“The Road to Emmaus”
Rev. Neville Watson - 25/04/2021
Reading - Luke 24:13-35
The Bible is full of parables. It was the accepted way of teaching in the days when few could read and write. The parables of Jesus are well known. Society in those days was full of parables – stories with a meaning
In January 2013. John Domenic Crossan was speaking at the Pitt Street Uniting Church in Sydney and I chanced upon Roger, a friend I had known in my teens. He was very bright and had ended up on the Productivity Commission, the body that the Australian Government uses to sort out difficult issues. He said to me something like “I’m still searching Nev”.
I returned to my seat and Crossan started his address. I’ve no idea what the subject was but I vividly remember him saying : “The road to Emmaus is a story dummy! It never happened but it happens every day”. The post Easter stories are what he called “parabolic narrative”. They are stories designed to make a point. They are “post death parables”. And of all the post death parables, Crossan maintained that the Emmaus Road is the most significant.
I remember looking over at Roger, and he looking at me in affirmation. We had the inestimable privilege of being brought up in a church that used to sing “God has given us a book full of stories, that begins with the tale of a garden and ends with a city of gold.” To take the stories literally is to miss the point completely, a tragedy of huge proportions. So it is with the story of the Emmaus Road. People return from Palestine and report that they walked the Emmaus Road. The problem is that there are about six sites in Jerusalem purporting to be the Emmaus Road. Marcus Borg summed it up nicely “Emmaus is nowhere because Emmaus is everywhere.”
The story is about a stranger who joins two people on the Emmaus road discussing the death of Jesus. The stranger broadens the conversation. He is invited to dine with them, and after “breaking bread with them” he “vanishes” from their sight. The Greek word used was “became invisible to their sight”. I like that! Jesus as the invisible man - invisible to our society which is based on eating, drinking and being merry. On the road of life Jesus appears to us. He walks and talks with us, both on the journey and in the breaking of bread,
The story of Emmaus is a post death parable – a parable of relationship.
The town of Emmaus has never been identified. Why? Because “Emmaus is everywhere” a small group of people eat and drink in remembrance, and identify themselves with the faith, hope and love seen in Jesus of Nazareth.
* * *
When I was a teenager in the 1940s, there was a playwright by the name of Dorothy Sayers who wrote a play called “The Man born to be King”. I found it fascinating, especially the words of the Centurion at Gethsemene when he was asked where Jesus was laid. “He is not here. He roams the world where neither Jew nor Gentile can stop him”.
And for me, the words still ring true today. “Emmaus is nowhere, Emmaus is everywhere.” Emmaus is where life in all its fullness is recognised and experienced in Jesus of Nazareth.
Emmaus is whenever and wherever Jesus is to be found. It is where life is recognised and experienced in Jesus of Nazareth – even in a building in Wembley Downs where a small group of people eat and drink in remembrance of him.
* * *
Today is also Anzac Day, and fair enough if people wish to remember it. I do not. I experienced the shocking and awful bombing of Iraq. After one such episode, I wept as I saw the bodies of children being stacked in the back of a ute. And I would remind you that not one Australian soldier or sailor was killed in the Iraq war. Half a million Iraqi civilians were. Lest we forget!
I don’t think I will ever forget those bodies in the back of the ute. For most people the Iraq war was like a fireworks display on the telly. For me it was far more, and at times I could have sworn I was accompanied by a stranger.
Any wonder then that this parable ranks so highly with me today, as does my fifty two years association with this congregation with whom I have experienced a fullness of life rarely seen today.