what you and I do every day of our lives, especially when world shaking events occur.
What’s different however is this conversation, these questions, these emotions and thoughts, are about to be answered by a man unlike any other person who ever existed, or will ever again need to exist. The disciples, Cleopas and his companion, are in the presence of the risen Lord, post-resurrection, pre-ascension.
This is mystery. I’m not intending explanation here. I’m talking revelation. God is speaking to us in the Gospel according to Luke. Jesus meets the disciples and walks them through the Easter happening. Everything he says has a Word of God connection They get these connections because they, unlike us today, are steeped in the biblical narrative. They know the Old Testament promises. They expected a messiah to come. They thought they knew who it was. They thought it was Jesus of Nazareth. Yet he was crucified, dead and buried. Now, some of his followers are reporting amazing goings on. The man they are with is speaking of these happenings, and what it all means.
Now it’s time to ask. Where on your journey have you met the risen Lord? Really, this is a valid question, appropriate to the season of Eastertide. Where along your own road to Emmaus, have you encountered the spirit of the living God, risen from the dead?
I encountered the risen Lord, not for the first time, this past weekend. I woke up to an announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed. I immediately got out of bed and went downstairs, to listen to a television already on, reporting this news. Literally, as I stepped down the staircase I was conflicted with sadness. Who am I, a Christian, I thought, to celebrate the death of another human being? Yet, I admit it, I was relieved the man was dead, thanks be to God. And I know the reason, as my son said later from Arizona, “Hopefully, Cooper will grow up in a safer world.”
In that moment of conflicted emotions, happy to have a man possessed of evil killed, sorrowful at the death of another human being, I was in the presence of the risen Lord. My God and my all was speaking to me. Reminding me that we are not in the business of death. We are in the business of life. Our Christian purpose in life is to submit ourselves, our souls and bodies, to His teachings of peace and justice, and creation. We are to be loving, creative, reasonable, in harmony with creation and with God.
The best we can do in a world that is possessed of conflict and violence is to be open to the strange, the stranger in our midst; to listen, and to seek the truth; to allow the possibility that what we know is not enough, and still to be confident that because of the One with whom we have broken bread, and do so regularly, we are able to say, as we strive to think, and do, and say what is right in the face of what is insufferably wrong - “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
I will not fear the evil done or threatened me or mine or us, nor the evil done necessarily by me or mine or us in order to protect and secure our homes and families and nation from violence and harm. We will fear no evil, and we will act accordingly as we must. Why? Because You are with us and in Your Presence we are secure.
